Special Collections:

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

Socialism on Film is a collection of documentaries, newsreels, and features films sourced from the British Film Institute. They include ones by Soviet and East European filmmakers dating from 1917 to the 1980s. This project makes available the ETV-Plato Films collection put together by the British communist Stanley Forman in the years after the Second World War. This is a collection of films produced almost exclusively in the communist world and then versioned into English for distribution in the West. All the films in this collection have been digitized from the original 16mm and 35 mm film reels.

The major part of the collection was created as part of the Stalin Era Research and Archives Project (SERAP). This project was a collaborative, multidisciplinary undertaking based at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto. With support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, it sought to stimulate the reinterpretation of politics and society in the USSR under Stalin through the use of newly declassified archival materials. This part of the collection contains resources on the courts, procuracy, criminal law and its administration under Stalin and in the immediate post-Stalin period. Contained in the collection are many restricted or partially closed materials, including stenographic reports of conferences of judges and other officials, raw criminal statistics, records of the drafting and internal debates on new laws and party resolutions, and bureaucratic directives and instructions. These documents are photocopies of originals contained in a number of archives in Moscow (especially GARF and the former Central Party Archive).   

Another important part of the collection includes records of interviews conducted with Soviet legal experts in emigration in 1985-1987. Interviews in folders 1-17 were conducted in Israel with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Interviews in folders 18-46 were conducted under the auspices of the Soviet Interview Project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (James Millar, director). Many of the interviews, especially the first ones, focus on administration of justice during the late Stalin period. Most of the interviewees are people who left the Soviet Union between 1979 and 1981. Some worked as investigators, assistant attorneys, or judges in the beginning of their careers. Almost all ended their careers in the USSR as advocates and lawyers. 

The collection also contains 320 surveys of judges based in 25 regions of the Russian Federation, which were conducted under the joint program "Reform of the Russian Judicial System", developed by the Centre for Constitutional Studies of the Moscow Public Scholarly Foundation and the Institute of Constitutional and Legislative Policy (Budapest).

The collection includes approximately 100,000 entries and approximately 200 reference sources published between 1711 to 1995. It covers biographical information on individuals influential in the shaping of Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Serbia, and Montenegro written in South-East and West European languages. The Archive covers the period from the 9th century to the present day and includes men and women who have influenced the cultural, political, religious, and economic life of this region.

The collection contains a biographical clippings file on over 50,000 people compiled and kept for the benefit of the staff of Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty Inc., the "Red Archive." It includes a vast range of public figures from party and state officials, members of the security apparatus and military personnel to directors of enterprises, chairmen of kolkhozes and prominent scientists, artists and journalists.

The collection includes more than 600 U.S. intelligence estimates and assessments concerning the Soviet Union during the entire period of the Cold War, from 1946 to 1983. It covers all the material released by the CIA in December 1994 concerning the Soviet Union and international communism. The documents included are from the office of the Director of Central Intelligence, the National Intelligence Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the military services intelligence units, and other organizations.

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 Stalin Digital Archive (SDA) contains documents from Fond 558. These comprise Stalin’s personal papers dating from 1889 to 1952, and cover, among other topics, industrialization and agricultural collectivization, the Great Purges, Soviet foreign policy, the Cold War, and Stalin’s personal relations with Western intellectuals and Soviet officials. Also included are 300 volumes from Stalin’s personal library containing his marginalia, as well as the series Annals of Communism published by Yale University Press (YUP). The SDA is a collaborative project between the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) and YUP. The database allows for the management of a personal library of saved documents, tags, annotations, and searches, and participation in private groups and research forums. Of interest to students and researchers of history and political science.

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.

With typescript copy. (1726, Munkacs, Hungary (now Mukachevo, Ukraine)).

The collection includes correspondence, poems, and short stories written by late 19th-century Czech writers, including members of the "Maj" group. Some of the writers represented are Josef Svatopluk Machar, Adolf Černy, Eliška Krásnohorská, František Táborský, and the composer Karel Weis.

A holograph collection of poems originally written between 1920 and 1940. Author's presentation copy to L.I. Strakhovsky (ca. 1940).

TS. Poem translated by Andrew Suknaski (1959).

The Russian Civil War and American Expeditionary Forces in Siberia, 1918-1920 is a collection of war diaries, operations reports, subject files, important letters, memorandums, cablegrams, maps, charts, and other kinds of records relating to the activities of the post-WWI American Expeditionary Forces in Siberia. Topics covered include economic, political, and social conditions in Siberia; operations of the Siberian expedition; Japanese-American relations; and more. Of interest to scholars of American history, Slavic studies, East Asian studies, international relations, political science, economics, geography, and history.

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.

The collection includes Hungarian political records pertaining to the Hungarian Nazi Party known as the Arrow-Cross Party under the leadership of Ferenc Szalasi, a Regent and Premier of Hungary in late 1944. Also included are collections of speeches, essays, and other writings of Ferenc Szalasi which serve to complete his diary. In addition, this collection contains Hungarian military records, personal name files of Hungarian Army officers for the World War II period and earlier, maps, books, pamphlets and newspapers in Hungarian.

The Office of Strategic Services and the State Department commissioned the leading scholars in international affairs and a variety of area studies to write special, top-secret reports during World War II and the Cold War. This collection contains 3,774 reports in fourteen parts. The reports are scholarly analyses of the political, historical, economic, and military origins and direction of World War II and the early years of the Cold War. The majority deal with Europe, Asia and the Soviet Union, with smaller parts devoted to the Middle east, Africa and Latin America.

The parts relevant to East Central Europe are:

• Part IV: Germany and its Occupied Territories during World War II. Washington: University Publications of America, [1977?]. 22 reels
• Part V: Post War Europe. Washington: University Publications of America, [197-?]. 10 reels
• Part VI: The Soviet Union. Washington: University Publications of America, 1977. 8 reels
• Part X. Europe; 1941-1961 supplement. Washington: University Publications of America, [1979?]. 11 reels
• Part XI: The Soviet Union: 1941-1961 supplement. Washington: University Publications of America, 1980. 6 reels

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.