Bulletin No. 1, Fall 1995
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STALIN-ERA RESEARCH AND ARCHIVES PROJECT
Welcome to the first issue of the Bulletin of The Stalin-Era Research and Archives
Project (SERAP). SERAP is a collaborative, multidisciplinary undertaking based at
the Centre for Russian and East European Studies of the University of Toronto.
With support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada, the Project seeks to stimulate the reinterpretation of politics and society
in the USSR under Stalin through the use of newly declassified archival materials.
At the core of the Project's activities is a series of archive-based research
investigations, each headed by a member of the Project team. At the same time,
the Project seeks to develop new scholarship on the USSR under Stalin through:
- the collection, preservation and dissemination of important archival materials
(including the creation of a Canadian Centre for the Study of Archival Materials
on the Stalin Period, housed in Robarts Library of the University of Toronto);
- gathering scholars from North America and abroad for workshops and conferences
addressing particular aspects of the reassessment of the Stalin era;
- collaborating with colleagues from Russia and the former Soviet Union to
facilitate a reappraisal of their own history and promote the creation of research
communities that span the East-West divide; and
- training graduate students
and young researchers by involving them in specific research projects, in
conferences, in the Project's monthly core colloquia, and in the analysis,
preservation, and dissemination of archival materials.
The Stalin-Era Research and Archives Project represents a unique response to
the extraordinary opportunities offered to historians by the demise of the USSR.
As the doors of previously closed archives have opened, Western institutions (such
as Yale and Stanford Universities) have launched ambitious projects for the
publication of documents. Unlike those two undertakings, however, SERAP is a
project that combines the retrieval and dissemination of documents with
collective reappraisal of the historical record itself with its emphasis on scholarly
investigations, the creation of research networks, conferences, workshops, and
training in archival research.
The intellectual focus of SERAP is broad, extending well beyond the traditional
Western emphasis on the dominance of the Communist Party and the personality
of its leader Joseph Stalin. The concerns of the project team include the
intricacies of bureaucratic politics and interests, and the impact on the Stalinist
order of social groups such as workers, peasants, women, scientists and officials
of the state. Interactions between both state and society and centre and
periphery occupy an important place in SERAP's reinterpretative agenda, and
such processes as "accommodation," "negotiation" and "resistance" are destined
to occupy a central place in the Project's intellectual focus. Each of SERAP's
conferences and workshops is sharply focused on a specific aspect of this
scholarly mandate. As a culminating event, the Project team is planning a major
conference on the reinterpretation of the Stalin era that will convene a group of
innovative scholars from all countries who work with Soviet archival materials to
address these and other important questions of common interest.
In this first Bulletin you will find material on the origins of
SERAP and about the way SERAP activities have evolved
during the first 18 months of its existence. There are
profiles of current work from the Project's five team
members as well as details on past and future conferences,
SERAP seminars and colloquia, library acquisitions, and other
items of related interest. In future issues--the Bulletin will appear twice a year--we will provide ongoing updates
along these same lines and information about Canadian and
international colleagues who have already begun to play
major roles in SERAP's further development.
We hope this Bulletin will communicate at least some of the
excitement and satisfaction we are feeling as SERAP unfolds.
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THE ORIGINS OF SERAP
The Stalin-Era Research and
Archives Project emerged from
what seemed to be just casual
conversations among a group of University of Toronto
historians--conversations in which stories were exchanged
about the impact of the USSR's demise on personal research
experiences. As scholars and fascinated observers, each of
us was initially excited and expectant about the way in
which extraordinary developments were affecting the content
and thrust of our work.
