[Maxim Litvinov]

As a personal initiative to help me with translation from Russian > English, I'm planning to translate one of the letters in Stalin's personal archive every day from now until I run out of them (I have about 125 in a book called «Иосиф Сталин в объятиях сeмьи» [Josef Stalin in His Family's Embraces]).

If anyone's interested in reading some of the personal correspondence to/from Stalin, which as far as I know hasn't for the most part been published in English, feel free to check out the project's progress at http://www.orgburo.com/letters.php at some time.

I set up the page as though it was Stalin's 'webmail' account, just for fun. So far I have only got up about 10 letters that I translated a few years back, written from Bukharin to Stalin in the mid 1930s. Unfortunately, Bukharin can be very boorish at times. His final letter (the only one that is not my translation) is *very* interesting though.

As I said, as the days go by, I hope to gradually augment these 'emails' with the original Russian and translated English of Stalin's letters to/from his second wife, his children and his mother.

[Intelligitimate]

Sounds good. I wish more people would do stuff like this.

I've been meaning to help someone put Strauss' Life of Jesus online, but I've been being a lazy ass. I wish I was more motivated sometimes.

I appreciate what you're doing, and I'm sure many other people will also. People who do stuff like that are truly what makes the internet great. That and hardcore pornography.

[Boris]

Have you ever thought about getting the stuff you translate that isn't in english published? Because I would certainly buy your stuff.

[Maxim Litvinov]

Thanks for the kind words. I am trying to get a grant at the moment to co-translate a novel with my old Russian professor. Terrible pay, interesting work. But I am not really 'qualified' to translate historical documents into English from the point of view of a publisher. Even if they were interested in a translated collection of letters, they'd want it translated by someone semi-eminent or fully-fluent, and accompanied with a commentary by someone similarly well-known.

If you're interested in such material, Boris, you should try something like "Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror" { http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... 300094035/ }. All of the most interesting material generally gets compiled and translated into English after a year or so. It's just for some strange reason most of Bukharin's prison works, his letters to Stalin, and most of Stalin's letters (except those to Molotov) have never been fully published in English.