The library has acquired complete sets of two rare French periodicals: La Ligue and Celsius, neither of which is listed in American library catalogs; they are available only in the Bibliothèque National in Paris. The acquisition of these two titles by Hoover enhances the strength of the library’s French holdings on the themes of war, revolution, and peace.

Two significant émigré collections have been added to Hoover’s already extensive Hungarian library and archival holdings: those of Hugo Sonyi and Bela Csejtey. The two have very different biographies: the first was a top Hungarian general, the other, an American-educated scientist. Their collections however are similar in focus: Hungary’s military efforts in the two world wars, which, despite the valiant sacrifice of many thousands of soldiers, ended in defeat.

George S. Scherbatoff (1897-1976), a US Navy commander during and after the Second World War, also served as a member of numerous naval and diplomatic missions, including the US delegation to the conference at Yalta in 1945. The donated album, which is entitled “Trip to Greece with the UN Balkan Commission, November 1947-May 1948,” contains many photographs of the commission’s activities that are described by accompanying notes.

Stanford historian Amir Weiner recently examined the newly accessible KGB files housed in the Hoover Institution Archives. Weiner found that “a system of checks and balances in today's Western-style democracies prevents agencies like the FBI from engaging in domestic surveillance at the same invasive scale as the KGB” (Stanford Report). The collection is composed of tens of thousands of documents, including informants' reports, interrogation minutes, and official internal correspondence. Nearly two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the KGB archives are the largest accessible holdings (Russian and Ukrainian holdings are, for all practical purposes, closed) of the Soviet political police, which were left almost intact in Vilnius, Lithuania, after the Soviet Union disintegrated.