Thomas Lahusen collection of Vasilii Azhaev’s materials includes mostly photocopies of drafts of manuscripts, articles, readers’ conferences reports, notebooks, photographs, personal correspondence as well as official documentation pertaining to Azhaev’s imprisonment and further employment in the Corrective Labor Camp of the Baikal-Amur Main Line. The collection also includes photocopies of periodicals produced and disseminated within Soviet labour camps. For the most part, the collection combines material from Azhaev’s personal archives with some documents from the State Archives of the Region of Khabarovsk.
Thomas Lahusen collected and used these documents when writing his manuscript, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). Most of the material are copies from Azhaev’s personal archive that were given to Thomas Lahusen by Irina Liubimova-Azhaeva in 1992.