Frances W. Kratzok recently donated a 1935 diary written by her father, Stanton W. Kratzok to the Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center.

Stanton Kratzok was a Philadelphia native and alumnus of Temple’s School of Law. He composed the diary in the summer of 1935 during his travels abroad through Europe and the Soviet Union. That summer, Kratzok, an undergraduate at Wharton, enrolled in a program hosted by Moscow State University and organized by the Institute of International Education in New York and Intourist, the official state travel agency of the Soviet Union. It was during his journey to Moscow that he recorded his thoughts and experiences with the aid of a portable Remington typewriter.

Upon arriving in Leningrad, Kratzok and the caravan of American and English students travelling with him were informed the People’s Commissariat for Education had cancelled the summer program, purporting the professors assigned to instruct the courses had been commandeered by the government for “shock work.” Accommodations were made for Kratzok and his fellow travelers to tour the Soviet Union in lieu of their planned studies. Nearly half of the diary’s contents are dedicated to his exploration of Moscow, the seaside towns in Georgia, and the cities of Yalta and Kiev in the Ukraine. Within the 82 pages of the diary, Kratzok provides colorful commentary about his fellow travelers, the sites he visited, social conditions, and government politics with special attention paid to the legal system in the Soviet Union and daily life for Russian Jews.

The finding aid for Stanton W. Kratzok’s diary is accessible online. 

–Jessica Lydon, Project Archivist