In fact, however, conversations very quickly took on greater
weight. The more we talked, the more we began to realize
the significance of connections between our ostensibly
separate research efforts. On the one hand, we were all
engaged in work on important facets of the "Stalin Era"--and fully appreciated the way in which sensitivity to
separate parts could greatly strengthen understanding of the
whole. On the other hand, we were all convinced that the
opening archives would speed the kind of fundamental
reevaluation that had long seemed necessary. The decades
that stretched from the 1920s into the 1950s were weighted
with tragic consequence--yet official taboos, historical
falsification, and restricted access to source materials had
constantly interfered with scholarly efforts to delineate and
understand. Discussions fairly quickly brought us to the concept of a
"Stalin-Era Research and Archives Project." The "Research
and Archives" component of our title was carefully chosen
to reflect clearly the double goals we were setting for
ourselves. We did want to play a meaningful role in
expanding accessibility to the archives, but we were equally
determined to begin working with the source materials that
would become available. As we thought through various
research design possibilities, we also found ourselves
enthusiastic about the value of collaborative and
multinational approaches. In the end, we settled on a cluster
of mutually reinforcing goals, described above, and including
the collection and dissemination of documents, holding
conferences, and workshops, collaborating with Russian and
other colleagues, and training graduate students.
The University of Toronto provided valuable support as
SERAP took shape--"seed" money assistance from President
Rob Prichard was especially valuable both practically and
psychologically. An award from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada--under a new Major
Collaborative Research Initiatives Program--then proved to
be the key turning point. A five-year funding package gave
us the opportunity to launch the Project.
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ABOUT THE PROJECT DIRECTORS
For more than two years ROBERT
JOHNSON has been assembling a
computer data-base of
population statistics, including
published and unpublished tables from the USSR censuses of
1937 and 1939. The 1937 census was totally suppressed
before publication, and only a few tables from the 1939
census were published on the eve of World War II. Thereafter,
the archival records were off-limits to scholars for almost
fifty years, but were rediscovered in the late 1980s, enabling
demographers and historians to reevaluate the population
history of the Soviet Union. In the early 1920s the surviving
tables of the 1937 census were published in Russian and
subsequently translated into English and French. The main
totals of the 1939 census have also been published, but in
this case a much larger volume of unpublished statistics
remains in the archives.
On successive trips to Moscow since 1992 (most
recently in May-June 1995) Prof. Johnson has been reviewing
the archival records, comparing published tables with
unpublished ones, and consulting with Russian colleagues
who have also been studying these materials. Along with the
censuses, he has also been studying year-by-year statistics
on births, marriages, deaths, and migration, and data on
these topics are now being transcribed into the computer
database. In January 1995 he organized a conference in
Toronto on the theme "Reevaluating Soviet Population
History in Light of the Censuses of 1937 and 1939," which
was attended by more than twenty demographers, historians,
and other specialists from 8 countries. Papers from the
conference are now being edited for publication in 1996.
Prof. Johnson who is on sabbatical leave in 1995-96, is also
working on a longer study of peasants in the Russian empire
and Soviet Union, which will make extensive use of the population database that he
has created.
RON PRUESSEN has come to SERAP in a somewhat unusual
fashion. Where his four colleagues are well known specialists
in Soviet studies, his previous work has been very much
focused on United States foreign policy and the broader field
of "International Relations." One of the virtues of "IR" work,
however, is that it encourages attention to both halves of
various relationships and to multiple protagonists often
involved in particular crises or eras. Well before Moscow
archives became more accessible to scholars, for example,
Pruessen had already been expanding his earlier American
research to include British, French and German sources. For
a historian with strong interest in the Cold War, of course,
the 1990s have now brought the special additional
excitement of learning more about the Soviet "side" of the
story, and Pruessen was immediately attracted to the
prospect of placing foreign policy elements into the overall
reappraisal that his SERAP colleagues were eager to
undertake.
Pruessen's initial work has been of two types. First, he
has been familiarizing himself with the various Moscow
archives relevant to Soviet foreign policy--particularly the
Centre for the Storage of Contemporary Documentation
(TsKhSD). As well, he has been exploring the possibility of
channelling some SERAP funds into the Archives of the
Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs--particularly to support
the photocopying of the opisi which would be of so much
use to scholars. Second, he has begun two specific research
projects which will allow rapid utilization of new source
materials in the collaborative styles so central to the SERAP
concept as a whole. "Caught in the Middle" is the working
title for a study of Central European experiences in the
1940s and1950s: a first conference related to this project
will be held in Vienna in November and a second is
scheduled for Budapest in 1996. The other research project
now taking shape will deal with the so-called "German
Problem" as a key issue in Cold War tensions. A one-day
symposium on the Nuremburg Trials will be held in Toronto
in March 1996, for example, with other workshops and
conferences to follow.
