The history of the forest industry of the Volga region of the pre-war five-year plans in the materials of archival funds: the problem of missing documents

The forestry industry of the USSR played an important role in the pre-war industrialization. At present, there are no studies that examine and analyze in detail all the main aspects of the development of forestry and the forest industry both in the Volga region as a whole and individual administrative-territorial formations of this region during the years of pre-war industrialization. The main materials on the history of the exploitation of the forests of the Volga region in the 1930s are contained precisely in the archival funds. In this article the main attention is focused on the disappearance from the archival funds of the documentation of the largest logging organizations, i.e., forest trusts, which is valuable for researchers of the industrial development of the region. Only the safety of documents of the territorial departments of forest protection and forest plantations of the Penza, Kuibyshev and Saratov regions, created in 1936, can be considered satisfactory.