From St Petersburg to Notre Dame Digital Exhibit"The extraordinary significance of this wide-ranging collection is underscored by the fact that it remained with the family, stored in the same apartment for nearly nine decades— having survived the revolution and civil war, the Stalinist purges, the Second World War, hunger and reconstruction, Khrushchev’s Thaw and Brezhnev’s Stagnation, the fall of the Soviet Union, and a devastating civil war and unrest that lasted for almost ten years after Georgia regained its independence in 1991. In 2006 the Polievktov-Nikoladze family papers were discovered by a Notre Dame faculty and subsequently purchased by the University. The materials, predominantly in Russian and Georgian languages, include voluminous personal and professional correspondence, diaries, memoirs, photographs, and other manuscript formats."