188 Larysa Levchenko
The historians and archivists , united around the Archeographical Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences ( VUAN ) and headed by M . S . Hrushevskyi ( the former President of the Ukrainian Central Council ), increasingly felt the party and political pressure on the archives and tried taking steps to decentralize the archival branch management , withdraw archival institutions from the subordination to the VUTsVK , and expand access to archival documents . Under the influence of the Archeographical Commission ’ s point of view , in September 1926 the People ’ s Commissariat on Education presented its own conclusions on the organization of the archival branch in Ukraine and impeached Lenin ’ s Decree of June 1 , 1918 ‘ On Reorganization and Centralization of Archival Affairs in the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic ’ as well as the idea of the archival affair centralization in general . It was noticed that archival institutions had previously been closely joined with research activity .
Subsequently , the People ’ s Commissariat on Education put forward its own project of archival branch reformation consisted of three variants for the archival institutions ’ management reorganizing . According to the first variant , central archives and krai historical archives in matters of scientific research and technical work were to be subordinated to the Main Department of Science ( Ukrnauka ) of the People ’ s Commissariat on Education and the Archaeographic Commission of the VUAN . In accordance with the second variant they were to be transmitted to the Ukrnauka , and the only control on archival and administrative work would come from the Ukrtsentrarkhiv . The third variant involved restoring the authority of the People ’ s Commissariat on Education in the archival sphere , as it had been before 1923 . In this case , the organizational division of the VUTsVK was to be vested with administrative control over the departmental archives and records management in the People ’ s Commissariats ’ s departments . This project was categorically rejected by the ‘ Istpart ’ and the Ukrtsentrarkhiv , and subsequently by the VUTsVK , which called it a hidden attempt by Ukrainian nationalists to break the principle of archival branch centralization that had been enshrined in the Soviet archival legislation and to reduce Soviet state control over archival document use . On May 8-13 , 1926 , the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Archivists took place in Kharkiv , where party leaders did everything to denounce the tendencies towards the archival management decentralization 40 . Though the old school of Ukrainian historians and archivists had received a damaging blow at the Congress – in March of 1927 the Secretariat of the Central Committee of Communist Party recognized the utility of strengthening the archival organs with Communist Party ’ members – the influence of this school ’ s representatives was still strong untill the beginning of 1930s . At that point , the
40
О . Г . Мітюков , Радянське архівне будівництво на Україні в 1925 – 1930 … , p . 14 – 15 .