Special Collections: Russian & Soviet

The collection includes biographical information on 75,000 important personages from the earliest times, the rule of the Rjurikiden, to the end of the dynasty of the Romanovs in 1917, providing historical information for all of the Russian states, including White Russia, Ukraine, as well as the Baltic States and Poland. Compiled from more than 150 source works published between 1827 and 1995.

The collection consists of primary materials on Russian Futurism before the Revolution. It contains monochrome and colour microfiche of journals, poetry, manifestos and miscellanies. The titles in this collection are from private collections in England, France, and the United States of America.

Two series containing thirty-eight titles are indispensable to historians, economists, sociologists, political scientists, bibliographers, and literary historians, as well as those interested in Russian and Eastern culture of the past and of the present. The material is in Russian and covers the period from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. The collection includes dictionaries, bibliographies, government documents, collections of laws, and periodicals. Some of these periodicals and serials are unobtainable in paper form, particularly those published after the 1917 Revolution.

The collection includes 5,000 scarce titles in the humanities and social sciences housed in Helsinki University Library, which was an official depository for Russian books from 1820 to 1917. This collection contains books in eight major categories:

1. Russian Politics and Government.
2. Russian Industry and Trade.
3. Military History.
4. Literature.
5. Bibliographies, Memoirs and Histories.
6. Education.
7. State and Law.
8. Social Questions

Imperial Russia’s Asian march coincided with a revolution in intelligence. Gathering and analyzing such intelligence also became much more comprehensive, almost encyclopedic. It entailed not only the armed forces and the terrain of all potential adversaries, but also political, economic, ethnographic, and much other data. 

The collection Archive series, 1651-1917 contains the following parts: 

1. A threat from the Far East (China, Japan, Korea) 
2. The Eastern question (Turkey, Palestine, Arabia & Syria) 
3. The Great Game in Central Asia (Persia (Iran), Afghanistan)

During the last two centuries of its existence, the Russian Empire clashed with Turkey no less than eight times; one of these conflicts was the disastrous Crimean War. Known to Victorian England as "The Eastern Question," these confrontations were a major feature of the era's great power struggle. The Russian general staff gathered an enormous mass of data about its Ottoman adversary. Comprising more than 1,000 separate files, the collection includes classified attaché and diplomatic reports on Turkish politics, British influence, the organization and condition of the Turkish army, the defenses of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles straits, as well as nationalist revolts in the Balkans and elsewhere. There are also over 500 maps, plans, diagrams, and other illustrations.

The collection includes the entire Houghton Library Collection of Russian Revolutionary Literature, covering the period 1825 to 1917, and material from other sources. Most of the materials were published abroad or by underground presses inside Russia and includes more than 1,000 titles by both anonymous and well known Russian authors. Also includes many rare Lenin pamphlets, anonymous and ephemeral pieces distributed among the workers and peasants, particularly those published immediately before and during the Revolution of 1905.

Consisting of broadcasts recorded from Russian television between 1992 and 2005, this is a collection of videos covering a broad range of topics and formats, in particular news, documentaries, talk-shows and interviews with notable Russians.

The collection includes Russian pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary journals for women reproduced from the National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg, formerly called the Saltykovshchedrin Library. The pre-revolutionary journals covered fashion, housekeeping, handiwork and literature. The post-revolutionary journals were geared more towards the working woman and her role in the new socialist society.

Records of conferences and meetings attended; drafts of and correspondence regarding articles written; correspondence relating to the writing of Communism, National and International and Governments of Communist East Europe; personal files (1961-1979) and correspondence (1974-1983); lecture notes as visiting professor, Columbia University, 1952.

Lecture notes on international politics and international organization, University of Wisconsin and Dartmouth College (1941-1959); files for courses on Soviet politics at Dartmouth College and the University of Toronto; lecture notes for courses on Eastern Europe and comparative communism at the University of Toronto; lecture notes by Hazard at Columbia University (1949-1950).

Addresses, radio scripts, correspondence, lecture notes; files on the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (1980-1981); files relating to the publication of Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (1971).

Correspondence, articles, reports, and related material on East European studies at the University of Toronto and elsewhere, including a study of the U.S. Helsinki Watch project prepared by the Ford Foundation.

Addresses; correspondence with students, 1970-1986, and on the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto, 1980; course outlines in political science, 1960-1980.

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.

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.
The accession also contains some of Professor Skilling’s personal belongings and awards, such as medals, honorary degrees, and photographs and slides of his personal and professional life.
It has been divided into the following series:
1. Academic work
2. Personal life
3. Awards and recognition

This collection includes Smolensk regional records of the All-Union Communist Party (Vsesoiunaia Kommunisticheskaia Partiia) of the Soviet Union, from 1917 to 1941. The archive reflects the changing jurisdiction of the Smolensk Party headquarters over the years. Topics covered include: agriculture, machine-tractor stations, trade unions, industry, armed forces, censorship, and education.

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. All the films in this collection have been digitized from the original 16mm and 35 mm film reels.

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).

The collection contains a biographical clippings file on over 50,000 people compiled and kept for the benefit of the staff of Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty Inc., the "Red Archive." It includes a vast range of public figures from party and state officials, members of the security apparatus and military personnel to directors of enterprises, chairmen of kolkhozes and prominent scientists, artists and journalists.