ARCHIVAL DOCUMENTS ON THE HISTORY OF SOVIET-CANADIAN RELATIONS IN THE LATE 1920s AND 1930s: SOURCES FOR THE RECONSTRUCTION OF BROKEN TIES

The history of interstate relations has traditionally been studied based on official documentation from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, embassies, and consulates. However, the history of Soviet diplomacy in the 20th century provides numerous examples of how bilateral relations continued to develop after official relations broke down, and could have had a positive impact on foreign policy issues. This article examines the challenge of finding and analyzing sources to reconstruct bilateral relations, using the example of Soviet-Canadian relations in the late 1920s and 30s. The identified sources, however, can be considered relevant to other countries and their relations with the Soviet Union during that period. The documents from the central Russian archives allow us to talk about the active, unofficial cooperation between the USSR and Canada in the 1930s. This cooperation was seen in the economic, socio-political, and cultural spheres. These documents help us to understand how economic relations between the two countries developed after the severance of diplomatic ties, due to the embargo on the import of certain Soviet goods and a trade war that took place in the first half of the 30s. They also show us how cultural relations evolved and what forms they took. We can see how the reception of Canadians in the USSR was organized and how they were introduced to the country, under the close supervision of officials from the Society for Cultural Relations with Abroad. Furthermore, the materials from the Comintern and Profintern provide information about relations with Canadian communists and trade unionists during a time of diplomatic tension leading up to World War II. At the same time, Soviet-Canadian relations in the 1930s were overshadowed by Soviet-American relations, which were significantly larger in scale and closely linked organizationally.