Data Set
55
The SOWSK database - Soviet security policy under Brezhnev and Gorbachev
A collection of media, expert and academic reports and official documents
Version 1.0, published: July 1, 2025.
Description
This literature database was initiated as part of the project "Social and economic conditions of security policy concepts in the Soviet Union 1976-1987" (SOWSK) at the Federal Institute for Eastern and International Studies (BIOst) in Cologne. The initial research project was funded by the German Research Foundation. The research project was intended to examine Soviet security and armaments politics during the Brezhnev and Gorbachev years.
To facilitate the evaluation of the wealth of material that was generated, the relevant publications were recorded in a literature database. This database includes media reports, grey literature (e.g. from think tanks), official documents and reports as well as scientific publications that have been published in the time span from the 1950s up to 2021. The database contains a total of 11,026 documents.
The bibliographic data was recorded in the catalog. The thesaurus allows you to search by thematic criteria. On top of that it is also possible to search by person, authority- and company names, as well as for a particular author or publication date and a number of other criteria.
This online data collection contains the complete catalog as an xml file (“SOWSK-Katalog.xml”). In the xml file, all database fields are marked with < > so that an automatic input into a database program is possible. In order to work with the xml file directly, it should be opened in a web browser which reproduces the document structure (data tree structure). The names of all database fields are listed in the “SOWSK-Field_Assignment.pdf” file. The complete thesaurus, which contains all terms used to describe the individual documents, is also part of the data collection as a separate text file (“SOWSK-Thesaurus.pdf”). The catalog is in German. However, most of the catalog entries are in English or Russian. To allow easy navigation in the catalog without knowledge of German the list of entry fields and the thesaurus have been translated into English.
The original files are archived at the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen. The contact person is Heiko Pleines (pleines@uni-bremen.de).
Countries
Keywords
Foreign Policy Security Policy Armament Policy