March 6, 2009 In February of 2009, an archive guide that I wrote appeared in the 2008/4 issue of the journal Ab Imperio. The guide is called "For the Russianist in Istanbul and the Ottomanist in Russia: A guide to the Archives of Eurasia" (it can also be found, along with a number of my other academic writings, on the research page of my website). The idea for the guide arose in the aftermath of a workshop Sean Pollock organized during the course of our year-long Russia and Islam project at Columbia University's Harriman Institute (2007-2008). Sean asked me to write a piece on the types of source material that would be useful to a Russianist wishing to research in Istanbul. To be honest, I was a bit reluctant to write this piece at first.  Sometimes get the impression that some Russianists think that having a couple years of modern Turkish and a familiarity with the Arabic script means that they will be able to read Ottoman Turkish and work in the archives—and frankly I was a little worried that by writing this piece I might be contributing to this misconception. Sadly, even people who have spent years of their lives training specifically in the field of Ottoman history can have, at least at first, a very frustrating experience trying to read materials in the Ottoman archives. For someone who has just been trying to pick up Turkish on the side, reading most Ottoman archival documents is not a realistic short-term goal. A second concern that I had is that my guide would just encourage a tendency among some scholars to window-dress their studies with a handful of documents in a certain language or from a certain archive, simply for the sake of showing they've been there. Some Russianists, perhaps a little too eager to introduce a sexy-sounding Islamic component to their work, use a few token items and then place them in the front and center of their work; on the back blurb of one book that I read recently,  for example, the author boasts of having command of the "languages" of the region under review, and the book's dedication is  duly written in both Russian and a Turkic language—and that's the only time anything actually written in this language ever makes an appearance in the book. For someone who has devoted years of his life to studying the languages and histories of the various populations of Eurasia upon which I work, I have to admit that I get a little ticked off when I see this kind of phoniness.    Nevertheless, there are some Russianists out there who really have made a commitment to studying Ottoman Turkish, including some people who have put serious time into this even after they've gotten a job and (in at least one case) tenure. Truly amazing and very impressive. And there's also a growing cadre of graduate students that I've met in recent years—including, but not limited to, several of the individuals participating in the Russia-Ottoman grad workshop that I organized at the Harriman last year—who have really put time into learning these languages well and studying the historiography of a field outside their own. To those about to rock, please consider yourself saluted. But even for Russianists who cannot read Ottoman Turkish at all, there  are many French-language documents in the Ottoman archives that could conceivably be of  value.  These documents include an enormous number produced by the Foreign Ministry, so people interested in topics pertaining to various aspects of Russian-Ottoman relations, including goods and services crossing the borders, would probably find this material useful and accessible. For Russianists who can read printed Ottoman documents (the documents in the Ottoman archives, by contrast, are handwritten and therefore much more difficult to read), I also talk about some of the library resources in Istanbul.  The second half of the guide is devoted to a discussion of Turkic, Arabic, and Persian sources that are available in the USSR. This is hardly an exhaustive account, but rather a discussion of the types of sources I've used during the course of my research. Especially in Kazan, there is an enormous amount of Arabic-language material, mostly religious writings, that has only begun to be tapped. For individuals in the fields of Islamic studies, Russia is really a region they should consider working on. While the idea may sound strange at first to someone working outside these fields, I think there is a lot that Ottomanists and Russianists could learn from one another, and there are a number of topics that could really benefit from a trans-imperial research agenda. While most historians working in the field today still tend to be pretty limited to working on documents written in the language of their "home" field, I think that within the next ten years or so we'll see several historians producing studies that re-interpret Russian-Ottoman connections in new and creative ways. I hope my guide will be of use to them.  Update, March 9: I should have mentioned earlier that I'd like to thank Sean Pollock for organizing this valuable workshop and giving me the chance to contribute to this issue. I think he deserves a lot of credit for putting all of this together.