PETER SOLOMON, Professor of Political Science at the
University of Toronto, recently completed a manuscript
entitled Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin, which is due to
appear in mid-1996 through Cambridge University Press.
Based on ten years of research, including five years with
archival materials, this books presents the story of how
Stalin and his colleagues tried to make criminal law in the
USSR a reliable instrument of rule. A key difficulty was
finding ways of ensuring the compliance with central
directives of the local officials charged with their
implementation. This books also tells the story of the uses
to which criminal law was put--from the repression of
peasants and officials during collectivization, to the
criminalization of juvenile delinquency, abortion, and
violations of labour discipline later in the decade; to the
draconian punishments established for theft in 1947.
In connection with the manuscript and other articles,
Professor Solomon has been building a major collection of
photocopies of archival documents relating to the history of
the procuracy, courts, and criminal policy, 1932-1952. The
collection draws from both state and party archives. Most of
these documents were only recently declassified.
Professor Solomon organized and convened an
international conference for SERAP on March 30-April 2,
1995, entitled "Reforming Justice in Russia,1864-1994: An
Historical Perspective." The participants comprised a group
of scholars ranging across disciplines (history, politics, law),
countries (USA, Canada, UK, France and Russia), and
generations. All of these scholars had conducted original
research on aspects of law and justice in Russia, many using
archival sources. The underlying assumption for this
conference was that an historical perspective would
significantly advance understanding of both the
contemporary judicial reform in Russia and the meaning or
legacy of the Stalin era. Among other things, this approach
facilitates consideration of cumulative effects of different
waves of reforms, the lessons of past reform efforts, and
cross-temporal comparisons. On the basis of the
conference, an edited volume of papers will be published
next year.
SUSAN GROSS SOLOMON, Professor of Political Science at the
University of Toronto, has been engaged for some time in
studying the development of science and medicine under
Stalin. She is currently completing two monographs. Caring
for the Body Politic, which is nearing completion, is a study
of the development of Soviet social medicine, 1921-1936. The
Odd Couple, which is in the early stages, is a study of the
Soviet-German connection in medicine and public health in
the interwar years. Both projects use a "healthy mixture" of
scientific material published in journals and monographs and
materials drawn from archives in Moscow and St. Petersburg and
from Bonn, Koblenz, Potsdam and Berlin.
Recently, she has begun to experiment with the use of
scientific diaries as a source for the understanding of
scientific life under Stalin. The first foray in this direction
resulted in the publication in German of the travel diary of
Dr. Karl Wilmanns, the noted Heidelberg neuropsychiatrist
who led an expedition to Buriat Mongolia in 1926 to study
syphilis among the Buriats. The volume, which appeared in
print as Karl Wilmanns, Lamas, Lues und Leninisten: Tagebuch einer Reise durch Russland in die Burjatische
Republic im Sommer 1926 (Breyel: Centaurus Verlag, 1995)
reveals much about the fabric of interaction between Soviet
and German physicians working side by side. A second,
equally intriguing "find" is a diary written in 1930 by
Professor Ludwig Aschoff, the noted German pathologist, on
his trip to Russia. Aschoff is credited as being the impetus
behind the German-Russian Laboratory for Racial Research
which operated in Moscow l927-l933. Solomon is currently
working to publish Aschoff's diary and selected parts of his
voluminous correspondence with Russian colleagues as an
opening wedge into the important question of Russian
attitudes toward racial research in the period prior to the
Second World War.
LYNNE VIOLA, an Associate Professor in the History
Department of the University of Toronto, specializes in the
history of the peasantry in the Soviet Union in the 1920s
and 1930s. She has worked extensively in Russian central
archives, most notably RGAE (Russian State Archive of the
Economy), GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation),
and RTsKhIDNI (Russian Centre for the Preservation and
Study of Documents of Contemporary History) in Moscow. Her
current projects focus mainly on the years of
collectivization.
