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. This part of the collection contains resources on the courts, procuracy, criminal law and its administration under Stalin and in the immediate post-Stalin period. Contained in the collection are many restricted or partially closed materials, including stenographic reports of conferences of judges and other officials, raw criminal statistics, records of the drafting and internal debates on new laws and party resolutions, and bureaucratic directives and instructions. These documents are photocopies of originals contained in a number of archives in Moscow (especially GARF and the former Central Party Archive).
Another important part of the collection includes records of interviews conducted with Soviet legal experts in emigration in 1985-1987. Interviews in folders 1-17 were conducted in Israel with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Interviews in folders 18-46 were conducted under the auspices of the Soviet Interview Project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (James Millar, director). Many of the interviews, especially the first ones, focus on administration of justice during the late Stalin period. Most of the interviewees are people who left the Soviet Union between 1979 and 1981. Some worked as investigators, assistant attorneys, or judges in the beginning of their careers. Almost all ended their careers in the USSR as advocates and lawyers.
The collection also contains 320 surveys of judges based in 25 regions of the Russian Federation, which were conducted under the joint program "Reform of the Russian Judicial System", developed by the Centre for Constitutional Studies of the Moscow Public Scholarly Foundation and the Institute of Constitutional and Legislative Policy (Budapest).