The role of Ukraine’s party archives in the shaping of the soviet myth of the great patriotic war in the 60s-80s of the 20th century (a case study of the archive department of Kherson oblast committee of the CPU)

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The role of Ukraine's party archives in the shaping of the soviet myth of the great patriotic war in the 60s-80s of the 20th century (a case study of the archive department of Kherson oblast committee of the CPU)

Kuzovova Natalia, PhD of History, Head of History, Archeology and Methods of Teaching Department of Kherson State University

Abstract

Анотація

Мета роботи: дослідити діяльність партійних архівів КПУ в 19601980 роках, спрямовану на створення документальних комплексів про Другу світову війну: документів особового походження й тематичних колекцій, визначити основні засади, котрими керувалися архівні установи, проводячи відбір фондоутворювачів та документів, які, на їх думку, мали адекватно відображати події Другої світової війни, охарактеризувати напрями пошукової, археографічної та публікаторської роботи радянських архівістів, проаналізувати інформативність, повноту та достовірність утворених документальних комплексів, наслідки результатів діяльності партійних архівів для історичної пам'яті про події Другої світової війни.

Методологія дослідження. У процесі дослідження застосовувалися загальнонаукові та спеціально-історичні методи джерельної та архівної евристики, наукової критики джерел, дипломатичного, текстологічного, герменевтичного аналізу.

Висновки. У ході дослідження було з'ясовано, що формування документальних колекцій здійснювалось з порушенням принципів архівної науки, що призвело до створення радянського міфу про Велику Вітчизняну війну. Проте архівісти в результаті своєї діяльності накопичили багато цікавого історичного матеріалу, який не оприлюднювався через ідеологічні засади і створює певне поле діяльності для сучасних студій з історії Другої світової війни.

Streszczenie

Rola archiwowpartyjnych Ukrainy w ksztaltowaniuradzieckiego mitu o wielkiej wojnie ojczyznianej wlatach 60-80. XX wieku. (na przykladzie wydzialuarchiwalnego komitetu obwodowego KPU w Chersoniu)

Kuzovova Natalia.

Cel pracy: zbadanie dziaialnosci archiwow partyjnych KPU w latach 1960-1980, majqcych na celu stworzenie kompleksow dokumentalnych o II wojnie swiatowej: dokumentow pochodzenia osobistego i zbiorow tematycznych, okreslic podstawowe zasady, ktorymi kierowaiy siq instytucje archiwalne, dokonujqc selekcji fundatorow i dokumentow, ktore ich zdaniem miaiy odpowiednio odzwierciedlac wydarzenia II wojny swiatowej, scharakteryzowac kierunki prac poszukiwawczych, archeograficznych i wydawniczych archiwistow radzieckich, przeanalizowac informacyjnosc, kompletnosc i wiarygodnosc powstaiych kompleksow dokumentalnych, konsekwencje wynikow dziaialnosci archiwow partyjnych dla historycznej pamiqci o wydarzeniach II wojny swiatowej. Metodologia badania. Wprocesie badawczym stosowano ogolnonaukowe i specjalnie-historyczne metody heurystyki zrodlanej i archiwalnej, krytyki naukowej zrodei, analizy dyplomatycznej, tekstologicznej, hermeneutycznej.

party archive war memory

Findings and discussion

The history of the party archives of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (the Ukrainian SSR) is an insufficiently studied topic since researchers paid more attention to the document sets of the Communist Party of the Bolsheviks of Ukraine (the CP(b)U) - the Communist Party of Ukraine (the CPU), rather than to the actual activities of the archival departments of the party organizations. Indeed, the documents of the party archives contain important information on the history of Ukraine and they have been part of its National Archive Fund since 1991. The information abundance of the party funds and, at the same time, the problems related to the specifics of their work such as secrecy and ideologization, were covered in the publications by Ruslan Pyrih (Pyrih, 1996, p. 5-10.), Konstantyn Novokhatskyi (Novokhatskyi, 2004, p. 15-21.), Maiia Lehkostup (Lehkostup, 2011), Iryna Zhurzha (Zhurzha, 2018, p. 176-192), Oleh Bazhan (Bazhan, 1999), Olena Koretska (Koretska, 2015, p. 90-109) and others.

