Russian & Soviet

The Stalin Digital Archive (SDA) contains documents from Fond 558. These comprise Stalin’s personal papers dating from 1889 to 1952, and cover, among other topics, industrialization and agricultural collectivization, the Great Purges, Soviet foreign policy, the Cold War, and Stalin’s personal relations with Western intellectuals and Soviet officials. Also included are 300 volumes from Stalin’s personal library containing his marginalia, as well as the series Annals of Communism published by Yale University Press (YUP).

Harold Adams Innis (1894-1952) joined the staff of the University of Toronto's Department of Political Economy in 1927, rising to the post of Head of the Department by 1937. From 1947 until his death in 1952, Innis assumed the additional responsibility of Dean of the School of Graduate Studies. Innis' international reputation as an economist took him on the lecture circuit. The most prestigious of these was the British tour in 1948 of the Beit, Cust and Stamp lecture series in Oxford, Nottingham, and the University of London respectively.

George Pavlovich Ignatieff (1913-1989) was a noted Russian-Canadian diplomat whose career spanned nearly five decades. His many postings included Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia (1956-1958), Assistant Undersecretary of State for External Affairs (1960-1962), Permanent Representative to NATO (1963), and Canadian Ambassador to the UN (1966-1969). He served as the ninth Provost and Vice-chancellor of Trinity College (1970-1979), and Chancellor of the University of Toronto (1980-1986).

Charles Pachter, born in Toronto, is one of Canada's leading contemporary artists.

His papers include his mother's, Sara Pachter's, travel diary to Israel and Russia in 1959, as well as correspondence and photographs of her trip to Belarus and Russia in 2002. Sara Pachter was a Toronto travel agent and led frequent tours of Israel.

Collection of Mennonite-related documents from the Zaporizhzhe Regional State Archive, Zaporizhzhe, Ukraine, microfilmed under the auspices of the Research Program in Tsarist and Soviet Mennonite Studies, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto.

The Electronic Archive “Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat” (PSDS) includes the database of Soviet samizdat periodicals, electronic editions of selected samizdat journals, illustrated timelines of dissident movements, and interviews with activists.

Socialism on Film is a collection of documentaries, newsreels, and features films sourced from the British Film Institute. They include ones by Soviet and East European filmmakers dating from 1917 to the 1980s. This project makes available the ETV-Plato Films collection put together by the British communist Stanley Forman in the years after the Second World War. This is a collection of films produced almost exclusively in the communist world and then versioned into English for distribution in the West.

The material consists of the personal records of Professor Skilling and focuses primarily of Skilling’s academic work, and includes research notes and drafts of his doctoral thesis, The German-Czech National Conflict in Bohemia, 1779-1873, as well as notes and drafts supporting the revision of this thesis, which Skilling worked on for several years. There is also some correspondence with other scholars in the field of Eastern European studies, as well as publishers and editors.

Correspondence, research notes, manuscripts etc. of Prof. Gordon Skillling relating to his career as professor of political science. Includes files for Josef Pekar, Czech politics, etc.

Photos of the meeting of the International Astronomical Union Held in the Soviet Union, 1958. Helen Hogg, as well as other Canadian astronomers including A. Batten and S. van de Bergh, were present and can be seen in these shots.