In the last two years, Professor Viola has concentrated on
the topic of peasant resistance for a book entitled Peasant
Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of
Peasant Resistance (Oxford University Press, 1996,
forthcoming). Working with a range of published and archival
sources, including OGPU reports (svodki) on collectivization,
she has pieced together a history of peasant resistance,
including such areas as rumours, broad sheets, arson, riots,
and passive resistance. Her work demonstrates that peasant
resistance, especially active forms of collective resistance,
were far wider than previously considered either in the
Russian or Western literature. Her work also illuminates
aspects of peasant culture, community, and politics through
the study of resistance.
Professor Viola is also engaged in an international
collaborative project on collectivization. The Tragedy of the
Russian Countryside is the title of a five-volume
documentary history in preparation in Russia. V. P. Danilov
is the general director of the project, and is joined by
Professors Viola and Roberta T. Manning on the editorial
board. Other collaborators include R. W. Davies, Elena
Osokina, and Stephen Wheatcroft. The first volume of the
series will go to the publisher in 1996. Documents for the
project have been gathered from all of the central archives
in Moscow, including most notably the archives of the former
KGB.
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THE SERAP WORKSHOP SERIES 1995-1996
The SERAP Workshop Series features
distinguished historians who have
been invited to the University of
Toronto to discuss their most recent
research in the archives of the
former Soviet Union. The
Workshops, which are open to faculty and graduate students,
address problems of archival research, document analysis,
and reinterpretations of the Stalin Era. In the inaugural
year of the project, SERAP invited Jeffrey Burds, University
of Rochester, who spoke on "Russian Central Archives:
Classification, Declassification, and Reclassification" (Sept. 29,
1994); James Harris, University of Chicago, "Regional Archives
in Russia: The Urals State and Party Archives" (Dec. 5, 1994);
R. W. Davies, University of Birmingham, "Research on the
Soviet Economy of the 1930s: The Role of the Archives" (Jan.
26, 1995); Lars Lih, "Stalin at Work: Stalin's Letters to
Molotov" (Feb. 23, 1995); Oleg Khlevniuk, "The Politburo in
the 1930s: The Archival Record" (March 28, 1995); and Sergei
Zhuravlev, Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of
Sciences, "Working in Moscow's Formerly Secret Archives"
(April 6, 1995). This fall, SERAP hosted the following
speakers in its Workshop Series:
V. P. Danilov, Institute of History, Russian Academy of
Sciences, "The Archives of the Former KGB" (Sept. 21, 1995):
Dr. Danilov was one of the first Russian historians to make
extensive use of newly available archival documents in his
research. Dr. Danilov noted one of the main peculiarities of
the KGB archives--the tendency to diligent documentation
but disorderly storage of the texts, and remarked on one of
the most significant document formats--the svodki or
reports on the political moods of various social groups
written by the OGPU. The latter documents constitute a
major part of the archival collection and can provide
historians with valuable and, in his view, reliable
information. Danilov stressed that although more people can
now use the depositories of the former KGB archives, access
is often limited to the materials of those purged during the
late 1920s-30s. The materials on the KGB as an institution,
its executive and operational documents, are not yet
available to the "average" scholar.
David Hoffman, Ohio State University, "Popular Opinion under
Stalinism: New Evidence from the Archives" (Oct. 12, 1995):
Professor Hoffman has worked extensively in national and
local state archives such as GARF, RTsKhIDNI, and TsGAMO,
and in his talk focused particularly on his findings in the
records of the Komsomol. He noted that personal material
such as diaries are an especially rich source, and stressed
the importance of letters as a means of gauging Soviet
popular opinion. Hoffman also discussed the benefits of
working with police documents and court case reports.
Based on his survey of these materials, he discovered that
the overwhelming majority of cases in the 1930s concerned
theft or embezzlement; in his opinion the prevalence of, and
concern surrounding, these crimes of property were a
reflection of the tremendous economic hardship of the time.
Elvyra Uzkurelyte-Baltiniene, Academy of Music, Vilnius,
"Archival Documentation of Stalin's Policy of Cultural
Genocide in Lithuania" (Oct. 19, 1995): Dr. Uzkurelyte-Baltiniene discussed the documents located in the Archive
of Lithuanian Social Organizations, formerly known as the
Archive of the Party Institute of History. Her talk focused
primarily on the period 1944-1953, and offered new
insights into the well-known general pattern of arrests,
deportations, and killings occurring in the region at the
time. Dr. Uzkurelyte-Baltiniene also shed light on resistance
and dissent during this period, citing examples (such as
letters to the Soviet Government) from civilian and military
sources. Regarding future archival research, Dr. Uzkurelyte-Baltiniene emphasized the need for work to be done on the
material currently housed in both the State and Ministry of
Internal Affairs Archives.