The methodological background of historical memory studies consists of the works by Leonid Zashkilniak, who defines historical memory and notes that it is the result of the interaction of the individual and the social environment (Zashkilniak, 2006-2007, p. 855); Aleida Assmann (Assmann, 2012), who emphasizes the important role of archives in the shaping of historical memory in totalitarian societies; Tetiana Zhurzhenko (Zhurzhenko, 2017) on the generation of modern historical memory of the Second World War on in the post-Soviet space as a reaction of the “children of war” to the Soviet policy of memory; Heorhii Kasianov (Kasianov, 2011, pp. 275-306) regarding the influence of historical policy on the revision of this memory, etc. They give an idea of whether archives influenced this process, how it happened, and how the formation and use of archival funds affected historical memory.

The conservation of archival abundance is the result of the tireless work of the Ukrainian branch of Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute (MELl) under the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks) (the AUCP(b)) - the All-Union Communist Party (the AUCP) and regional archival departments. In the context of the topic, these are thousands of meetings with veterans, participants of events, interviews, memoirs, photos, inquiries to other archives, museums, libraries, enterprises, institutions, and organizations in order to accumulate the documents on the history of the Second World War. Not a single fundamental work published by the Academies of Sciences of the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR was complete without inquiries to party archives, which were carried out with strict compliance with deadlines and party discipline. Not a single regional collection of documents, articles, essays, public lectures, even the encyclopaedic publication of “The History of Cities and Villages of the Ukrainian SSR”, and of course “The Ukrainian SSR in the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union in 1941-1945” came out without a significant contribution from party archivists. Therefore we can assume that party archives played an important role in preserving a significant set of documents. But at the same time, they became the most powerful factories for falsifying the history of Ukraine under the auspices of the Communist Party. The intensification of their activity took place in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s and might be related to the need of creating new value orientations for the Soviet society after the condemnation of the cult of Stalin's personality.

The main goal of the paper is to study the activity of the CPU party archives of the 1960s-1980s, aimed at creating the sets of documents about the Second World War - documents of personal origin and thematic collections; to determine the main principles guiding the archival institutions when they were selecting the fund-forming agents and the documents which, in their opinion, were to adequately reflect the events of the Second World War, and the directions of Soviet archivists' search, archeographic and publishing work; to analyse the information content, completeness and reliability of the assembled sets of documents, the consequences and results of party archives' activities for the mythologization of the Second World War events.

In the course of the research, general scientific and specific historical methods of source and archival heuristics, scientific criticism of sources, diplomatic, textual, and hermeneutical analysis were used. In order to cover the topic comprehensively, we carried out a page-by-page review of the materials of the Archive Department of Kherson oblast Committee of the CP(b)U - CPU, which contains both the archive's documents and the document collections assembled by the archive, as well as the array of documents of senior institutions - MELl under the Central Committee of the AUCP(b) and its Ukrainian branch. The analysis of these documents enables us to achieve the research goal and to identify the typical features which are characteristic of such archival institutions that were part of the party archive system of the Ukrainian SSR.

The scientific novelty consists in the fact that the previously unpublished documents on the party archives' history are introduced into scientific discourse, and they form the basis for the disclosure of the technologies of the Second World War history falsification at the archival institutions' level during the specified period.

