Kyiv Central Archive of Old Documents

Kyiv Central Archive of Old Documents (Київський центральний архів давніх актів, or КЦАДА; Kyivskyi Tsentralnyi arkhiv davnikh aktiv, or KTsADA). An archive founded 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, charters, and archives from Right-Bank Ukraine. Consequently, all local institutions that kept books of acts (aktovi knyhy) were instructed to compile descriptions of them and send them to Kyiv. During 1852–54, the archive received 5,833 books of acts and over 453,000 individual documents from past centuries up to 1799 from district courts, treasury chambers, city magistrates, and other institutions of 25 cities and towns of Kyiv gubernia, Volhynia gubernia, and Podilia gubernia. In the following years, the archive received 50 books of acts from local imperial institutions, and 1,598 documents from the Kyiv Archeografic Commission. Other documents were received from Kyiv gubernial institutions, in particular the Kyiv Treasury Chamber and Kyiv Provincial Chancellery (over 8,500 civil and 85,000 criminal cases, mainly from the administration and courts of the eighteenth-century Hetman state). Another group of documents came from the Chernihiv Treasury Chamber and included documents on monastery estates secularized in 1786. From the 1880s, the KTsADA was divided into three departments: a) the main complex—old record books; b) individual documents (numbering more than 456,000); and c) fonds of the institutions of the Hetman state in the eighteenth century, mainly from the Kyiv region.

The KTsADA was subordinate to the Ministry of Public Education in Saint Petersburg and the board of the Kyiv Educational District, and was under the supervision of Kyiv governor-general who presided over Kyiv gubernia, Volhynia gubernia, and Podilia gubernia. The archive was directly subordinate to the board of Kyiv University and was located on the university premises. It was managed by the head of the university library—a librarian, who was also considered an archivist. In 1892 the KTsADA was declared an independent unit within the university and in 1903 it was removed from the subordination of the head librarian. It was now headed by the archivist, with the help of secretary and two assistants and scribes-copyists.

The archive employed several prominent scholars for the description of old books of acts, among them Ivan Kamanin, Orest Levytsky, Kostiantyn Kozlovsky, and Ivan Novytsky. By the mid-1890s, they and their colleagues painstakingly described 90 books of acts, of which 44 were printed. Their work on the oldest books of acts of the sixteenth century and books of the Kyiv voivodeship of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was particularly important. The material in the archive was used by the Kyiv Archeographic Commission for the compilation and publication of Arkhiv Iugo-zapadnoi Rossii (8 parts, 35 vols, 1859–1914) as well as other publications. A number of volumes were compiled by Kamanin, Kozlovsky, and Novytsky, who, in addition, compiled name and geographical indexes to the 27 volumes of the Arkhiv.

During Ukraine’s struggle for independence (1917–20), KTsADA employees, and especially Ivan Kamanin (director from 1890 to 1921), participated in the development of an archival system for Ukraine; in particular, they took part in the drafting of theoretical principles of archival reform and for the creation of a national archive. During that time, KTsADA acquired new collections, including church metric books from Pidolia from the 16th to 18th centuries and documents from the 14th to 18th centuries (385 acts) gathered by the Kyiv Archeographic Commission. In order so that it can focus on archival activities, on 8 February 1919 KTsADA was transferred from Kyiv University to the jurisdiction of the state organ—the Main Department for Arts and National Culture (established by the Hetman government of Pavlo Skoropadsky). From 1921 to 1923 the archive was under the jurisdiction of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and after that, under the Central Archival Administration of the Ukrainian SSR.

From 1928 KTsADA had the following structure: a) department of old record books, charters, and other documents of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (5,938 books of acts of more than 60 institutions); b) department of collections and private fonds (such as the Branicki family archive and fond of the Historical Society of Nestor the Chronicler); and c) department of archival fonds of institutions of the Kyiv region of the 17th–18th centuries (more than 160 fonds related to the Hetman state and the Russian tsarist government in Ukraine, including fonds of the General Military Chancellery, the Little Russian Collegium, and the General Military Court). In 1932 it was renamed the All-Ukrainian Central Archive of Ancient Acts in Kyiv.

