Central State Archive of Civic Alliances and Ukrainica
Central State Archive of Civic Alliances and Ukrainica (Центральний державний архів громадських об’єднань та україніки or ЦДАГОУ; Tsentralnyi derzhavnyi arkhiv hromadskykh obiednan ta ukraїniky or TsDAHOU). The central Ukrainian state repository for archival documents of political parties, civic alliances, and movements that operated in Ukraine from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day. It was established in October 1991 in Kyiv when the archives of the Communist Party of Ukraine, which stored a significant amount of documents dealing with modern Ukrainian history, have been attached to the system of state archives of Ukraine. It was created on the basis of the former Archive of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, which functioned at different times as an independent institution or as a structural unit of the Communist Party’s research institutes. Its immediate predecessor was the Unified Party Archive (IePA), established in 1929 in Kharkiv, as a unit of the Institute of Party History and the October Revolution in Ukraine under the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine.
Already in 1929–30 the archive took into custody about 80,000 files, including more than 50,000 files containing documents of the Central Committee of the CP(b)U and local party bodies, which were previously stored in the Central Archive of the Revolution in Kharkiv. IePA was one of the 30 branches of the Moscow-based Central Party Archive of the Lenin Institute under the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik). From 1939 to 1945, it had the status of an independent institution and existed under the name of the Central Party Archive (TsPA) of the Central Committee of the CP(b)U, and later again became subordinated as a sector to the Ukrainian Branch of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute under the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) (renamed in 1974 to the Institute of Party History under the Central Committee of the CPU, a branch of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow). At the end of 1932, IePA had over 100,000 storage units, and at the beginning of 1941, TsPA had over 200,000 storage units, consisting primarily of documents and materials from the CPU’s Central Committee, local party organizations, and the Komsomol, as well as memoirs of party veterans and illustrations. With the outbreak of the Second World War and then the German-Soviet war, part of the holdings was evacuated to Cheliabinsk (RSFSR), but due to the lack of transport, it was impossible to save all documents. A significant number of them was burned, many of them deliberately destroyed by the retreating Soviet forces. In total, the archive lost up to 90 percent of documents, about 144,000 storage units, including documents of the departments of the Central Committee of the CP(b)U (agitation and propaganda, personnel, accounting and statistical services) for 1919–36; materials of the Central Control Commission of the CP(b)U (1923–34); and cards of candidates for party membership, among other materials. In the 1960s–80s, the archive continued to receive documents from central Communist Party and Komsomol bodies and began collecting materials from the editorial offices of the republican newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses run by the CPU and the Komsomol. In 1988, it received from the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR a small array of documents—117 compact boxes—part of the former archive of the Museum of Ukraine's Struggle for Independence that operated in Prague from 1925 to 1948. In 1991 it was reorganized as the Archive of the Central Committee of the CPU, which functioned as part of the Institute of Political Studies of the CPU Central Committee. Later that year it was renamed Central State Archive of Civic Alliances of Ukraine (TsDAHO Ukrainy). In 2022, it merged with the Central State Archive of Foreign Ukrainica and assumed its current name.
As of today, TsDAHOU has 330,716 storage units (including 330 audio-documents) in 349 fonds, with 776 inventories. Its holdings include documents of the Communist Party of Ukraine—protocols of congresses, conferences, plenums, meetings of the Politburo, Orgburo, and Secretariat, materials of the department of the Central Committee (1918–91); a set of documents of the Komsomol of Ukraine (1919–91); materials of many Ukrainian political parties (Socialist Revolutionaries, Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers' party, Ukrainian Communist Party, Communist Party of Western Ukraine (KPZU); Jewish political parties (Bund, Poale Zion, Komfarband, Zionist groups) (1900–30); the most complete set of documents about the Soviet partisans in Ukraine, 1941–5 (the Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement, individual units and detachments, 1941–45); investigative files of repressed citizens (1920–50); part of the documentary collection of the former Museum of Ukraine's Struggle for Independence in Prague (the so-called Prague Archive); and documents of contemporary civic alliances and political parties, such as Popular Movement of Ukraine (Rukh), Ukrainian Republican party, Ukrainian Helsinki Association, Socialist Party of Ukraine, Reforms and Order party, and others.