The Archive Department of Kherson oblast Committee of the CP(b)U - CPU as a typical archival institution of the Ukrainian SSR was organized in 1944 due to the creation of the Kherson region. Its only difference was the fact that the inquiries about the period of 19171944 requiring complicated heuristic work received the archive staff s answer that the region had not existed until 1944, and the documents of the former Kherson History of the Party had not been preserved, so the archive had no possibility to provide any information. This continued until 1955, when the Ukrainian branch of MELI resolutely put an end to this, appealing to the fact that in addition to History of the Party, the documents of which had been really lost, the whole set of documents on Kherson and its oblast was being stored in the archive, and it was time to start investigating it and join the common work on the preparation of publications dedicated to the anniversary of the Soviet regime's victory in Ukraine. But sometimes this “non-committal reply” emerged again, although in general the work of this party archive was characterized positively by the top authorities, and no specific violations in the work of the archive department were revealed during its existence. More detailed information about the history of this archival institution can be found in the research of the author of the paper (Kuzovova, 2014, p. 103-111).

One of the first tasks that the party archive received from MELI was related to the compilation of the documents about the Second World War (known as the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet historiography). These are the documents about the activities of Komsomol members and communists during World War II, the Bolshevik underground and the partisan movement. To make its collections, the archive department was granted the right to request copies of relevant documents from the party bodies, enterprises, institutions, organizations at all levels, libraries, museums, archives, including central ones [7, folio 15].

As Svitlana Vlasenko notes, studying the activities of the Commission on the History of the Great Patriotic War at the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR on the formation of partisan funds, oblast Commissions were created under the oblast committees of the CP(b)U in 1944, and they were supposed to be assisted by district and city party committees. The main task of the commissions was to collect and systematize materials (documents, memoirs, diaries, illustrations, and others) that would comprehensively reflect the history of the Great Patriotic War in general and in the territory of the oblast in particular, and to identify and register documentary materials that reflected the events of the Patriotic War in the territory of the oblast for the provision of a documentary base (Vlasenko, 2019, p. 105-106). We can trace such activity using the example of the party archive of Kherson oblast Committee of the CP(b)U beginning with 1946.

We would like to note that despite the importance of this task, the priority area of activity for all party archives was the preparation of publications for the 40th regular anniversary of the October Coup (known as the Great October Revolution in the Soviet historiography), which was initiated by MELI. It took up all the time left for research work. In addition, in the Kherson party archive, as well as in many archives of the Ukrainian SSR, for a long time there was a shortage of personnel, there was no researcher, and in general, the level of employees' training was low: it took them several years to master archival science through trial and error.

It is unlikely that under such conditions it would have been possible to create document collections on the history of the war if the head of the party archive Nina Ladychuk had not been the widow of the partisan detachment leader - Oleksandr Karpovych Ladychuk, who got killed tragically at the beginning of the war in Kherson oblast in 1941. Before the war, he presided over the Kherson City Council, but the party authorities did not allow him to evacuate. First, he was appointed head of the militia, which did not have a single rifle at its disposal, and then - chief of the partisan detachment staff under the command of his deputy for the Rada - Ye. Hirskyi. According to the official version, the detachment's death was heroic - after several successful acts of sabotage, they were surrounded by the enemy and, in order not to surrender alive, blew themselves up with a grenade. But as remembered by the participants of the events, the detachment, which had no weapons and was deployed in Oleshky, could not enter the territory of Kherson to carry out its legendary terrorist attacks.

The colleagues of Nina Hryhorivna, who knew her personally, said that she had visited the area where her husband had been hiding and had found out that after many days of wandering, the partisans had been betrayed by the local residents, fearing punitive measures and feeling no sympathy for communists. In their memory, the streets of the city of Kherson were named after Ladychuk and Hirskyi, and a monument was erected at the site of their death, and that's all: the authorities were very careful about recognizing their merits.

