Special Collections:

A collection of books and periodicals (ca. 200 items)  published by Belarusian refugees living in displaced persons’ camps in West Germany after the Second World War.

 “Petlice” is a collection of privately-issued typewritten samizdat works in Czech and Slovak.  It contains journals, books, and pamphlets by authors not permitted to publish officially in Czechoslovakia before 1989.  The subjects cover belles-lettres, philosophy, religion, economics, politics and history.

The collection includes 175 newspapers and journals published in Western Ukraine (Galicia, Bukovina, Transcarpathia) during the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Contains series: documents and publications; photographs.

The material includes personal documents, photographs, a few Ukrainian DP camp periodicals, scripts for plays, and poems associated with Nadija Jaremenko (1923, Cherkasy province-Manitoba, 1992), a poet, and Ivan Pip (1915, Lviv region-Manitoba, 1989), an artist, who took part in transforming the DP Camp Korigen into a centre of social, artistic, and educational activity, before they immigrated to Canada.

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

The collection (with the supplement edited by Gabriele Baumgartner) includes biographical information drawn from 180 reference works published from the 17th through the 20th centuries. The biographies were taken from Polish sources, from international biographical collections and also from German, Russian, French, English and Latin documents from the period of the 17th century until approximately 1945. It contains information on clans, families and individuals, providing a complete picture of the historical, political, social and cultural development of Poland.

This collection is based on the extensive holdings of Radio Free Europe in Munich and the Polish Library Posk in London. It includes unique primary source materials representing a wide range of opposition and dissent periodicals up to 1988, covering: uncensored periodicals 1976-December 12th, 1981; Solidarnosc periodicals 1976-December 12th, 1981; martial law and underground periodicals, Dec. 1981+; and memographs, December 1981.

The Polish Legions were formed in June 1917 by Poles serving in the tsarist army.  They aspired for reviving the Polish state and incorporating western Ukraine.  The collection includes orders by the High Command, personnel listings, local Polish military newspapers, minutes of conferences held by Polish officers, and materials on the Legion's disbandment.

The Kiev Province Committee was established by Tsar Nicholas I to investigate the extent of guilt of the individuals involved in the Polish uprising of 1830-1831.  This collection comprises a total of 432 investigative files that cover the organization and operation of the Committee; the bringing of people to military court; conscriptions into the army; police surveillance; and investigation records.

The Potichnyi collection includes German, Polish, Ukrainian, KGB and other documents related to the Ukrainian underground movement. Also included are extensive correspondence, clippings and other documents pertaining to the Ukrainian underground.

The second group of the Peter J. Potichnyi collection of the Counter-Insurgency documents come directly from Soviet archives. This collection covers 150,000 pages of documents, covering the activities of the NkVD-NKGB, and the MVD-MGB internal forces of the Ukrainian Okrug against the Ukrainian Liberation Movement during the years 1944-1954. After Ukraine proclaimed independence in August 1990, this archive was removed to Moscow.

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).

A collection of Russian record company catalogs originally published between 1905 and 1925. It includes librettos of opera excerpts and songs.

The Electronic Archive “Project for the Study of Dissidence and Samizdat” (PSDS) includes the database of Soviet samizdat periodicals, electronic editions of selected samizdat journals, illustrated timelines of dissident movements, and interviews with activists.

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.

These publications constitute three separate collections, consisting of approximately 60 boxes of materials issued by various departments of Radio Free Europe from 1961 to the present. Many of the publications are weekly background and situation reports on Eastern Europe and the USSR in English. About half of the material consists of publications from the Czechoslovak Unit of Radio Free Europe issued since 1970, and reprints of items from Czech and Slovak newspapers and journals.

A collection of unedited intelligence reports—many of them handwritten—from Red Army operatives throughout Russia.  Included are traditional operational and intelligence reports and evaluations.  The political intelligence reports contain surveys of civilian attitudes and assessments of the mood and circumstances of Red Army troops.

The Reeves Papers contains papers as well as audio and video recordings of interviews with Czech and Slovak leaders.  Topics discussed include the Prague Spring, Christianity in Eastern Europe, Czechoslovak political affairs and life in Czechoslovakia before 1968.  Also included are reminiscences of pre-1948 Czechoslovakia used in CBC’s “The Human Face.”

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.