Manuscript Collection MS COLL 00573 - Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside Collection

15 boxes (5 metres)

Donated by Professor Lynne Viola.

Consists of an archival collection about the history of the Soviet peasantry, collectivization and repression in the countryside during the 1930s. Records were acquired by Professor Lynne Viola in the course of co-editing two document collections on Soviet collectivization. Included are photocopies of documents from the major archives in Moscow. Some of the documents on collectivization and dekulakization became accessible to researchers in the 1990s, which enabled the publication of the 5-volume The Tragedy of the Soviet Village: Collectivization and Dekulakization, 1927-1939 [Tragediia sovetskoi derevni: kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie: dokumenty i materialy 1927-1939], a work that was the result of collaboration of historians from six countries: Russia, USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and South Korea. Another important publication, which was a result of the collaboration, is the 2-volume set The Politburo and the Peasantry: Deportation and Special Resettlement 1930-1940 [Politbiuro i krestianstvo: vysylka, spetsposelenie 1930-1940]. The greater part of this publication contains material from the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation. The collection contains photocopies of documents that were not included in the above mentioned publications, but have enormous historical significance and archival value. The documents came from five major archives in the Russian Federation: The Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Records of Modern History [Rossiiskii tsentr khraneniia i izucheniia dokumentov noveishei istorii]; The State Archive of the Russian Federation [Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii]; The Russian State Archive of the Economy [Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki]; The Russian State Military Archive [Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki]; and The Central Archive of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation [Tsentral’nyi arkhiv Federal’noi sluzhby bezopasnosti Rossiiskoi Federatsii] (which is the successor to the Soviet secret police agencies OGPU, NKVD, and the KGB, and which is still closed to all but a handful of researchers.) In addition, the collection includes documents from provincial archives of Russia and Ukraine. The gathering of this material was a part of the Stalin Era Research and Archives Project (SERAP) based at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies (now the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies) at the University of Toronto.

Material may be requested in person at the Fisher Library Reference Desk, or in advance using our online stack retrieval request form: https://aeon.library.utoronto.ca

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