In general, the authorities, represented by state security agencies, were very picky about the recognition of heroic deeds: during the period of 1946-1950, interrogations of suspects in cooperation with the Nazis continued. If we compare the lists of members of underground organizations and partisans in the south of Ukraine, concluded by archivists (State Archive of Kherson oblast. F.R-3562. Op. 1. R. 77. F. 19-22), with the lists of Abwehr employees concluded by the state security agencies (Valiakyn, A.V., Kohan, A. A., 2011), the former do not prevail much. Among the collaborators, there were many representatives of the Volksdeutsche, former members of the White Guard troops, who invited the dispossessed kulak men, the repressed and all those who suffered from the Soviet regime to cooperate. However, any of the party members who remained in the occupied territory, even on the orders of the authorities, automatically fell under suspicion. For example, the party and Komsomol could choose not to renew the membership of those who testified that while being in the occupied territory, they had buried the party membership card in the ground (it should have been burned obligatorily). In the case of O. Ladychuk, it was obvious that he was left to certain death;it is unlikely that the well-known head of the city could conduct successful underground activities.

After interviewing the eyewitnesses of the events, Nina Ladychuk had a clear idea about the nature of the partisan and underground movement in Kherson oblast and their effectiveness but believed that she should preserve the documentary evidence of the events, which had left her a widow and had made the children orphans. But such materials did not cause any interest in the Central Archives: they did not fulfil the main ideological function - to show the heroic role of the Communist Party in the fight against the invaders. The activities of the militia, partisan detachments, and the underground were either ineffective or had a very weak evidentiary connection with the party and Komsomol bodies.

Once again the party's ideological instructions were impossible to implement, since all the documents that were supposed to demonstrate the party heroism proved the totally opposite: the population of the region was left in danger, with food and weapon supplies destroyed (according to the memoirs of S. Kryvoshein, archived, but not published in Soviet times) (State Archive of Kherson oblast. F. R-3562. Op.1. R. 21 b. Kryvoshein, “From What I Have Lived and Experienced”). Therefore, entire oblasts could come into conflict because of the “ideologically correct hero”. Thus, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson oblasts “laid claims to have” the same character - the partisan detachment leader Andrii Reznichenko, whose combat path passed through several oblasts, so the regional bodies of state security provided different in content certificates, based on the materials they owned, and MELI, systematizing the material, revealed this discrepancy (State Archive of Kherson oblast. F.R-3562. Op. 1 R. 82. F. 84-85).

That is why and because of the inspections of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (the PCIA), the publication of the collected documents was made difficult during the second half of the 1940s and in the 1950s, when the war events were fresh in memory, on everyone's lip, but interrogations of suspects continued. Even the publication of the anthology “The Victory of Soviet Power in Kherson Region” in 1957 caused a barrage of eyewitnesses' accusations and 40 years had passed since it, so what can we say about recent events (Kuzovova, 2016, pp. 251-255).

The party archive returned to the topic of World War II (the Great Patriotic War) in 1958 with the discovery of the documents of the youth underground patriotic group members led by Illiusha Kulyk that operated in Kherson during the Nazi occupation in 1941-1943. To proclaim him a hero, all that was needed was to associate his name with the party organization. It is not known for certain whether I. Kulyk was a Komsomol member and for what purpose his group operated. But the story of I. Kulyk became well-known. On the 10th of October 1958, basing on the materials of the party archive, “Komsomolska Pravda” wrote about him, on the 12th of November of the same year so did “The Defender of the Motherland”, and then several local newspapers (they were not allowed to publish materials earlier than the central ones) also published their articles about the heroic struggle of the representatives of Kherson's Komsomol against the invaders (I. Kulyk posthumously became a hero of the Soviet Union only in 1965).

Further discovery of the documents took place as part of the preparations for the celebration of the 15th anniversary of Victory Day. There were plans to publish the anthology “Kherson Oblast during the Great Patriotic War. 1941-1944”, for which they began to collect materials and testimonies, as well as leaflets with the party and Komsomol members' appeals to the people during the Great Patriotic War, but the anthology was published only in 1968.

