The State Archive of Russia handed over copies of documents from 1880 to Vitebsk archivists

August 19, Vitebsk / Sergey Kochetov - BELTA/. The State Archive of the Russian Federation has donated copies of documents from 1880 from the "Case on the Organization of Archives of the Vitebsk Governorate" to the State Archive of the Vitebsk Region, the director of the regional archive, Tatyana Svistunova, told a BELTA correspondent. The materials provide an insight into the state of document storage in the governorate institutions, starting from the central governorate archive of ancient acts, the archive of the governorate board, the noble deputy assembly, and ending with the archive of the public charity department. The study of the situation in archival affairs was carried out on the initiative of the governorate board, and its results were included in the "Case on the Organization of Archives of the Vitebsk Governorate," which is stored in the State Archive of the Russian Federation. "This is very interesting material that provides an opportunity to assess the general directions and approaches to the process of studying the condition of documents and organizing their storage in the 19th century in the territory of the governorate," noted Tatyana Svistunova. Judging by the copies, even at that time, special attention was paid to issues of staffing and material support for archival work, storage conditions, inventory and preservation of documents, as well as fire safety in archival premises. The copies of the documents will supplement the collection of the regional archive and will be of interest not only to archival specialists but also to researchers of the history of the Vitebsk region. The history of the archival service of the Vitebsk region dates back to April 1852, when Emperor Nicholas I of the Russian Empire issued a decree "On the Establishment of Central Archives for Acts in Kiev, Vitebsk, and Vilno for the Western Governorates." The Vitebsk Archive became the first archival institution in the territory of modern Belarus. Today, the collection of the State Archive of the Vitebsk Region contains 1,172,000 storage units, and the archive receives 12,000-17,000 cases for storage annually. -0-