Tukalevskii, Vladimir Nikolaevich – Materials from Personal Inheritance
| Name | Tukalevskii, Vladimir Nikolaevich – Materials from Personal Inheritance |
 Vladimir N. Tukalevskii (1881-1936) |
| Catalog Number | T-Tu | |
| Volume | 657 inventory units, 42 archival boxes | |
| State of Cataloging | The collection has been fully cataloged and is freely accessible | |
| Languages of Documents | Russian, rarely Czech, German, French, Polish, Italian and Finnish |
Vladimir Nikolaevich Tukalevskii (November 3, 1881 – December 13, 1936) was a historian, philologist and publicist, promoter of agrarian co-ops and founder of the Slavonic Library in Prague.
He was born in Poltava and studied at the Mathematical and Physical Faculty of the Kiev University and later at the agricultural department of the Kiev Polytechnic University (moved to the University of Saint Petersburg, Faculty of History and Philology, in 1905). At that time, he started publishing articles in journals and magazines and cooperated with several publishing houses. He wrote about Russian literature of the 19th century (Tolstoi, Turgenev) and propagation and development of agricultural cooperation.
In 1919, Tukalevskii and his family emigrated to Finland, from where they moved to Prague in 1923. In November 1924, he was appointed by the Czechoslovakian Ministry of Foreign Affairs a director of the newly-established Russian library, which was the predecessor of the Slavonic Library. Tukalevskii was involved in the Trial of the Sixteenth (Kamenev, Zinoviev...): one of those many interrogated accused him of working for Gestapo. Tukalevskii was defending himself against the accusation. Finally, he was discharged from the Slavonic Library in 1936. However, he died before that, on December 13, 1936. His case has never been fully uncovered. He was even considered an agent of the NKVD by some émigrés due to his contacts with Soviet scientists.
The Tukalevskii’s file contains materials from the period between years 1865–1936; prevailing are materials about his activities on the field of agrarian cooperation between 1905 and 1916 (editorial documents, news, reviews etc.). Documents from his Finnish period are also significant. His Prague period and works are present just randomly. However, the collection of materials dedicated to the Moscow Trial of the Trotskists and the accusation of Tukalevskii might be interesting especially for Czech researchers.
The collection is a useful contribution to those in Prague’s Museum of Czech Literature and Moscow’s State Archive of the Russian Federation.