Back in 1962, the part archive reported that it had completed all the work assigned to it to prepare the collection. However, the Odesa publishing house “Maiak”, with which the archival institutions of the south of Ukraine collaborated, refused to publish the anthology, because it considered the publication to be unprofitable (State Archive of Kherson oblast. F.P-3562. Op. 1. R. 77. F. 48).

This is very typical for all regional anthologies - the unpopularity of local publications was due to their poor quality: for fear of publishing something wrong, they abused the reprint of general materials, were trivial, and did not contain new documents. And the collected and rather interesting local history materials did not correspond to the ideological concept of the party. There was also a problem of the attitude to the events of the “Great Patriotic War”. After 1947 the 9th of May became a workday, and this date began to be celebrated with mass events only after 1955. This was due to many factors, including the formation of Soviet historical memory of this event.

In 1965, MELI worked on a multi-volume publication of “History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union”, one of whose volume was to be the heroic history of the Great Patriotic War. The main goal of this volume was to perpetuate the party's leading role in waging and developing the “National War” behind enemy lines, that is, the partisan and underground movement. Turning to the party archives of the south of Ukraine to provide relevant materials about Kherson oblast, MELI got refusals from everywhere, the Kherson party archive also recalled its traditional excuse that the region had not existed. After an angry letter from the Ukrainian branch, MELI had to “remember” again about the anthology, which was not admitted by the publishing house, and to provide the necessary information about the underground movement.

The leaders of the party archive even asked the Ukrainian branch of MELI to assist the publication, which contained documents from other archives of the USSR and memoirs of participants in the events, “found with great difficulty” (State archive of Kherson oblast. F. P-3562. Op.1. R. 77. F. 48). The anthology, which was being prepared together with the regional archive, was then planned to be published in Kyiv, in “Derzhpolitvydav”, after being edited in 1966. It was included in the publishing house's plan, but in 1967 it was suddenly excluded without any explanation (82. F. 99). It was published only in 1968 in the Odesa publishing house “Maiak”, and as predicted in previous years, it did not cause much demand. But the main “party line” of the historic description of World War II events was observed and subsequently found its embodiment in the corresponding article volume of “The History of Cities and Villages. Kherson oblast”, at which the party archive, oblast archive and local History Museum began to work in 1962 in accordance with the letter of the Ukrainian branch of MELI dated August 31 № 667 (State Archive of Kherson oblast. F.P-3562. R. 65. F. 66).

The archivists' work was really not easy. The information MELI demanded of them had to be collected bit by bit. The problem was again in the ideological orientation: only those materials that positively characterized the party and its figures were needed. So, for example, it was necessary to collect information from all enterprises about their prewar leaders and party unions for participation in the evacuation of enterprises. An inquiry was sent to each company, and they had no right not to answer it. It is interesting that the further fate of some of the heads of the largest enterprises of the oblast could not be found out at all, and the director and the Communist party organizer of the Kherson Cardan shaft plant somehow “compromised” themselves at the beginning of the war, and what exactly the compromising material was, was not voiced in the letter, referring to the oblast party committee (State Archive of Kherson oblast. F.P-3562. Op. 1. R. 77. F. 78-91). It should be noted that information that could damage the party's reputation was banned from publication. Thus, the employees of the Voroshylovhrad archive received a strict warning; they had let the researcher, while working on his PhD thesis, “make numerous extracts about the facts of gross violations by the Communists of the requirements of the party charter and socialist legality”. The heads of all the archives visited by the researcher, received an order to check his personal file immediately, to make him return the extracts, and in case of finding any violations, to stop issuing records to him. In this context, it was strictly forbidden to make extracts from the documents on the activities of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) - the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), even for the purpose of showing their activities negatively (State Archive of Kherson oblast. F.P-3562. Op. 1. R. 111. F. 46). In general, for trying to take out records without verification by the head of the party archive, users were deprived of the right to visit the archive. Thus, for trying to take out one unverified notebook from the Odesa party archive, professor H. Y. Cherniavskyi, now an American scientist and historian, was deprived of such a right in 1972 (State Archive of Kherson oblast. F. P-3562. Op. 1. R. 117. F. 114)

