“Today, at Eleven AM There Was a Fire in the Archive of the Former Sokhrannaya Kazna (Loan Office). Arson Is Suspected…”
| 29 October 2024
Posted in
Publication of archival documents
Morozan V.V.,
St. Petersburg,Russian Federation
“Today, at Eleven AM There Was a Fire in the Archive of the Former Sokhrannaya Kazna (Loan Office). Arson Is Suspected…”
Abstract
The article deals with documents theft in the Russian archives in the pre-revolutionary period. Preservation of archival documents, attitude of the directors of various institutions to archives remains an urgent problem in the modern world. The author attempts to reveal the drawbacks of departmental archiving system in the Russian Empirein a case-study of an arson in an archive. History and daily life of the archive of the sokhrannaya kazna (loan office), motivation and nature of the crime committed against archival documents are investigated in full detail, whichconfers somepractical significance to the research.The article investigates a case of embezzlement in the late 1860s. The officials of the State Bank stole finance papers of the former sokhrannaya kazna (loan office) from the Moscow officearchive. To hide the crime, one of the thieves set fire to the archive.The fire was quickly extinguished by the officeemployees. The author describes the course of the investigation and the fate of the accomplices, paying attention to certain aspects of archival work in the Moscow office. Hefocuses his attention on the transfer of the Moscowloan office archives to the local branch of the State Bank and on the difficulties of employees’ recruitment to the bank branch. These difficulties weakened control over the preservation of documents in the officearchive. The article is based on archival materials from the fond of the State bank (Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA), fond 587). Russian historiography is sadly lacking in research of daily life of Russian archives, of documents storage conditions, of attitude of various institution head to archives. This work fills this gap to some extent.
Keywords
Archiving, documentary materials, credit and banks,criminal offense, abuse of official position, local history, public service.
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About the authors
Morozan Vladimir Vasilevich, PhD in History, professor at the Saint-Petersburg State University,St. Petersburg,RussianFederation, 8-911-970-29-18, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it