The Historical Collections 1889 – 1955 of the Phonogram Archive of the Institute of Russian Literature, a corpus of over 35,000 historical recordings in the field of ethnomusicology, ethnolinguistics, and philology, amount to over 500 hours of recorded sound material. Specifically noteworthy is the high proportion of items related to the earliest period of recording with a phonograph in the field, i.e. before 1910. These collections represent to a high degree of completeness the recorded legacy of orally transmitted cultures of the former Tsarist Russian Empire and the later Soviet Union.

Many of these recordings are the oldest of their kind, and some are unique. As a whole, they represent orally transmitted cultures, languages, and rites, which have since undergone substantial changes, and sometimes even have been lost. Along with similar collections elsewhere, these holdings reflect a considerable portion of the globality of the orally transmitted cultural heritage. Several collections have been the basis for well-known publications and thus have gained international reputation.

• Year of submission: 2001
• Year of inscription: 2001
• Country: Russian Federation