What is the Stalin-Era Research and Archives Project?
The Stalin-Era Research and Archives Project (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 (1) 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 the Robarts Library of
the University of Toronto); (2) gathering scholars from North America and abroad for
workshops and conferences addressing particular aspects of the reassessment of the Stalin
era; (3) 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 (4) 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.
SERAP 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 these 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.
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