Special Collections: Ukrainian

The Peter J. Potichnyi Collection contains two large groups of documents: those representing the insurgency and counter-insurgency in Ukraine and covering the period 1941-1954. Part one consists of insurgency documents that relate directly to the Ukrainian Liberation Movement. This collection contains documents from the Polish Ministry of Public Security (Ministerstwo Bezpieczenstwa Publicznego) for the period 1945-1948. The second part of this collection includes material from the Polish Security Archives, and contains Ukrainian underground documents captured by the Polish forces in 1947-1948.

Finding aid available in the PJRC.

This collection is mostly from the National Archives of the United States, and represents a portion of documents that were seized by Allies at the end of World War II. This collection includes documents pertaining to the counter-insurgency activities of the German occupational forces.

Published guide and index to microfilms available in Robarts Library (see under: Guides to German records microfilmed at Alexandria, VA).  Call number D735 .A58 (particularly vols. 28, 38, 40-41).

The collection comprises material on the Prosvita Society in Kyiv which was founded on 16 May 1906. The documents describe the work of the influential Kyiv branch of this important cultural and popular educational organization originally founded in Western Ukraine in 1868. Among the goals of the society were the promotion of Ukrainian culture and language through teaching, research, publications, and the creation of reading rooms, libraries, and schools. The collection of documents from the Kyiv branch includes records of the First and Second All-Ukraine Congresses of Prosvita; minutes of general meetings; statistical reports; correspondence; and the Society's memorandum to the Hetman of the Ukrainian National Republic, Pavlo Skoropadskyi, on making Ukrainian the state language.

Born in Khrotytsia, a German-speaking Mennonite colony in Southern Ukraine, David Rempel came of age during the Civil War. He immigrated to Canada in 1923 and then went on to study and live in the United States. He spent his career as an historian and teacher preserving the vanishing culture of the Mennonites in Russia and Ukraine. The collection consists of Rempel's documents, including correspondence, mainly pertaining to Mennonite history in pre-revolutionary Russia, and the effects of the Maknovshchyna and the emigration to North America.

Records of the German supported provisional government of Ukraine of 1918, focusing on the government's Informer Division within the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The collection documents the Division's searches and arrests. Materials include evidence of secret agent recruitment and training as well as surveillance of Bolshevik party members. These resources also shed light on the moods of the local population.

Ievhen Shtendera was a member of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) from 1943 to 1948. He emigrated to West Germany where he studied at the Ukrainian Free University, and co-edited a number of nationalist periodicals. Shtendera immigrated to Canada in 1956. He has served as managing editor of the mult-volume Litopys UPA (Chronicle of the UPA) since 1976. His papers (1932-2004) consist of biographical material, correspondence, newspaper clippings, publications, and other documents relating to the UPA, and memoirs of UPA soldiers.

Contains photographs of various Ukrainian-Canadian groups, events, and organizations from Ontario and Quebec.

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.

The Halyna Stadnyk Papers focus on the activities of several members of the United Hetman Organization [Soiuz hetmantsiv derzhavnykiv].  Halyna Stadnyk is the main recipient of the letters in this collection.  Her principal correspondents are Natalia Doroshenko and Ielysaveta Skoropadska-Kuzhim.

The Mykhailo Sytnyk papers focus on the life and activities of the Ukrainian poet Mykhailo Vasylovych Sytnyk (1919-1959; pseudonym: Mykhailo Chmuryj).  He published his poetry in a number of Ukrainian journals, as well as in several poetry collections: Vid sertsia (1942), Novi obrii (1942), Vidlitaiut’ ptytsi (1946), and Zaliznychyi storozh (1947), the last a narrative poem about wartime Ukraine.  The papers include correspondence with family members and Volodymyr Vynnychenko, photographs, manuscripts, and newspaper clippings.

From the description of Professor Lynne Viola: This is a unique and valuable resource for scholars interested in the history of Soviet peasantry, collectivization, and repression in the countryside during the 1930s. Included amongst the documents are the hundreds of secret police reports from the archives of the FSB (the KGB's successor), an archive still closed to all but a handful of researchers. The collection also includes documents from the provincial archives of Riazan and Ukraine as well as from all major central archives in Moscow. These are photocopies of the originals. Part of the Stalin Era Research and Archives Project (SERAP).

Rev. Tsukornyk was a Ukrainian Orthodox priest and teacher, and composer and arranger of Ukrainian music, as well as a director of choirs throughout Canada.

The papers include his selected correspondence; a daily journal he kept while pastor for St. Mary's Ukrainian Greek Orthodox Church in Oshawa; speeches and concert programs given at several Ukrainian Orthodox parishes for different occasions; various musical arrangements; examination questions for students of Ukrainian Sunday schools; and a few photographs.

This collection consists of a series of video cassettes produced by Kiev Glasnost Films, based in Toronto. They cover a wide range of topics about the country, including Ukrainian history, literature, film, geography and folk culture.

Contains series: Photographs; posters; documents.

The documents include photographs documenting the primary activities of the Ukrainian People’s Home, particularly its choir and executive. The posters promoted the various concerts and theatrical performances organized by the community. The miscellaneous documents relate to the Home and to the Prosvita (Enlightenment) and Ridna Shkola societies in Lviv, Ukraine.

The collection contains guides to 38 regional archives with descriptions of holdings from the 17th century through the publication date. It is divided in three sections: Pre-Soviet, Ukrainian Nationalist, and Soviet. Each section provides chapters on collections devoted to regional government affairs, legal institutions, educational insitutions, police, industry, and more. The guides were published in 1958-1989.

Consists of sketches and graphic designs submitted to the Chair of Ukrainian Studies competition for a new graphic mark/symbol. Included is a newspaper clipping detailing the competition as well as several submissions and their explanations. 

Departmental minutes, news releases, activity files, recordings of seminars and symposiums, as well as event photographs from the office of the Chair of Ukrainian Studies. 

A digitized, fully searchable and hyperlinked repository of visual testimonies by almost 52,000 survivors of genocidal wars. The vast majority of the testimonies in the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive are from Jewish survivors of the Holocaust (1939-1945), as well as other Holocaust witnesses, rescuers, and aid providers.

Among the main subjects discussed in the interviews are geographical locations, prominent figures, names of family members and other people, prewar Jewish life, religious practice, cultural life, acts of persecution and prejudice, camps and ghettos, deportations, massacres, means of adaptation or survival, resistance, rescue and aid efforts, and postwar emigration and immigration.

In spring 1942, Germany began to draft occupied populations as forced laborers. Eastern workers (Ostarbeiters) were of both sexes between the ages of 15 and 60 years old. During their period of residence in the Reich, Ostarbeiters were permitted to write their relatives in the Ukraine. Their letters, however, never reached their intended destinations. Instead they were directed into a secret archive and kept "under arrest" until the early 1990s, when the entire collection was finally declassified. The collection of postcards contains the testimonies of Ukrainian, most of who had been forcibly removed to Germany. The correspondence usually got past the German censors, even though it vividly describes the conditions in Germany, the kind of work, way of life, spare time, treatment of Ostarbeiters by the Germans, and relations with representatives of other nations (Frenchmen, Poles, Belgians, and others). Many letters are highly emotional as the writers express their longing to return home and concern about relatives and friends.

The collection includes a variety of material concerning agrarian development and the peasantry of 19th century Russia. The main bulk of the publications of the Zemstvo, provincial administrative bodies set up after the Reform of 1861, consists of more than 4000 volumes covering the period from 1860 to 1917. The material in the collection is important not only for historians of Russia but also for economists and others concerned with the agrarian economy and the doctrinal debate of the Marxists and Russian Populists.