Special Collections:

A collection of reports on politics and military affairs, statistics, interviews, meeting minutes, court proceedings and diplomatic cables.

The British Foreign Office Records of General Correspondence for Russia is the basic collection of documents for studying Anglo-Russian relations during this period of change in domestic and international affairs. This collection consists of the bound volumes of correspondence for the 1883 to1886 period.

The correspondence arriving in the Foreign Office was divided between "foreign" correspondence and "domestic" correspondence, which was further divided into notes from foreign representatives in London and notes from other British government departments, institutions, and individuals. Foreign correspondence was categorized by department (political, consular, commercial, etc.).

The video cassettes contained in this collection cover a wide range of subjects, including documentaries, news programs, musical performances and assorted Russian television programs. The content is either in Russian or in English but with Russian content.

This photoarchive collection documents Armenian architecture in areas of Armenian population throughout the world. It gives detailed descriptions and histories of Armenian architecture, along with information about cultural context and location. It is useful for the study of early and late Medieval Christian architechural arts of Transcaucasia and the Middle East. The collection includes 42,000 photographs of churches, monastaries, fortresses, and other monuments.

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. Though firm in suppressing the protests and repressing revolutionary groups, he managed to introduce governmental, economic, and agrarian reforms aimed at improving conditions for farmers. Stolypin's policies irritated not only revolutionaries but many people in positions of power. After surviving several attempts on his life, Stolypin was shot by Dmitrii Bogrov, a leftist radical and agent of Okhrana, in Kiev on 14 September 1911, and died from his wounds four days later. The documents concern the course of the investigation, and the sentencing to death of Bogrov.

This collection presents an array of written materials from the Association of Workers of Revolutionary Cinematography (AWRC), the proletarian organization established and maintained by leading Soviet filmmakers. The collection includes correspondence, memoranda, notes and minutes of meetings and the organization’s periodicals.

The Baltic Biographical Archive (BaBA) lists biographical data on more than 80,000 individuals. It is a cumulation of 150 biographical works published between 1600 and 1940. It contains information on nationals of Baltic States as well as persons who worked there and were of some influence in the region. The selection of biographical sources puts special emphasis on the specific role of German-Baltic individuals. Included are Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and other nationals who shaped the historic course of the Baltic region. Also, the biographies of more than a million Baltic people living in exile all over the world are included in the BaBA wherever possible.

The T. & A. Baťa Shoe Company was founded in 1894 in Zlin, Moravia (now the Czech Republic), by siblings Tomáš, Antonin and Anne Baťa, descendants of a family of cobblers. What began as a small, family enterprise, expanded over the course of the century to over ninety countries to become the largest and, at times, the most successful shoe manufacturer and retailer in the world. Documentation related to all of the Bata Shoe Company’s innovations can be found in the Bata archive in the form of carefully kept administrative records, staff training manuals, financial files, and internal company memos.

Includes corporate files from the Canadian Bata Shoe Company (including correspondence; legal and financial records; product development, marketing and promotional files; technical and production-related files, and human resources files). The bulk of the material was created by the Canadian Bata company, however many records relate to several of the oraganization’s international outposts, including companies headed in Africa, India, Asia and Europe. The collection also includes press clippings and other publications about the Bata Company and its historical significance. There are also a small number of Bata family records, primarily for Thomas J. Bata (1914-2008), Sonja I. Bata, Tomáš Baťa (1876-1932) and Marie Bata.

Donated by Sonja Bata, 2014.

The collection contains documents relating to the trial of Mendel Beilis (1874-1934) held in September and October 1913. Beilis, a Jewish clerk at a brick factory on the outskirts of Kiev, was accused of murdering a young Ukrainian boy, Andrei Iushchynskyi. The identity of the real persons responsible for the crime were known by police but the government--at that time debating a draft law on abolishing the Jewish Pale of Settlement--sought to convict a Jew and thus to incite mass anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia. Progressive members of the Russian and Ukrainian intelligentsia came out in support of Beilis, who was eventually acquitted by the 14-member jury. The documents cover the two and half-year investigation, the trial itself, and the events around it. The collection contains proceedings of the court, forensic reports, testimonies of all 355 witnesses, speeches by the prosecution and the defense, materials of the investigation, and articles from newspapers.

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.

This collection provides a record of U.S. policy during the most prolonged U.S.-Soviet crisis of the Cold War era. It contains approximately 3000 documents from the Department of State and Department of Defense, primarily from November 1958 to the fall of 1962. Some of the topics covered in the collection are: U.S. policy toward Berlin and Germany in the years before the beginning of the crisis in 1958; alliance issues among the Unites States, Britain, France and West Germany; the U.S.-Soviet tank confrontation at Checkpoint Charlie, October 1961; the connection between the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Berlin Crisis; and U.S. nuclear weapons policy.

The collection includes writings of leading scholars and specialists on the legal systems of the Soviet Union. It contains articles from periodicals and books. A number of titles are written by Harold T. Berman, a leading authority on comparative legal history, jurisprudence, Russian law, and international trade law.

Bienkowska taught Russian and Polish studies at the University of Toronto’s Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures until her death in 1974.  She worked closely with the Polish community in Canada.  The collection contains such items as diaries written in Poland during World War II.  Also included are academic papers, class notes and personal correspondence.

The collection includes the original diary and English-language translation of Dmitrii Dmitrievich Litovchenko (1891-1919), a Russian White Army Officer in the Preobrazhenskii Leib-Guard Regiment in Ukraine, written from January 7 to November 7, 1919, as well as a number of Litovchenko's certificates and other original documents.

This collection contains approximately 140,000 pages of documents from the Peter J. Braun Mennonite Archive, assembled in the Molochna Mennonite Settlement, Southern Ukraine, during the years of revolution and civil war from 1917 to 1920.  The extensive collection of Russian Mennonite sources covers subjects ranging from religious life, to economic development, to administrative practices from 1803 to 1920.

Peter Brock (1920-2006) was a professor of History at the University of Toronto from 1966, and a pre-eminent specialist in Polish and East European history.  He obtained doctoral degrees in history from the Jagiellonian University of Kracow, Poland, and Oxford University. Besides the University of Toronto, he taught in history departments at the University of Alberta, Smith College, and Columbia University.

His papers include correspondence, certificates and diplomas, lecture notes, memoranda, notes for and drafts of manuscripts, and other material related to his personal and professional activities.

Bulgaria: Records of the U.S. Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs is a collection primarily of instructions to and dispatches from U.S. diplomatic and consular staff concerning political, economic, military, social, and other internal correspondences and events in Bulgaria. Documents include U.S. State Department reports and memoranda, communications between the State Department and foreign governments and other U.S. departments. Of interest to scholars in history, political science, international relations, foreign affairs, and Slavic studies.

A series of lectures sponsored by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. Among the speakers: M. Petryshyn, R. Zurba, C. Worobec, James Mace, V. Oleander, Orest Subtelny, and Stnaley Frolick.

TS, signed. Poetry compilation.

Card Catalog of Gubernskie, Oblastnye and Voiskovye Vedomosti from the National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg.