The First All-Russian Conference of Archival Activists of 1921 and the First All-Belorussian Conference of Archival Workers of 1924 as an example of the Russian-Belorussian archival cooperation

The article considers the background to the First All-Belorussian Conference of Archival Workers of May, 1924, and the part which was played in its convocation by historian-Slavicist Vladimir Ivanovich Pitcheta, the MGU professor and concurrently the Chief Inspector of the Central Archives of Russia, who was appointed President of Belarusian State University in the summer of 1921. The author carries out a comparative analysis of the issues discussed at the Russian and Belorussian archivists’ conferences and comes to the conclusion that they significantly coincide. At the same time, the paper indicates the issues that were debated at the Belarusian conference; those issues were of particular concern for the newly formed state archival service of Belorussia and were primarily organizational in nature. The most relevant among those were the issues related to the restitution to Belarus of its archives that were evacuated during the First World War to the Eastern regions and that were mainly kept in the archives of the RSFSR. The conference resolution on the subject contributed to the adoption by the USSR Central Executive Committee on September 18, 1925, of the regulation that stated the approval of the petitions of the Belorussian and Ukrainian supreme legislative bodies; the petitions concerned the restitution to those republics of the archival materials kept on the RSFSR territory and subject to the transfer to the places of their provenance. The participants of the conference agreed with the opinion of the BSSR Central Archives that it was not appropriate to establish the USSR Central Archival Administration since that move was not justified by any necessity and only posed a danger to the interests of Belarus. The membership of the conference, as well as the plurality of views on the main issues discussed, clearly distinguished that scientific forum of the Belorussian archivists from the Second Meeting of Archival Workers of Belarus – the meeting that took place three years later and that demonstrated the first stages in the developing of a new command and control system in the sphere of archives.

1. Khodzin, S.M., Shumeiko, M.F. and Yanovsky, A.A. (2011) (comp.), Pamyat’ і slava: Pershy rektar Belaruskaga dzyarzhaўnaga unіversіteta–Uladzіmіr Іvanavіch Pіcheta [Memory and glory: the first president of Belarusian State University – Vladimir Ivanovich Pitcheta], BSU, Minsk, Republic of Belarus