The information provided by the party archives was carefully checked, and inaccuracies became the subject of further investigations. Secrecy hindered - the documents about the underground movement were kept by the state security agencies and were provided only at the request of the oblast committee. Reconciliation of information between them was carried out through MELI, which did not contribute to the rapid receipt of information. “Secret checks” of archival publications were practiced by state security agencies (State Archive of Kherson oblast. F.R-3562. Op. 1. R. 87. F. 99-119).

While the anthology was being prepared for publication, the archive staff actively communicated with the general public, talking about the heroic deeds of the Soviet underground, published articles and essays in local newspapers (State Archive of Kherson oblast. F. P-3562. Op. 1. R. 77. F. 125)

Almost at the time of preparing the anthology, the party archives already had some experience in preparing anthologies dedicated to the events of the October Coup of 1917. The instructions given by MELI instructed to publish only those documents that positively described the role of the party, to avoid publishing any information related to party workers who had compromised themselves, to reduce as much as possible, and preferably exclude the possibility of publishing ideological opponents' documents altogether. A part of the document could be excluded if its content did not correspond to the ideological principles, and in the case of regional anthologies, the documents from the Central Archives were reprinted (although archives were required to indicate which documents were published for the first time). This made it possible to make the archeographic publication ideologically “correct”, but negated its scientific component and did not serve to increase the reader's demand for the products of regional archives.

In addition to this, such publications caused significant damage. Besides the fact that they engraved a distorted picture of events in the minds of subsequent generations, they served as a source of the indescribable pain for their participants. One of them was the Soviet regime's denial of Holocaust. Practically, the Jewish population was killed twice: the first time by the Nazis, the second time by the policy of forgetting by the Soviet government. In her letter written in 1980, Ye. Pelykh (a victim of the Kherson ghetto, who miraculously managed to escape and lost her family there) wrote that everyone had forgotten about the existence of the ghetto, and even denied its existence (Documents on the history and culture of Jews in the Regional Archives of Ukraine (2014), p. 599). This is a consequence of the Soviet policy of memory.

In the late 1940s, the members of the killed Jewish families paid unsuccessful visits to those in power with demands to at least safeguard the anti-tank ditches that had become mass graves of the executed Jews of Kalinindorf, through which several active roads ran (Documents on the history and culture of Jews in the Regional Archives of Ukraine (2014), p. 555).

In 1965, during the construction of a pit for a residential building in Kherson, 1,927 corpses were found, from 4-year-old children (forensic experts concluded that the corpses of children under 4 years of age might not have been preserved) to elderly people executed by shooting by the Nazis. Only after the terrible discovery, the Emergency Commission for the investigation of Nazi atrocities was reassembled and several testimonies were recorded that were never published (Documents on the history and culture of Jews in the Regional Archives of Ukraine (2014), p. 549). Holding show trials of collaborators immediately after the war became a thing of the past - during the specified period, the topic of the Holocaust was silenced. In our opinion, this corresponded to the general ideological concept - a large number of civilian casualties overshadowed the heroic deeds of the party leaders during the war. This could have damaged the image of the winners, which is still relevant among a part of the population that is still under the influence of the ideological message of the Soviet government, which was being created for decades. As a result, construction work continued, and the city authorities confined themselves to installing a small monument. In Kherson only, two residential buildings and one room of the abandoned factory were built on the sites of shootings of the Jewish population, the Romani, and the Red Army's war prisoners.

