Special Collections:

The collection contains resolutions, directives and telegrams from the Central Committee of All-Union Communist Party, the Soviet of People's Commissars and their mirror organizations in Ukraine; correspondence from local Party committees and executive committees of the local Soviets; official and private appeals of the regional party committees to higher Party authorities; memoranda and information reports from branches of state security, justice, and the prosecutor's office, as well as citizens letters. This material provides information about grain procurement policies in Ukraine; the escalation of food shortages, large-scale starvation, and mortality among the peasantry; political attitudes and political unrest among the peasants and some members of the grassroots Party organizations; and measures eventually taken by the Central Committee and the People’s Commissariat to contain the scale of the disaster.

The collection includes 115,000 biographical entries taken from lexica, handbooks, yearbooks, almanacs and biographical reference works. It contains articles on some 90,000 people (often more than one article about one person) from Hungarian history beginning in the 9th century through the founding of the Habsburg Empire, its division following the Austro-Prussian War (1866), the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy (the so-called Austro-Hungarian settlement), up to the present.

A collection of reports on politics and military affairs, statistics, interviews, meeting minutes, court proceedings and diplomatic cables, including documentation on the critical period of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 against the Soviet-backed government.

George Pavlovich Ignatieff (1913-1989) was a noted Russian-Canadian diplomat whose career spanned nearly five decades. His many postings included Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia (1956-1958), Assistant Undersecretary of State for External Affairs (1960-1962), Permanent Representative to NATO (1963), and Canadian Ambassador to the UN (1966-1969). He served as the ninth Provost and Vice-chancellor of Trinity College (1970-1979), and Chancellor of the University of Toronto (1980-1986).

The fonds consist of records pertaining to George Ignatieff's professional career and personal life. Genealogical information about the Ignatieff family documents their lives in Russia and immigration to Canada. Family records include memoirs, diaries, photographs, student records, journals, and correspondence. Ignatieff's professional life as a diplomat with the Canadian government is doucmented by correspondence, subject files, speeches, reports, newspaper clippings, and photographs.

Of particular interest to Russian and East European studies are memoirs of Ignatieff family members reflecting on their lives in 19th-century Russia and immigration to Canada following the Bolshevik Revolution. Ignatieff's professional records include subject files relating to his trips to Russia in the 1980s; a diary, correspondence, and mementos of his trip to Russia in 1983; plus correspondence, reports, memoranda, newspaper articles, etc. on his visit to Moscow in 1955. Ignatieff also gave speeches on the topic of Russia and corresponded with the Centre for Russian and East European Studies (CREES).

A collection of 1,246 independent newspapers published in Ukraine between 1989-1996, and collected by the Central Academic Library in Kiev.

Harold Adams Innis (1894-1952) joined the staff of the University of Toronto's Department of Political Economy in 1927, rising to the post of Head of the Department by 1937. From 1947 until his death in 1952, Innis assumed the additional responsibility of Dean of the School of Graduate Studies. Innis' international reputation as an economist took him on the lecture circuit. The most prestigious of these was the British tour in 1948 of the Beit, Cust and Stamp lecture series in Oxford, Nottingham, and the University of London respectively. As well, Innis was a featured participant in conferences at home and abroad. In 1945 he traveled to Russia on a special invitation to join the 220th Anniversary meeting of the Academy of Sciences in U.S.S.R.

Of particular interest to researchers of the Soviet Union is series 13 describing Innis' participation in the 220th Anniversary Meeting of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. in June 1945. Material includes diaries, articles, letters, programmes, invitations, postcards, and newspapers.
 

 This is an extensive collection of the Jazz Section of the Czechoslovak Union of Musicians, consisting of publications dealing with art, music, poetry, photography, and culture in general.  The Section was officially dissolved by the government in 1984, but continued to function underground.  The Jazz Section’s original purpose was the promotion of jazz and rock music and was the main defender of ‘alternative’ music in Czechoslovakia. Notable items in the collection include Bohumil Hrabal’s banned book Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (I served the King of England) as well as its most ambitious project: a three-volume dictionary/discography of North American rock musicians entitled Rock 2000.

Scattered around the world today are an estimated 12 million descendants of Jewish emigres who departed Ukraine for the United States, Canada, Europe and Russia between 1895 and 1917. From start to finish, this remarkable diaspora was managed by a single organization in Kiev—the Society for Adjustment of Jewish Emigration, later called the Jewish Emigration Society. The Society organized and managed the outflow of Jewish emigres and their destinations abroad before it was disbanded in 1917. The collection of over 38,000 pages includes documents of the Jewish Emigration Society, as well as personal correspondence of the emigres.

The aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and subsequent civil wars brought outbreaks of anti-Semitic activities, particularly in Ukraine, where tens of thousands fell victim to Jewish pogroms during the Ukrainian-Soviet War of 1917-1921.  The collection of over 30,000 pages documents the activities of the Kyiv District Commission for Relief to Victims of Pogroms, including its work with orphanages, schools, hospitals, work centers, shelters, and refugee camps.  The records include correspondence, witness accounts, reports describing commissioners' and committee activities, records of individual investigations, refugee and victim lists and statistics, communications with Western relief organizations, and documents pertaining to Jewish emigration out of Ukraine.

A collection of vocal and instrumental music, with Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian and Ukrainian words.

