Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine

Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine (Центральний даржавний історичний архів України; Tsentralnyi derzhavnyi istorychnyi arkhiv Ukrainy). An archive founded in Kyiv in 1852 as the Central Archive of Old Record Books at Kyiv University by the Temporary Commission for the Analysis of Old Documents (later the Kyiv Archeographic Commission) to collect and preserve 15th- to 18th-century documents and archives from Right-Bank Ukraine. By 1890 the archive contained 5,883 court record books and some 500,000 other documents. The material in the archive was used by the commission in the compilation and publication of Arkhiv Iugo-zapadnoi Rossii and its other publications. From 1921 to 1923 it was under the jurisdiction of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and after that, the state archival system. In the interwar years the archive was renamed Kyiv Central Archive of Old Documents and was enriched with other valuable documents and several family archives. During the Second World War, many of the documents were destroyed and part of the archive was taken by the Germans to the West. Most of the evacuated materials were recovered and returned to Kyiv. In 1992 the archive assumed its present name. Among the most valuable documents preserved in the archive is an extensive collection of acts from the periods of the Lithuanian-Ruthenian state, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Cossack Hetman state, and the Russian Empire.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Romanovs'kyi, V. (ed). Tsentral'nyi arkhiv starodavnikh aktivu Kyievi. Zbirnyk stattiv (Kyiv 1929)

[This article was updated in 2020.]