Anatol Shmelev is a research fellow, Robert Conquest curator of the Russia and Eurasia Collection, and the project archivist for the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Collection, all at the Hoover Institution.

Because Shmelev’s expertise is in twentieth-century Russian history, specializing in the Russian Civil War, he is principally responsible for acquiring Russian archival materials.

Anatol Shmelev studied history at UCLA and UC Berkeley, and received his Ph.D. from the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1996, with a dissertation on the foreign policy of the Siberian government during the Russian Civil War. He has worked at the Hoover Institution since 1997. Aside from his direct responsibilities, Shmelev has continued his scholarly engagement with Russian history, concentrating on information resources. His bibliography of Russian émigré military literature was published in 2007 by Norman Ross, following a collection of essays on archiving the lives of Russian and East European immigrants entitled Tracking a Diaspora, published by The Haworth Press in 2006. Vneshniaia politika pravitelstva admirala Kolchaka, 1918-1919 (The Foreign Policy of Admiral Kolchak’s Government, 1918-1919) was published by the European University Press in St. Petersburg in 2017. His latest book, In the Wake of Empire: Anti-Bolshevik Russia in International Affairs, 1917-1920, is currently under consideration for publication.