Voices beyond the Urals
Abstracts
The Center for Preservation of a Reserve Record is an enormous warehouse of state documents located in the western Siberian town of Ialutorovsk. It was built after the death of Stalin as a repository and not an archive, and was closed to researchers until 1992. The Center’s primary and unique function is the maintenance and storage of microfilms or back-up copies (strakhovye fondy) of important archival documents from both the Tsarist and Soviet periods. In addition to the microfilms, however, the Center stores a vast collection of original documents, printed material, sound recordings and films which were moved to this remote site from their original storage in various central state archives in Moscow. This study is the first to list the contents of the Center’s vast collection, but also seeks to illustrate the importance of the Center’s holdings by focusing on a group of documents stored there, the case files and individual petitions of the lishentsy or the disenfranchised from the 1920s and 1930s. A systematic sampling of these petitions can help historians to explore a variety of new questions, such as the victim’s response to repression and the ways in which political membership was contested and constructed in the new Soviet state.
References
Bibliographical reference
Golfo Alexopoulos, “Voices beyond the Urals”, Cahiers du monde russe, 40/1-2 | 1999, 199-216.
Electronic reference
Golfo Alexopoulos, “Voices beyond the Urals”, Cahiers du monde russe [Online], 40/1-2 | 1999, Online since 15 January 2007, connection on 18 April 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/10; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/monderusse.10
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