The archival branch of Ukraine from 1917 to 1960 ...
197
From May 25 to June 1 , 1929 , the Second Congress of archival workers of the RSFSR was held in Moscow . In that year the Soviet Union celebrated the 50 th anniversary of J . Stalin ( 1878 – 1953 ) and this event determined to a certain extent the fate of archives and archivists in the USSR . After this Congress , meetings of archivists in the USSR were no longer held . Tetiana Khorkhordina calls 1929 - the year of the ‘ great turning point ’ which spearheaded the period of totalitarianism triumph , and which led by 1938 to the transfer of archives to the control of the NKVS . T . Khorkhordina stated that during the decade 1929 – 1938 a ‘ militarization ’ of the archives occurred . The remnants of archivists ’ scientific independence were annihilated , and a rigid system of their subordination to the party-state dictatorship was established . T . Khorkhordina emphasized that at that Congress ‘ voices of those who soon were repressed in the course of processes that began in 1930 and finished in 1938-1939 had been heard for the last time ’. She concluded that it was a ‘ Congress of doomed ones ’. Even M . Pokrovskyi who was the first Chief of the Tsentrarkhiv of the USSR deplored the creation of this Unionwide archival organ . T . Khorkhordina believed that he had kept in mind the People ’ s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs which sought to dispose of its archives on its own . Unfortunately , M . Pokrovskyi was the one who played a significant role in the case of the Academy of Sciences ( 1929 – 1931 ) when more than one hundred historians and archivists became the first victims of repressions . In that year J . Stalin compared archivists to ‘ archival rats ’, ‘ putrid liberals ’, ‘ frauds-pettifoggers ’. It could be said that M . Pokrovskyi was lucky because he died of natural causes in April 1932 59 . The next Chief of the Tsentrarkhiv of the USSR , Jan Berzin , was killed during the Great Purge in August 1938 . Despite his arrest , M . Rubach was able to avoid being shot , but the next Chief of the Ukrtsentrarkhiv Semen Semko was killed in 1938 . The wave of repressions caused the deaths thousands of scholars , local historians and archivists .
On the eve of the Second World War , on March 29 , 1941 , the Council of the People ’ s Commissars of the USSR approved the Regulations ‘ On the State Archival Fonds of the USSR and the Network of the State Archives of the USSR ’. The State Archival Fonds was determined as a complex of documents that had scientific , political , and practical values regardless of date , content , appearance , technique , and method of reproduction . The Regulations highlighted the unity of the State Archival Fonds and didn ’ t divide it into the Fonds of the Union Republics 60 . The network of the state archives was not reformed on account of the beginning of the War , and as before it consisted
59
Т . Хорхордина , История Отечества и архивы , 1917 – 1980-е гг ., Москва 1994 , p . 139 , 143 , 147 , 151 , 175 – 178 .
60
О . Г . Мітюков , Радянське архівне будівництво на Україні ( 1917 – 1973 …, p . 126 – 127 .