Archives and power: the state archival service in the formation of historical consciousness and Russian social and cultural identity

The article analyzes the main issues of archival construction in Russia during the first decade of the Soviet state. The analysis is based on documents from the two-volume edition titled “Archives and Power” which was published on the occasion of the centenary of Russia’s State Archival Service. State archives keep a full range of documents concerning the history of administrative bodies in charge of archives in Soviet Russia and the USSR in 1918-1928. A huge number of documents from this variety is included in the two volumes of the book, with most of them never published and used by historians before. The book “Archives and Power”, argue the authors of the article, considerably expands the source base for researching archival construction and archival science in Russia. The documents indicate what a large-scale activity was carried out by the Main Archival Administration (GUAD), the first all-Russia administrative body in charge of archives, saving and collecting this documentary heritage. As the authors of the article show, a lot of events, developments and processes in the period of 1918-1928 are revealed through the records and protocols of the meetings of GUAD-Central Archives (Tsentrarhiv of the RSFSR). The first post-revolutionary decade saw a targeted transition, though a difficult and contradictory one, from departmental segmentation to centralized management of archives and scientific principles of archiving. The documentary two-volume edition offers the first objective analysis showing the mechanism of high-level decision-making in archiving. According to the authors of the article, the published documents show that the party and state machine, instead of centralizing archiving on scientific principles, monopolized the management of archives on a hard-line ideological basis. The fundamental edition “Archives and Power” has enlarged the source base for the historical research of the State Archival Service as well as the one of Russian statehood in general.