The way to the East: evacuation of the documents from the State Archives of the Kalinin region during the Great Patriotic War

The article provides an analysis of the activities and evacuation of the State Archives of the Kalinin region during the Great Patriotic War. The paper examines the steps taken by the Archival Department of the UNKVD in the Kalinin region (thereafter the State Archives Department) for saving the archival materials of the subordinate regional archives in Kalinin and its branch in Rzhev. Attention is focused on the economic and personnel problems that the archivists had to face at the preparatory stage when selecting the documents for the evacuation. The author of the article examined a set of the documents concerning the storage conditions of the archival materials in Ufa and Chkalov, where part of the Archival Fund of the Kalinin region had been evacuated, and the conditions of the archives in Kalinin after the liberation of the town from the Nazi occupation. Special attention is paid to the actions taken by the archivists in the field of re-accounting, restoration and the use of the archival documents in 1942–1945 under the disunity of archival funds. During the research, the author used the archival materials (the plans, reviews, acts, orders, reports, instructions, etc.) from the funds of the State Archives of the Tver region and the State Archives of the Russian Federation.

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