Special Collections:

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.

This database provides comparative documentation, analysis, and interpretation of political processes through the lens of revolutions, protests, resistance, and social movements. The collection includes videos, printed materials, and images from a variety of time periods, regions, and topics, including material on the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the Prague Spring.

A collection of reports on politics and military affairs, statistics, interviews, meeting minutes, court proceedings and diplomatic cables, relating to Romania during the postwar Stalinist era.

Chava Rosenfarb (1923-2011) is one of the most important Yiddish novelists and writers of the second half of the twentieth century.

Her papers include drafts and proofs of The Tree of Life [Der Boym Fun Lebn]; Bociany [a novel about life in a Polish shtetl] and Of Lodz and Love; Survivors [translated from the Yiddish by Goldie Morgentaler]; address and daybooks; most of the printed manuscript of Briv tsu Abrashn; Bird of the Ghetto; correspondence with family, friends, authors, editors and publishers, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, printer and publisher Israel London, Elaine Kalman Naves, and other material related to the life and work of author Chava Rosenfarb.

In 1830, M. M. Speranskii and his colleagues published forty-five volumes (entitled Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii) containing, in chronological order, the texts of more than 31,600 legislative enactments beginning with the Ulozhenie of 1649 and ending with the reign of Alexander I on December 11, 1825. Later, a second and third series were issued. The second, embracing the reigns of Nicholas I and Alexander II (1825-1880), takes up 55 volumes, the third comprises 33 volumes for the period March 1881-1913, when publication was terminated by the Revolution.

This collection consists of approximately 1,650 titles, of which about 800 deal with the Jews of the former Soviet Union, about 600 with Polish Jewry, and the remainder with the Jews of Hungary, Romania, the Czech and Slovak Republics, the former Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Especially noteworthy is the Library's 400-volume collection of memorial books for Jewish communities destroyed during the Nazi Holocaust. These books, written primarily in Yiddish or Hebrew, but quite often including articles in English or other Western languages, are important sources for the study of Jewish history in Eastern Europe, and for the study of local community history as well.

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.

The Czechoslovak born Otto Schneid (1900-1974) was a painter, sculptor, art historian, and writer. His collection consists of research materials for Schneid's unpublished book on 20th-century Jewish artists in Europe ("Der Jude und die Kunst" (1938)), manuscripts for his published and unpublished works, and galleys for his published writings. The research materials include correspondence with more than 120 Jewish artists, copies of their exhibition catalogues, and other published works, and photographs of their art. Most of these artists perished during the Second World War.

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.