182 Larysa Levchenko
archives and supply the paper industry with secondary raw materials 20 . On April 24 , 1920 , the provincial offices of the OVAK were founded by the Decree ‘ On the Establishment of Provincial Commissions for Withdrawal and Disposal of Unnecessary Archival Materials ’. In such a way , on the one hand , the Bolsheviks solved the problem of the paper crisis . On the other hand , to create a communist society the Bolsheviks needed new Soviet populations with communist consciousness , so they destroyed historical documents of the Imperial period to erase the memory of the past . The Ukrainian scholars and archivists O . Vodolazhchenko and V . Barvinskyi wrote in 1925 that the archival sections under provincial departments on education fought with the provincial organs of the OVAK to preserve archival materials . If archivists did not manage to seize valuable archival records , the OVAK transferred them to recycling paper-mills of the ‘ South-paper ’ trust without any appraisal and the archivists ’ protests were not taken into account 21 . For example , in just the first quarter of 1921 the OVAK organs disposed of 23,441 poods 22 ( the equivalent 393,808 kg ) of archival materials including 8,820 in the Poltava province , 6,504 in the Katerynoslav province , in the Kharkiv province – 4,483 , and in the Kyiv province – 3,634 poods . 13,851 poods were transferred to paper mills for recycling . 9,588 poods consisted of the records which had texts only on one side of each sheet of paper so they were transferred to new soviet organizations to make documents on the blank pieces of paper 23 . In Kherson city the leader of the local OVAK O . Shmatov initiated a program of total utilization of archival records to solve the paper deficit problem , a move the Political Executive Committee approved 24 . The short report about the OVAK activity revealed that 11 provincial organs of the Commission transferred 128,062 poods ( 2 151 441,6 kg ) to the ‘ South-paper ’ trust during the winter of 1920 and 1921 25 . It was a tragedy for Ukrainian archives and although the OVAK was liquidated on January 13 , 1922 26 , archival records utilization continued until the end of the 1930s .
20
DAMO , F . R-97 ‘ The Mykolaiv provincial archival commission on withdrawal and utilization of archival materials , 1920 – 1922 ’, Op . 1 , Spr . 3 , Ark . 4 .
21
О . Водолажченко , В . Барвінський , Короткий нарис історії архівної справи на Україні та діяльності Укрцентрархіва за 1924 рік , ‘ Архівна справа ’ 1925 , vol . 1 , p . 46 – 47 .
22
1 pood is the equivalent of 16,8 kg .
23
TsDAVO of Ukraine , F . 14 , Op . 1 , Spr . 18 , Ark . 10 .
24
О . Макіенко , Роль Особливої Всеукраїнської архівної комісії та її місцевих інституцій у розвитку архівної справи в регіонах України , ‘ Студії з архівної справи та документознавства ’, vol . 22 – 23 , Київ 2015 , p . 39 .
25
TsDAVO of Ukraine , F . 14 , Op . 1 , Spr . 18 , Ark . 1 – 3 .
26
О ликвидации деятельности ОВАК , губернских архивных комиссий и архивных секций Губисполкома , [ in :] ‘ Собрание узаконений и распоряжений Рабоче-Крестьянского Пра вительства Украины ’, 1 – 18 января 1922 , vol . 1 , p . 21 .