The Journal was established in 1963. Its first Editor-in-Chief was the professor of the University of Warsaw and the head of the Department of History of European Socialist Countries at the IH PAN, Rafał Gerber. After many years, the Department was transformed into the Department of History of the 19th- and 20th-Century Europe. Currently, it functions as the Section for the History of Eastern Europe and the Empires of the 19th and 20th Centuries within the structures of the Department of the History of the 20th Century. The next Editors-in-Chief were Professors Janusz Żarnowski, Piotr Łossowski, Marek Kazimierz Kamiński, and Andrzej Nowak. Now, the Journal is edited by the editorial team under prof. Daniel Boćkowski; its Editorial Board is made up of the eminent world scholars such as Professors Kimitaka Matsuzato, Timothy Snyder, Eric Jacobson, Darius Staliunas. The member of the Board was also Richard Pipes, who died in 2018.
The first number was published in 1965 under the title of The USSR and Central European History Research. In 1992, the title was changed to Studies into the History of Russia and Central-Eastern Europe.
According to the current list of scientific journals and peer-reviewed materials from international conferences prepared by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, contributions to Studies into the History of Russia and Central-Eastern Europe are awarded 100 points.
In previous years, the Studies into the History of Russia and Central-Eastern Europe carried out programmes financed by the ministry responsible for science, aimed at increasing the standard of the Journal and popularise research results, especially in English: a project with the National Program for the Development of Humanities (for five years) and the ‘Support for Scientific Journals’ programme of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education (for two years), with special English-language editions each year.
Afterwards, a two-year project ‘Development of Scientific Journals’ of the Ministry of Education and Science (contract no. RCN/SN/0181/2021/1 from 18.11.2022, state budget financing 79830,00 PLN for 2023-2024) has been implemented, aimed at further raising the scientific and editorial level of the journal published in open access and greater internationalisation (e.g. by publishing special editions in English, updating the website, applying to reference databases, providing promotional copies).
