The article presents the new documents and materials about the life and activities of one of the educators of the era of Peter the Great – Ilya Fedorovich Kopievsky (c. 1661–1714). Both the appearance of the first printed textbooks in Russian and the beginning of the implementation of a large-scale project by Peter to publish secular educational literature are directly related to his personality. Meanwhile, the activities of Kopievsky as an author, translator, and publisher of textbooks have not been thoroughly studied so far. Many obscure circumstances are connected with it, providing the researchers with the grounds to express contradictory judgments. The article partially eliminates these uncertainties by referring to the little-known materials and the previously unpublished archival sources. A detailed consideration of those materials and sources allows reconstructing the significant details of Kopievsky’s contribution to educating the Russian nobility during the period of the Great Embassy, of his work on the translations of educational literature and the latter’s consequent publication and distribution in Russia and of Kopievsky’s service in the Posolskii Prikaz in the last years of his life. The article also contains an overview of Kopievsky’s biography, draws attention to the gaps remaining in it, and outlines the prospects of the further archival research for filling them.

The article studiers reasons for the emergence and the main stages in the formation of the document system connected with the public service career development in the Russian Empire. The main imperial principles of the “service” to the state are considered. Over the last thirty years, there has been a tendency towards the revival of the public service in Russia. The article also focuses on the fundamentals of implementing the principle of accessibility and openness of information about the public service through the Internet free access to the state information resources. The present paper characterizes those resources, describes their purpose and the procedure of using them in compliance with the norms of the personal data protection legislation and with other local regulations governing the accumulation, analysis, reporting, systematization and also the provision of information concerning the civil servants. It is also worth noting that in all the time periods considered in the article, the principle of transparency of the processes and results of the civil servants’ activity remained fundamental. Summing up the results of the study of the principles, rules and technologies for the documenting of the civil service stages, one can emphasize a special, perhaps at first glance implicit, but a timehonored tradition of observing a civic duty and responsibility of the public service representatives towards themselves, towards the people and the state.

The article deals with the history of the institution of Kaymakanism in the Taurian region in 1784–1787. It is based on new archival materials. Shahin Giray established the positions of kaymakans and kadis in the Crimean Khanate during his reforms of the local government. Those officials performed administrative and judicial functions. Such government institutions remained after the accession of Crimea by the Russian Empire. They continued to perform their functions until 1787, when they were replaced by the uyezd offices. In addition to the kaymakans, the commandants played an important role in the local administration. They were appointed to the largest cities of Taurian region. The Crimean Tatar nobility loyal to the new authorities was subordinate to the kaymakans. The commandants were representatives of the Russian nobility. The Taurian regional government attempted to settle the relationship between those officials. However, the kaymakans and the commandants could not avoid conflicts. That had a negative impact on the functioning of the local governance system. The kaymakans had to work in an unfamiliar to them sphere of jurisdiction, without any knowledge of the Russian language. They continued to apply sharia in their judicial practice, which caused a lot of misunderstanding among the Russian officials and led to legal conflicts.

The cooperation of the new Soviet art and the artists of Russian emigration is a subject of particular interest. The period of the 1920s became a unique in the history of art when the new Soviet avant-garde artists, as well as artists who remained at home and those who decided to leave and not return, got along at international exhibitions within the Russian section. Russian art was still perceived as a single whole, geographical boundaries did not play a role, and the abyss of “non-return” had not yet opened between the creators themselves. The last chords in that still general composition were some art exhibitions that have become iconic. One of them was the exhibition of modern French art in Moscow (September – November 1928), which is the focus of the article. The organization of the exhibition brought together efforts of highranking officials of the USSR and France (A.V. Lunacharsky, E. Herriot), major cultural institutions (State Museum of New Western Art, Tretyakov Gallery, State Academy of Art Sciences), private French galleries and art dealers, as well as individual artists. On the basis of archival documents from the funds of the RGALI and the Archive of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the author restores the events associated with the preparation, organization, negotiations and participation in the exhibition of emigrant artists.

The article is about the basic steps of the church property seizure campaign for famine relief. The campaign was carried out from March to May, 1922, in parallel with the Soviet authorities’ awareness-raising crusade to undermine the credibility of the Orthodox clergy in Russia, including the Saratov province. The local media of those years thoroughly reflected those processes, since the government of that time actively used periodic publications for its political outreach. In the pages of the newspaper “Bor’ba” of Balashov district executive committee of the RCP(b) unleashed political persecution of the clergy that was cleverly masked as a fight against the famine and collecting of necessary means. The March-June 1922 publications featured not only the reports about the course of the campaign, caricatures and articles accusing the clergy of greediness and indifference to people’s tragedies, but also some fictional formats that contained hidden messages to form a negative public response towards the Christian faith. Christ was pictured as a cruel God indifferently watching the death of his flock in starvation pains. The party leaders who did not abandon their citizens in difficult moments were presented as saviors. What was happening was a substitution of ideals.

The article analyzes the changes that the metric books of the Roman Catholic parishes of the BSSR underwent in the conditions of the anti-religious campaigns in 1945–1991. With the establishment of the Soviet power on the territory of Belarus, active secularization processes began in all spheres of social life. One of the aspects of the secularization was the ban in 1917 on keeping metric books. They were replaced by the civil status acts registered by the Registry Office. After the accession of Western Belarus to the BSSR in 1939, All Catholic believers in Belarus started getting spiritual guidance from the Apostolic Administration of Vilnius and its branch in Bialystok. As a result, at an unofficial level, due to the demands of the bishops in those Roman Catholic parishes that were not liquidated, the practice of metrication continued. They lasted the whole phase of existence of the Soviet state. The key moment of the functioning of the metric books in the post-war period was the instruction of the Apostolic Administrator in 1948. It emphasized the primacy of the ecclesiastical law over the civil law in relation to the metrication materials. The metric books had lost the rigor of the form. The entries were often made in the school notebooks and on the scraps of paper using the non-literary forms of the language. The right to make an entry in the books on baptisms, marriages, burials was granted to the people who had not been ordained.