The archival collections represent the variety of themes in modern and contemporary Ukrainian history: society and politics in Ukraine in the first quarter of the 20th century through the activity of political parties and organizations; events of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–20 in the confrontation of political and military forces; the formation and destruction of the party-state system in Soviet Ukraine and the activities of the top party leadership; Ukrainization, development of national culture in the 1920s, and activities of Mykola Skrypnyk, Oleksander Shumsky, Mykola Khvylovy, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Serhii Yefremov, and Ahatanhel Krymsky; Stalinist terror and repressions; the activities of civic alliances and individuals in emigration in the 1920s–40s (including correspondence of many representatives of Ukrainian cultural and political elite, such as Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Yevhen Petrushevych, Stepan Smal-Stotsky, Viktor Petrov, Andrii Livytsky, Symon Petliura, Dmytro Antonovych, and others); the Second World War in Ukraine (the Nazi occupation regime, Nazi war crimes in Ukraine, the Communist party and Komsomol underground, the Soviet partisans in Ukraine, 1941–5, and the nationalist underground the Organization of Ukrainian Natinalists and Ukrainian Insurgent Army); postwar Soviet society; the dissident movement and ideological and political repressions in the 1970s–80s; the rise of civil society and political opposition during the perestroika in the late 1980s; the Chornobyl nuclear disaster and its aftermath.
The archive published and co-published such collections of documents as Litopys UPA: nova seriia (The Annals of the UPA: New Series, vols. 3–10, 2001–7); Vynnychenko i ukraїns'ka sotsial-demokratiia (Vynnychenko and Ukrainian Social-Democracy, 2008); Holodomor 1932–1933 rokiv v Ukraїni: zlochyn vlady-trahediia narodu (Holodomor of 1932–1933 in Ukraine: Crime of the Government-People’s Tragedy, 2008); Ukraїns'ka politychna emihratsiia 1919–1945 (The Ukrainian Political Emigration, 1919–1945, 2008); Provisnyky svobody, derzhavnosti i demokratiї: Dokumenty i materialy: do 20-ї richnytsi stvorennia Narodnoho rukhu Ukraїny (Harbingers of Freedom, Statehood, and Democracy: Documents and Materials: To the 20th Anniversary of the Creation of the Popular Movement of Ukraine, 2009); Kyïv: viina, vlada, suspil'stvo. 1939–1945 rr.: Za dokumentamy radians'kykh spetssluzhb ta natsysts'koї okupatsiinoї administratsiї (Kyiv: War, Power, and Society, 1939–1945: Documents of Soviet Security Service and Nazi Occupation Administration, 2014); Krym v umovakh suspil'no-politychnykh transformatsii (1940–2015): Zbirnyk dokumentiv ta materialiv (Crimea in the Conditions of Social and Political Transformations (1940–2015): A Collection of Documents and Materials, 2016); Chornobyl'. Dokumenty Operatyvnoї hrupy TsK KPU (1986–1988) (Chornobyl. Documents of the Operational Group of the Central Committee of the CPU (1986–1988), 2017); Hore peremozhenym: Represovani ministry Ukraїns'koї revoliutsiї. Naukovo-dokumental’ne vydannia (Woe to the Defeated: The Repressed Ministers of the Ukrainian Revolution. A Scholarly-Documentary Edition, 2018); and Ukraїna v Druhii svitovii viini: pohliad z XXI st. Dokumenty і materialy. U dvokh chastynakh (Ukraine during World War II: A View from the 21st Century. Documents and Materials. 2 vols, 2020–2021).
For decades, access to the archive was limited, information about its holdings was not made public, and the research and reference apparatus was designed primarily for ‘internal’ research of the Communist Party authorized personnel. There were no proper guides to the holdings in the party archives, and cataloguing was carried out according to the types of Party work. The first guide to TsDAHOU’s collections was published in 2001 (available online: https://tsdahou.archives.gov.ua/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/cdago_putivnyk.pdf). The archive has also developed a series of specialized inventories for its collections, some of which are now available online, including the list of all fonds and those fonds that have been digitalized, at the TsDAHOU official website: https://e.tsdahou.archives.gov.ua/ and https://tsdahou.archives.gov.ua/poslugy/oczyfrovani-opysy/.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bazhan, O. ‘Z istoriї TsDAHO Ukraїny (do 70-littia zasnuvannia),’ Studiї z arkhivnoї spravy ta dokumentoznavstva vol 4 (Kyiv 1999)
Tsentral'nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv hromads'kykh ob’iednan' Ukraїny: Putivnyk (Kyiv 2001)
‘Tsentral'nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv hromads'kykh ob’iednan' Ukraїny (TsDAHO Ukraїny).’ Arkhivni ustanovy Ukraïny: Dovidnyk, vol. 1: Derzhavni arkhivy. 2d ed. (Kyiv 2005)
TsDAHOU’s official website: https://tsdahou.archives.gov.ua/.
Serhiy Bilenky
[This article was written in 2025.]