Hiroaki Kuromiya, Indiana University, "Political Terror in the
Donbas: Archives and Questions of Evidence" (Nov. 9,
1995): The SERAP workshop series continued with a presentation by Hiroaki Kuromiya of
Indiana University. Professor Kuromiya discussed in detail his findings in the local Donbas archives
and the conclusions he has drawn from them. After
highlighting one or two contentious issues in the
historiography on the subject, Professor Kuromiya outlined
the genesis of the terror and discussed its impact on the
region, which, in comparison to other areas of the Soviet
Union at the time, was one of the hardest hit. He views the
terror as resulting from the combination of two factors:
Stalin's concern with the threat of a possible European
conflict, and the inherent problem of trying to gauge the
level of public dissent in a non-democratic system. The
Soviet leadership lacked independent information channels
that could be used to cross-reference intelligence reports,
and therefore the extent of the resistance to Soviet
domestic policy was unknown. In the Donbas region, the
Polish, German, and Greek communities were the first to be
devastated by arrests and deportations. Later, as the image
of the "enemy" of the Soviet state became more
class-neutral (thus allowing for attacks on the Communist
Party), the pattern followed the rest of the Soviet Union as
the purges took in various elites. Professor Kuromiya
stressed caution when examining relevant archival materials,
for he felt that, along with genuine evidence of anti-Soviet
activity (for example demonstrations or chashtushki), there
was the possibility that some anti-Soviet activity reports
had been fabricated by zealous security agents eager to fill
their quotas. Professor Kuromiya ended his presentation with
some profiles of collaborators, partisans, and NKVD
operatives during the Second World War whose files were
located in the regional archives.
Workshop guests in 1996 include: Donald Raleigh, Elena
Osokina, and Natalia Lebedeva.
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PAST AND UPCOMING CONFERENCES
SERAP sponsored a conference
on January 27-29, 1995,
entitled "Population of the
USSR in the 1920s and 1930s
in Light of Newly-Declassified
Documentary Evidence" at the University of Toronto.
Organized by Professor Robert Johnson, the workshop
brought together many of the leading scholars in the fields
of history, political science, and demography, such as
Stephen Wheatcroft, R. W. Davies, Barbara Anderson, and
Brian Silver. Also attending the workshop were a number of
scholars from Russia and Ukraine, including Anatoli
Vishnevskii, Sergei Adamets, and Serhiy Pyrozhkov. During the first two sessions of the workshop, participants
sought to provide an overall evaluation of the newly released
population data, while the remainder of the meetings
focused on the assessment of data on mortality for the USSR
as a whole, with special attention paid to the plight of
Ukraine. A final wrap-up session concluded the analysis.
SERAP Director Peter Solomon organized a conference in the
Spring of 1995 examining the development of the Russian
judicial system from 1864 to the present. Entitled
"Reforming Justice in Russia: An Historical Perspective" the
conference brought to Toronto a number of prominent
scholars and graduate students in the field. The two days of
discussion covered a variety of topics from different eras of
Russian and Soviet history--from rural arson in late
Imperial Russia to Russian judicial reform after communism.
One of the questions addressed at the conference was how
the prospects for and obstacles to the attainment of modern
legal order in Russia 1994 compared with the situation that
obtained in Russia in 1864 and 1919. This comparison
enables one to ask what differences, positive and negative,
did the Soviet (and especially Stalinist) experience make to
the achievement of autonomous and effective courts, and at the same
time which aspects of Soviet/Stalinist justice were new and which
continuations of Russian traditions. The Conference concluded with a
commentary on the proceedings by Robert Sharlet, followed by a general discussion.
