Russian & Soviet

TS. Poem translated by Andrew Suknaski (1959).

A holograph collection of poems originally written between 1920 and 1940. Author's presentation copy to L.I. Strakhovsky (ca. 1940).

The major part of the collection was created as part of the Stalin Era Research and Archives Project (SERAP). This project was a collaborative, multidisciplinary undertaking based at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto. With support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, it sought to stimulate the reinterpretation of politics and society in the USSR under Stalin through the use of newly declassified archival materials.

James Mavor was professor of Political Economy at the University of Toronto from 1892 to 1923, and donated this collection in 1960. It contains his correspondence on Russian affairs, and sheds light on his acquaintances with such prominent Russians as Prince Kropotkin and L. N. Tolstoi.

Typescripts, some with holograph corrections, of stories in North American Russian-language newspapers, and some correspondence relating mainly to newspaper work.

Mark Gayn was a journalist who traveled extensively and was known as one of the most knowledgeable and reliable commentators on Asian and Soviet bloc affairs. The Mark Gayn Papers consists of the impressive and varied research collection of print and non-print materials which he acquired during his career, which spanned five decades. The collection is divided into twenty categories or series, ten of which contain Russian material.

The collection contains various periodicals, manuscripts and miscellaneous documents ranging from the 1960s to the early 1990s from the Soviet Union. The material was collected by Igor Belousovitch during his work for the Office of Analysis for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the U.S. State Department.

The second group of the Peter J. Potichnyi collection of the Counter-Insurgency documents come directly from Soviet archives. This collection covers 150,000 pages of documents, covering the activities of the NkVD-NKGB, and the MVD-MGB internal forces of the Ukrainian Okrug against the Ukrainian Liberation Movement during the years 1944-1954. After Ukraine proclaimed independence in August 1990, this archive was removed to Moscow.

The collection contains resolutions, directives and telegrams from the Central Committee of All-Union Communist Party, the Soviet of People's Commissars and their mirror organizations in Ukraine; correspondence from local Party committees and executive committees of the local Soviets; official and private appeals of the regional party committees to higher Party authorities; memoranda and information reports from branches of state security, justice, and the prosecutor's office, as well as citizens letters.

The collection contains documents relating to the investigation into the assassination of Pyotr Stolypin. Stolypin (1862-1911), after having served as governor of the provinces of Grodno (1902) and Saratov (1903-1906), was appointed in April 1906 as Minister of the Interior and in July 1906 was named chairman of the Council of Ministers in which capacity he served until his assassination. He headed the Russian government at a time of massive protests by workers and peasants against the autocracy.