Judaica Digital Collections database includes eight resources from the State Archives of Kyiv Oblast', spanning the mid-19th and early 20th centuries:

• Promoting Jewish Education (190 delo)
• Jewish Societies in Ukraine, 1857-1929 (565 delo)
• Anti-Semitic Organizations: Union of the Russian People, 1900s (16 delo)
• Jewish Pogroms in Kyiv, 1905 (152 delo)
• Victims of Pogroms (502 delo)
• Mendel Beilis Trial Papers (435 delo)
• Jewish Emigration from Ukraine, 1895-1917 (296 delo)
• Jewish Emigration from the USSR, 1926-1930 (1,466 delo)

The collection documents the life and activities of participants of one of the Ukrainian nationalist movements, the United Hetman Organization (Soiuz hetmantsiv derzhavnykiv), mainly from the 1940s to 1950s. The correspondence of Rodion Kaliuzhnyi, who served as secretary to Danylo Skoropadskyi, the son of the last Ukrainian hetman, forms a large part of the collection. The collection also consists of a great deal of correspondence between him and other participants of the hetmanite movement in the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, Canada, Brazil, Australia, France, Austria, and Switzerland. A considerable part of the collection contains material on the death and funeral of Danylo Skoropadskyi. Additional material relates to the activities of the Association of Ukrainian Women in Great Britain. There are also photographs of the Ukrainian community in the displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany, mostly Mittenwald, from 1946 to 1949.

Research files, interview transcripts, drafts of manuscript of the publication Moscow Despatches inside Cold War Russia, by John Watkins; edited and with an introduction by Dean Beeby and William Kaplan (Toronto: Lorimer, 1987). The publication includes selections from official despatches written while Watkins was ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Daily journal maintained by the secretary of the Ukrainian Student Society of War Veterans in Emigration. The Society was formed in a refugee camp for Ukrainian war veterans in Riccione (near Rimini), Italy on 7 August 1945. Journal entries were recorded between 7 Aug. and 30 Dec. 1945 and record excursions to Rimini, visitors to the camp, and events held there.

From the description of Professor Martin Dimnik and Librarian's Assistant Caroline Suma:
"The distinguishing feature of the PIMS Slavic Collection is its highly specialized nature. From the start of the collection (1971) the library purchased Slavic materials relevant to researching the history of Kievan Rus’ and Muscovy (i.e., from the 9th to the beginning of the 17th century). The library’s main aim has been to obtain editions of original texts, such as charters and the chronicles of Kievan Rus’ and Muscovy, which are the primary tools of research. Secondary literature that facilitates the study of the sources has also been selected with special care. These materials cover  areas such as political, ecclesiastical, monastic, cultural, and social history as well as literature, language, law, historiography, archaeology, art, architecture, numismatics, sphragistics, and genealogical studies."

The Klement Family papers consist of “birthday books”- albums created by Anna Pachner Klement for her grandson, Tomaš (Tomi), beginning at age two, when he was diagnosed with Sydenham’s chorea. Albums depict stories of a young boy and his adoring grandmother and the life of one Jewish family in Prague during the 1930s. Two years after Tomi’s birth, Adolf Hitler came to power, and the albums begin to record the changing attitude towards Jews in Czechoslovakia. The last album was written in 1940 and in it Mrs. Klement describes how they are forbidden to go to the theatre or the movies. In July 1943, the Klement family was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp and fourteen months later they were shipped to Auschwitz where Tomi, his grandmother Anna, and mother Heda were gassed. Also included in the family papers are photo albums, photographs, Anna Klement’s diaries, poems by Anna Klement, family papers including obituaries, marriage certificates, etc., and Olga Klement’s diaries as well as her art work, autobiography, correspondence, notebooks and betacam tapes.

Cecilia Krieger (1894-1974) was the first woman, and the third person overall, to earn a doctorate in mathematics from a Canadian University (1930).  While still a graduate student at the University of Toronto, she was appointed as an instructor in mathematics in 1928, and became a lecturer in mathematics and physics in 1931 after spending some time at Göttingen upon completion of her degree.  After 12 years she was promoted to assistant professor at the University of Toronto and taught at that rank until her retirement in 1962.  Her best known contributions to mathematics were the translations of two books on topology by Waclaw Sierpinski.

Much of the correspondence is in Polish and is from Waclaw Sierpinski, the Polish mathematician whose work she translated for her doctorate.

[lectures]

The collection includes a set of letters written from 1934-1939 by John N. Hazard to the Institute of Current World Affairs, during his sojourn in the Soviet Union, first as a law student and later as a visitor. Hazard was the first Anglo-American Harvard Law College graduate to pursue the full course of legal studies then being offered in Moscow. The collection also includes his course lecture and seminar notes: most of these are in English with key terms in Russian. These documents offer a unique portrait of Soviet life and legal education of that time period.

This collection of papers is part of the series "Leaders of the Russian Revolution" and comes from the Russian Centre for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Most Recent History (RtsKhIDNI), known until 1991 as the Central Party Archive of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin (1875-1946) was a member of Union for Struggle of the Liberation of the Working Class, based in St. Petersburg and founder of the RDSRP. The collection includes photographs, diaries, transcripts of speeches, autographs of articles, reports and materials on his work in Petrograd and other places, and on the formation of the Jewish Autonomous Region (Birobidjan) and Intourist.