In early July of 1995, SERAP Director Susan Solomon
organized the "IV Annual Symposium on Soviet-German
Medical Relations between the Wars" in Berlin under the
auspices of the Institut fur Geschichte der Medizin, of the
Free University. The IV Symposium, like the three that
preceded it, was a forum for the presentation of work-in-progress by scholars engaged in studying different aspects
of medical cooperation. This year's meeting (whose sub-theme was the tension between isolationism and
internationalism) brought together scholars from St.
Petersburg, Berlin, Leipzig, Paris, Oxford and Toronto. Plans
are being made for the holding of a V Symposium in Berlin.
"Caught in the Middle": Central Europe Between the Soviet
Union and the United States, 1943-1947", Vienna, November
23-25, 1995. Jointly organized by Ron Pruessen (SERAP) and
Oliver Rathkolb (Institute of Contemporary History, University
of Vienna), this will be the first in a series of conferences
and workshops examining the experiences of Germany,
Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Yugoslavia, and
Italy in the 1940s and 1950s. Scholars from each of these
countries--as well as from North American and Russia--will
draw particularly on new archival materials. A basic premise
of the ongoing collaborative research project is that careful
consideration be given to the internal dynamics of each
Central European country as well as the impact of Soviet or
American policies. A second conference, dealing with the
1950s, is scheduled for Budapest in late 1996.
"New Archival Sources for the Study of the Cold War in Asia",
Hong Kong, January 9-12, 1996. SERAP will be one of a
group of interested contributors to this conference,
sponsored by the University of Hong Kong and the Cold War
International History Project in Washington. Participants
from North America, China, and elsewhere will explore the
relevance of newly available archival materials to questions
like the evolution of Sino-Soviet relations. Ron Pruessen
(SERAP) will be presenting a paper on "The Quemoy-Matsu
Crises of the 1950s" with Yongping Zheng of the Institute of
American Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
(Beijing).
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ARCHIVES TRAINING COURSE
The Stalin-Era Research and
Archives Project is pleased to
announce an introductory, non-credit course for University of
Toronto graduate students who plan to carry out research
in Russian archives. The course will be held over three weeks
from April 23 to May 9, 1996, and will meet twice a week,
each time for two hours. Instruction will be in elementary
Russian. Students will be introduced to basic archival finding
aids, terminology, organization, and structures. Students will
meet individually with the instructor at a time to be
announced during the week of April 15. Eligibility: an
elementary knowledge of Russian, graduate status in one of
the disciplines of Russian studies or in the CREES
programme. Preference will be given to graduate students
about to embark on archival research in Russia if
enrollments are too high. To sign up for the course,
students should present a brief letter of introduction,
indicating future research plans, present status, knowledge
of Russian, and any other pertinent information to Professor
Lynne Viola in her Sidney Smith History Department mail
box. All requests to participate in the course must be
received no later than 30 January 1996. For further
information, contact Lynne Viola during her office hours
(Tuesdays, 2-4) at UC D-304.
GRADUATE ASSISTANTSHIPS
A number of graduate research
assistantships for doctoral
students enrolled in the
University of Toronto's Department of Political Science or
Department of History are available under the Stalin-Era
Research and Archives Project. These positions involve work
with archival documents from the Stalin period, possibly in
connection with the student's own doctoral thesis research.
Research visits to Moscow and other archival centres of the
former Soviet Union may also be supported. The University
of Toronto's Department of Political Science and Department
of History offer wide-ranging and rigorous programmes of
graduate study to doctoral candidates planning to specialize
in Soviet and post-Soviet politics and history. Students
considering a doctoral programme in either of these disciplines are invited
to write for detailed information and application forms to
the following addresses:
Graduate Director, Department of History,
University of Toronto
100 St. George Street
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1 Canada
Graduate Director, Department of Political Science,
University of Toronto
100 St. George Street
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1 Canada
Centre for Russian and East European Studies,
Stalin-Era Research and Archives Project,
University of Toronto
130 St. George Street, Suite 14335
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A5 Canada
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ACQUISITIONS AND HOLDINGS
The University of Toronto's Robarts Library will be housing the SERAP documents, archival
materials, and secondary sources as they become available. The following is a partial listing
of these materials (back orders of journals are pending):
JOURNALS:
Arkhivno-informatsionnyi biulleten' (supplement to Istoricheskii arkhiv)
Istochnik: 1994, nos. 1-6; 1995, nos. 1-3
Istoricheskii arkhiv: 1992, no. 1 (Russian and English copies); 1993, nos. 1-6; 1994, nos. 1-6; 1995, nos. 1, 3
Otechestvennyi arkhiv: 1992-present
Rossiiskii arkhiv: nos. 1-5
Rodina: 1994, no. 3
DOCUMENT COLLECTIONS:
The Kalinin Collection (personal and official papers of Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin).
