The state of records management and archives administration in ministries and departments in the early 1960s (based on the documents from the Russian State Archives of Economy)

This article examines the theoretical and practical aspects of archival work, particularly with the documentary collections from the ministries and departments transferred to the Central State Archives of the National Economy (now the Russian State Archives of Economy) in the early 1960s. Previously, archival practice in the USSR, involving the selection of the vast tracts of documentary materials, had not yet encountered such a task. This was due to the relatively closed nature of departmental archives, which, for nearly forty years, had pursued their own policies for the selection and storage of archival documents. The study and scientific processing of those documentary collections by archival staff predetermined the further development of scientific and methodological work in the field of archival work, both in economic documentation and in the field as a whole. The results of their work were detailed in the reports and articles, which provide comprehensive information on the state of recordkeeping and archives within the departments. Working on-site, archivists not only arranged the ministries’ archival collections but also posed and addressed new theoretical problems. Thus, the issues of document funding, systematization, acquisition, and appraisal were subsequently reconsidered and revised.
Methodological manuals were compiled for departmental records management departments and archival repositories, along with the instructions on records management and compiling file nomenclatures, as well as the lists of the documents subject to the transfer to state custody. It was the resulting role of those studies that allowed Soviet archivists to strengthen the theoretical foundations of archival science.

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