The article deals with the memoirs of the political elite of the USSR and the GDR in the 1960s – 1980s. The memoir literature of that period was under a strict ideological control, having a dualistic nature at its core. On the one hand, the control was expressed in a series of prohibitive measures that really led to the restriction of the publication of any memoirs in general and the political ones in particular. On the other hand, it was during those years that two large-scale image campaigns were held, in which the party and the state promoted their ideology through the artificial creation of the memoirs of the highest representatives of the political elite. It concerned the memoirs of the general secretaries: of the Central Committee of the CPSU – Leonid Brezhnev (USSR), and of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany – Erich Honecker (GDR). Of particular interest is the fact that the memoirs of Brezhnev and Honecker were written by a team of professional “ghostwriters” – and not by the nominal authors whose names were on the book covers. The article describes the chronology of the clash of state ideology and memoir prose, and also analyzes the causes and consequences of that clash. For the first time, the article uses the documents from the former Archives of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, which makes the article especially interesting.

The article considers the issues of defining the boundaries of the disciplines of the records management and archival science in the framework of modern practice and theory.
These disciplines have traditionally developed in parallel and in each of them a certain approach to working with the document was formed . In the first, the main attention is paid to the documents formed in the course of management activities, primarily organizational and administrative. The second discipline includes in its circle of interests all types of documents that are deposited in archives, including private documents. Such inconsistency leads, among other things, to legal consequences when a “document” registered in the archive does not have the necessary details from the point of view of the records management to be considered as a document.
In fact, archivists, accepting documents to the archive that were not created according the documenting rules, assign them the necessary details and the status of the document. Also, the connection occurs at the stage of preventive value appraisal, when archivists create lists of documents with indication of retention period.
In the article, based on the analysis of the subject area, it is proposed to combine the two disciplines in a normative and methodological plan in order to close the existing gaps.

The article studies an importance of the state top officials role in the policy of the informatization of state bodies, the formation of the infrastructure for an “electronic government”. That is especially important in the periods when the leader’s choice of the reforms course in the country depends either on the further development and a breakthrough or on the onset of stagnation.
The contemporary history of many developed and developing countries confirms that the factor of the personal position of the head of state with the beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is of paramount importance for technological leadership. Only a few young states that achieved their independence in the last decade of the 20th century, with the election of strong reform leaders, managed to become the forerunners of innovative development.
The author uses examples of N.A. Nazarbayev, the first President of the Republic of Kazakhstan (1990–2019), political will in initiating the cardinal reforms in public administration and the accelerated introduction of advanced technologies and national developments into that sphere chronologically demonstrating the consistent implementation of the large-scale systems – of the unified electronic document management system of state bodies and the entire “electronic government” infrastructure complex. Resulting from the head of state personal attention, his consistent and active management of the digitalization processes, the Republic of Kazakhstan, in a short time, has achieved the leadership positions in the “electronic government” world ranking.

The article analyzes a document sent by the American journalist Stanley Washburn, a war correspondent of the British newspaper The Times during the First World War to the editor of The Times H.W. Steed. The document, which is stored in the Archive of the Times newspaper in London, is a draft article for the American edition of The Red Cross Magazine. Correspondent of The Times informs the American society about Russia’s contribution to the war, in particular, about the losses Russia suffered at the front and the difficulties the country was experiencing inside the country. The correspondent estimated economic potential of Russia in 1914 and talked about the reduction of the opportunities to maintain Russia’s economic and industrial life in a normal state during the war. The journalist analyzed the issues associated with railways and transportation of the wounded and underlined the necessity to provide allied assistance to Russia in order to prevent its withdrawal from the war. In particular, Washburn proposed to help the Provisional Government in solving the food problem in big cities by organizing food warehouses for that purpose and taking care of the supply of flour-milling facilities. The author of the document pays attention to the effective work of helping the wounded and makes recommendations for improving the work of the Red Cross at the front and inside the country.

The Committee for Assistance to the Peoples of the Northern Suburbs (the Committee of the North) under the Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR was organized in 1924 and until 1935 provided assistance to the autochthonous population of the northern territories in the formation and development of the economy, political and administrative management, education, healthcare, etc. In the territories of compact residence of the indigenous small population of the North, branches were formed under the local executive committees. The article describes the fund of the Committee of the North under the East Siberian Regional Executive Committee of the first half of the 1930s; the fund is stored in the State Archives of the Irkutsk region. When studying the history of the healthcare system in Eastern Siberia in the 1930s, there is a problem of a shortage of information on the organization of medical care for the autochthonous population. The funds of the health departments under the regional executive committee reflect only part of the information fragmentally interspersed in the general document flow array. The materials of the Committee of the North allow us to fully investigate the state of medical work among the northern nationalities. Together, they represent a valuable source of information about all aspects of life in the North, including the health care system. The foundation’s materials cover the space of the northern regions of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, the Irkutsk Region, the Republic of Buryatia and the Trans-Baikal Territory.