The interwar years were marked by Stalinist terror and repressions. Dismissals and arrests of employees of the archive took place in 1928 and 1932, and at the beginning of 1934 the entire staff of the archive was dismissed (including its director Oleksander Ohloblyn). The archival system lost the entire generation of theorists and practitioners of archival work as purges of archivists also took place in oblast historical archives in Poltava, Dnipropetrovsk, and Chernihiv. In 1939, the Central Archival Administration was reorganized into the Archives Department of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR, which further enhanced the supervision by state security apparatus over archival work. Nonetheless, the registration and description of archival documents continued. As of 1941, the archive contained 456 fonds and 486,061 files (sprav), of which 18,300 remained uncatalogued. During the 1920s and 1930s, a system of directories that described the content of collections was created at KTsADA (most of them by the staff dismissed in 1934). Among them was the first ever archival guide in Ukraine: Tsentral'nyi arkhiv starodavnikh aktiv u Kyievi: Zbirnyk stattiv (Central Archive of Ancient Acts in Kyiv: A Collection of Articles, 1929), compiled by Viktor Romanovsky, a prominent archivist and KTsADA’s director in 1922–31 who was arrested by the Soviet authorities several times (in 1923, 1928, 1932, and 1934). Despite recurrent harassment of the archive’s staff, its major achievement was the completion of inventories (opysy) for almost all fonds, historical references about fonds, thematic indexes to a number of inventories, reviews of fonds, and geographical and name indexes to inventories of old books of acts printed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Under Romanovsky’s leadership, KTsADA carried conservation (restoration) of documents both on paper and on parchment, primarily documents dating from the 16th and 17th centuries. The oldest document restored at that time was the charter of Grand Duke Alexander I of Lithuania for 1489. Chronologically, the documents preserved in the archive covered the periods of the Lithuanian-Ruthenian state, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Cossack Hetman state, and the Russian Empire.

During the Second World War, many of the documents were destroyed and part of the archive was taken by the Germans to the West. Abandoned by the retreating Soviet authorities in Kyiv, KTsADA lost two-thirds of its holdings. The Kyiv University building that housed the archive was completely destroyed; archival documents stored in two nearby churches were looted and partially destroyed. In fact, only those documents that ended up outside Kyiv during the war survived: primarily those taken by the Nazis in 1943, on the eve of the Soviet Army’s recapture of the city, to the archival center in Troppau (now the city of Opava in the Czech Republic). There is still debate whether any documents had been evacuated by the Soviet administration to the hinterland but, as of today, no evidence of such evacuation exists. In 1944–46, about 2,000 books of acts and fonds of Hetman state institutions and a number of private collections of KTsADA were returned from Czechoslovakia. Unfortunately, two-thirds of the books of acts (almost 4,000 out of 6,000) from Right-Bank Ukraine dating from the 16th to 18th centuries have never been recovered. This was arguably the biggest loss of Ukrainian archives during Second World War.

In December 1943, in the wake of the massive reorganization of Soviet archives, KTsADA was abolished (at that time it had neither its own home nor collections). In the next few years, its surviving collections—those returned from Czechoslovakia—which amounted to one-third of its prewar fund, were transferred to the newly established Central State Historical Archive of the Ukrainian SSR in Kyiv (now Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Kyiv).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Romanovs'kyi, V. (ed). Tsentral'nyi arkhiv starodavnikh aktiv u Kyievi. Zbirnyk stattiv (Kyiv 1929)
Grimsted Kennedy, Patricia. Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II, and the International Politics of Restitution (Cambridge 2001)
Kyivs'kyi tsentral'nyi arkhiv davnikh aktiv, 1852–1943: Zbirbyk dokumentiv, vol. 1: 1852–1921 (Kyiv 2002)
‘Dolia Kyїvs'koho tsentral'noho arkhivu davnikh aktiv u Druhii Svitovii viini: potriina trahediia – nyshchennia, pohrabuvannia, propahanda,’ Arkhivy Ukraїny no. 4–6 (2002)
Histsova, L. ‘Kyїvs'kyi Tsentral'nyi arkhiv davnikh aktiv (1917–1941),’ Arkhivy Ukraїny no. 4–6 (2002)
Natsional'nyi reiestr vtrachenykh ta peremishchenykh arkhivnykh fondiv. Vol. 1: Arkhivni fondy Ukraїny, vtracheni v period Druhoї svitovoї viiny (Kyiv 2007)

Serhiy Bilenky

[This article was updated in 2025.]