Organization of work of the Tver Provincial Archive Bureau with the documents of the military organizations evacuated to Tver in 1914–1917

Abstract

The article considers what the Tver Provincial Archive Bureau (gubarkhbyuro) did in 1919–1923 to identify and organize the documents of the military units and military organizations evacuated to Tver in 1914–1917 in  connection  with  the  military  operations  on  the  territory  of  the  Russian Empire. The revolutionary events of 1917 prevented the timely transportation of  the  document  complex  to  Petrograd;  so  the  documents  remained  in  Tver, Bezhetsk and Rzhev in an unsystematic form and undescribed form, without being provided with the satisfactory storage conditions. The article describes the actions of the Tver gubarkhbyuro to search for the documents and organize their acceptance for state storage. In the research process, the composition of the  existing  document  complex  was  analyzed:  in  addition  to  the  documents of  the  military  organizations  from  the  territories  left  by  the  Russian  army, the  documents  of  the  Russian  Empire  civil  organizations  that  operated  on the  territory  of  modern  Belarus,  Lithuania  and  Poland  were  evacuated.  The documents  were  provisionally  combined  into  a  complex  on  the  territorial principle  as  the  documents  of  the  organizations  operating  in  the  Kovno  and Vilna provinces. The  article  also  attempts  to  trace  the  fate  of  the  documents  received  for state storage. In 1921, part of the funds of the institutions of the former Russian Empire  operating  on  the  territory  of  the  Kovno  Province  was  transferred  to the  Lithuanian  Government.  That  complex  consisted  of  the  documents  of civil  organizations,  whereas  the  documents  of  military  units  and  military organizations remained in the archives of Tver until 1926.