Latest studies on the history of the Navy to be presented on the Day of Naval Knowledge in the Presidential Library

September 3, 2013 the Presidential Library will host the Day of Naval Knowledge traditional for the school year beginning. Scientists, heads and professors of naval universities of St. Petersburg will present their new research works on the history of the formation and development of the Russian Navy. Live webcast of the conference will begin at 10:00 am Moscow time on the Presidential Library’s website.

The audience will hear about the vicissitudes of the development of the Far East and the Arctic by Russian people, about the 310-year history of the Baltic Fleet. Sergei Cherniavsky, Director of the Russian State Archive of the Navy, will tell about the 150th anniversary of the expedition of a naval squadron which stopped near the coast of San Francisco, and which in many ways defined Lincoln's victory in the war between the North and South America.

Conference participants will learn new facts about the history of the construction and reconstruction of the Naval Cathedral in Kronstadt, which is by right considered the spiritual center of the Russian Navy.

The audience of the conference, organized under the support of the Kuznetsov Naval Academy and the Nevelsky Maritime State University, will be joined through videoconferencing by universities of Vladivostok, Arkhangelsk, Kostroma, Khabarovsk, Karelia, Tyumen and Moscow region.

The Presidential Library pays a lot of attention to the history of the Russian Navy. Its collections include books and papers covering the period of the formation and development of the national fleet from Peter's time to the present day. Many rarities were previously unavailable to the general public. For example, in the near future the library will be greatly enriched with the materials from the Kuznetsov Naval Academy. Today, sea albums and atlases, maps of the seabed and coast, issued in the 18th – 20th centuries are being digitized. 

Gradually, declassified materials are also entering the library’s collections. Already today, the multivolume "The Navy of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945" is available to the patrons of the library. It was issued as a "classified" edition in 1959-1962 and was originally intended for officers, generals and admirals of the Army and Navy.

Having being digitized by the Presidential Library, electronic copies of the editions are in great demand among readers and scholars, which can promise the emergence of new researches and, possibly, scientific discoveries.

The Presidential Library, created and developing as the country's largest center for preservation, systematization and analysis of historical materials, is ready to assist in providing the largest access to the documents for the General Command of the Russian Navy which, from October last year, has been deployed in the historic complex of Admiralty. This will be a continuation of the work already carried out in the sea capital of Russia. Annually, in September, the Presidential Library hosts the Day of Naval Knowledge, organizes meetings and lectures for students and those who have joined the service in the Navy to obtain and exchange the topical information on the history of the navy.