These archives consist of two sections, the Russian section and the Western European section The Russian section contains materials reflecting all aspects of the socio-economic, political, military and cultural history of the Russian state between the 13th and 20th centuries. The Western European section of the Archives contain extremely rare and valuable manuscripts dating back to the 6th century. These holdings include official documents and letters from well known people from England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and other countries, most of which were acquired from the famous scholar and collector N. P. Likhachev. In the Russian section of the archives there are one hundred and twenty three collections consisting of twelve thousand three hundred and forty entries including over seven hundred manuscript books. The collection is extremely diverse and contains many original manuscripts.
Some books have a large indexes to names.