The tragic fate of the ostarbeiters also did not find proper coverage in Soviet historiography. As a rule, the number of expelled to Germany Soviet citizens was made public with the reference to the materials of the Emergency Commission, and it was not reviewed any more, although the database of “The Expelled to Germany” of the State Archive of Kherson oblast contains information about a much larger number of people. The way this information was made public showed that the authorities considered them to be guilty of what had happened to them. After these people got through the filtration camps established for them by the Soviet government, they were forgotten, but the marks about being in forced labour in Germany continued to ruin their lives. The collection of documents “Letters from Nazi Captivity” was made secret and published very selectively until it was sent by the Security Service of Ukraine (the SBU) to state archives in the early 1990s.

A similar fate awaited another collection of spoken history materials “What I Experienced during the German Nazi Occupation” - all- Ukrainian schoolchildren's compositions where their lives in the occupied territory of Ukraine were described. Obviously, the materials of these works were used in the operational work of the state security agencies, which used this information to identify collaborators.

The publication of the occupation authority's documents was out of the question, although they had been preserved quite well, beginning with the documents of the Rosenberg operational headquarters and ending with the documents of the gebietskommissars. The period of occupation was described only through the prism of the testimony of members of underground organizations and partisans, which were as like as two peas. Any evidence which differed from the overall picture was not published.

The generators of “correct memories” could improve their financial situation. Following the archivists' requests, they received better housing and communal conditions, financial assistance, and higher pension (State Archive of Kherson oblast. F.P-3562. Op. 1. R. 77. F. 127). Besides, as the result of their research, archives were instructed to prepare award sheets to award the participants of the underground movement with the highest USSR honours. Thus, only at the suggestion of the Kherson party archive, 293 people were awarded (State Archive of the Kherson oblast. F.P-3562. Op. 1. R. 90. F. 10).

A new era of propaganda opened with the beginning of TV broadcasting. Not immediately, but gradually, the party archives joined in the preparation of TV shows. In 1969, the Kherson party archive prepared 7 TV programs (State Archive of Kherson oblast. F.P-3562. Op. 1. R. 102. F. 6).

The next director of the Kherson party archive Mykhailo Yemelianov, a former military man, willingly collected documents related to the war. He adjusted the main document collections on the history of World War II, which were made in the period of the 1950s -1970s - “Documents on the Underground and Partisan Movement in Kherson oblast during the Great Patriotic War”, “Documents on Military Operations in Kherson oblast during the Great Patriotic War”, “Personal Files of Heroes of the Soviet Union”.

Archive collections occasionally included documents that were “unsuitable” for publication. Witnesses of “wrong” events that did not correspond to ideological principles were not given the right to speak publicly. However, archivists kept such memories. They worked with their authors, helped them write them down, make typewritten copies, that is, they realized that these materials were interesting and needed to be preserved. This practice attracted different people with different views and life experiences to cooperate with the archives. They told their stories, and they seemed to realize that even though they wouldn't be published, that was their chance to share important memories. Indeed, these documents were published as early as in our century and aroused the considerable interest of historians and local history experts (Kherson oblast at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War (JuneSeptember 1941), 2011). However, they are very small in number, compared to the template and uninformative materials. In fact, a large layer of historical memory was lost along with the witnesses who gradually passed away.

party archive war memory

Conclusions

In the course of the research, we found out that document collections had been made in violation of the principles of archival science, solely on ideological grounds; insufficient attention had been paid to the verification of materials accepted for state storage. As a result, a distorted, unreliable, uninformative set of documents was created, which was popularized and actively distributed by party officials through public speeches, both on the radio and television, the publication of articles in the mass media, in anthologies of documents. Due to the poor quality of the material collected and promoted by the party archives, it was not interesting to the general public, but due to the lack of alternative sources, it was perceived as the ultimate truth. Along with this, archivists gained the experience of dealing with documents of personal origin, which led to the accumulation of interesting historical material, which, although not being popularized, enables archives to attract local history experts and professional historians to their work.

Gratitude. I would like to thank the members of the editorial board of the journal and the reviewers for their constructive remarks, wishes and consultations provided during the preparation of the article for publication.

Financing. The author did not receive financial support for research and publication of this article.

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