Drawn from RTsKhIDNI, f. 78, op. 1, d. 3 and 6-9, this collection has been published by
Chadwyck-Healey Inc. on 235 reels of microfilm. Old Bolshevik Kalinin was a member of the
Politburo from 1926 until his death in 1946. His papers include many letters of complaint
from peasants and workers and material on collectivization and the campaign against illiteracy.
West Ukrainian History, 1939-1953--A Collection of Archival Materials. Compiled by
Prof. Jeffrey Burds, Dept. of History, University of Rochester, and Fellow of the Stalin-Era
Research and Archives Project, University of Toronto. This collection features materials from
the state and party archives of Lviv.
ARCHIVAL GUIDES AND CATALOGUES:
Arkhiv literatury i iskusstvo Leningrada-Spravochnik.
Rossiiskii tsentr khraneniia i izucheniia dokumentov noveishei istorii. Kratkii putevoditel'.
Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennii arkhiv ekonomiki. Tom 1. Putevoditel' fondov.
Fondy Gosudarstvennogo arkhiva Rossiiskoi Federatsii po istorii Rossii XIX-nachala XX vv. Tom 1.
Arkhivnye dokumenty po istorii evreev v Rossii v XIX-nachala XXvv: Putevoditel'.
Russian State Historical Archives St. Petersburg: Annotated Register (Printed book and floppy disc).
"Osobaia papka" I.V. Stalina (Iz materialov Sekretariata NKVD-MVD SSSR 1944-1956 gg.).
Katalog dokumentov. Ed. V.A. Kozlov and S.V. Mironenko. (Moscow: Blagovest, 1994).
"Osobaia papka" V.M. Molotova (Iz materialov Sekretariata NKVD-MVD SSSR
1944-1956 gg.). Katalog dokumentov. Ed. V.A. Kozlov and S.V. Mironenko. (Moscow: Blagovest, 1994).
Analogous catalogues entitled Osobaia papka N.S. Khrushcheva and Osobaia papka G. Malenkova
are on order. All of these catalogues are part of the series "Arkhiv noveishii istorii Rossii."
SERAP PUBLICATION NEWS
SERAP is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of a volume of papers based on the conference
"Reforming Justice in Russia: An Historical Perspective." The book will appear in the summer of 1996.
SERAP is launching a series of working papers which is intended to bring results of current
archival research to a scholarly readership in a timely fashion. SERAP Working Paper #1 is
entitled "The CPSU's Top Bodies under Stalin: Their Operational Records and the Structure
of Command," by Jana Howlett, Oleg Khlevniuk, L.P. Koshelova, and L.A. Rogovaia. This paper
should be available for distribution by late February. It will be sent free of charge to
interested scholars and graduate students. To receive a copy, readers are invited to send a
written request by mail or electronic means.
In addition, we would welcome your reactions to this Bulletin. If you would like to
receive future issues, please inform the SERAP office by letter, fax, or e-mail.
HOW TO GET IN TOUCH WITH SERAP:
The offices of the Stalin-Era Research and Archives Project are located on the 14th floor
of
the Robarts Library on the University of Toronto St. George campus. Our address is:
Stalin-Era Research and Archives Project
c/o Centre for Russian and East European Studies
Robarts Library, Suite 14335
University of Toronto
130 St. George Street
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A5
Canada
Tel: (416) 978-3330
Fax: (416) 978-3817
E-mail: stalin@epas.utoronto.ca
The next issue of the Bulletin will appear in Spring 1996. The Stalin-Era Research and
Archives Project gratefully acknowledges the permission granted by the Centre for Russian
and East European Studies to use in condensed form some material previously published in the
CREES Newsletter.
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