Archives [архіви; arkhivy].
Medieval and early-modern period.
In Kyivan Rus’ the more important documents were preserved in the princely archives or the episcopal archives (of the Church of the Tithes and the Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv), in monasteries (the Kyivan Cave Monastery and Vydubychi Monastery), and probably in private (boyar) archives. During the Lithuanian-Polish period the main depositories of archival documents were the city courts, land courts, and pidkomorski courts as well as the central state collection located in Cracow and known as the Lithuanian Register until 1569 and the Crown Register after the Union of Lublin. Various town and church institutions had their archives, as did individuals, but most of them perished in wars, rebellions, fires, and the like.
In the Hetman state of the 17th–18th century, the first efforts were made to centralize archives in Ukraine. Besides the archives of the various governing institutions of the Zaporozhian Host, from the time of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky the Hetman archive was located in Chyhyryn. Its principal documents were taken to Poland by Hetman Pavlo Teteria (1665) and to Moscow by Petro Doroshenko (1676). The losses of the state archives during the Ruin (1670s) were covered to some extent by the church archives, such as the archive of the Kyivan Cave Monastery. Under hetmans Ivan Samoilovych and Ivan Mazepa the archive of the General Military Chancellery became the central state archive and was overseen by the general secretary.
The archive of Ivan Mazepa’s government was seized and largely destroyed by Aleksandr Menshikov during his sack of Baturyn in 1708. It is possible that some of the more important documents of this archive were taken abroad by Mazepa and found their way into Hetman Pylyp Orlyk’s hands. Even before this a new central state archive attached to the General Military Chancellery was set up in Hlukhiv. Known as the Little Russian General Archive, it had its own archivist during Kyrylo Rozumovsky’s rule. Archivists were usually highly educated individuals—such as Semen Divovych and Mykhailo Tumansky—who were particularly interested in history and literature. The archive suffered extensive losses during the great fires of 1748 and 1784 in Hlukhiv. Remnants of the general archive, along with the archives of various institutions, particularly monasteries, found their way first to the gubernia archive of Novhorod-Siverskyi and then to the archives of Chernihiv, Poltava, and Kyiv.
The 19th and early 20th century
Eventually, in the 19th century, the remnants of the Little Russian General Archive and other Ukrainian institutions were transferred to the archives of Kyiv and Kharkiv, and a part of them was shipped to Russia (where they were kept until the 1920s) or found their way into private collections such as that of Mykola Markevych in Moscow. In the absence of a central state archive in Ukraine, many archival materials were scattered, destroyed, or lost in the 19th century. Some were preserved in the archives of state institutions (administrative, judicial, military, financial, etc); churches and monasteries; civic, estate, and scholarly institutions; private collections; etc. The lack of suitable facilities, funds, and proper care and protection from theft, fire, and atmospheric influences resulted in the loss of many materials, and often of entire important holdings. Furthermore, the centralist policies of the Russian government, beginning with Peter I, were seriously detrimental to the development of Ukrainian archives. Many Ukrainian archival documents were taken from Ukraine on orders from the tsarist government or local authorities and ended up in Russian state archives or in private collections. Only a small part of this material was recovered after the Revolution of 1917.
In the mid-19th century Ukrainian scholars and civic leaders introduced measures to preserve and consolidate old archives. In 1852 the Kyiv Central Archive of Old Documents was established at Kyiv University by the Temporary Commission for the Analysis of Old Documents (later the Kyiv Archeographic Commission). It had several thousand (5,883) books of acts and over 453,000 individual documents, such as city court, land court, and pidkomorskyi court documents and monastery documents from Right-Bank Ukraine of the 16th–18th centuries. The archive employed several prominent Ukrainian scholars, among them Kostiantyn Kozlovsky, Ivan Kamanin, Ivan Novytsky, and Orest Levytsky. The material in the archive was used by the Kyiv Archeographic Commission in the compilation and publication of Arkhiv Iugo-Zapadnoi Rossii (8 parts, 35 vols, 1859–1914) and its other publications. In 1880 a historical archive was set up at Kharkiv University to preserve 17th- and 18th-century documents.
These archives, together with the gubernia learned archival commissions, which were established at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century in Chernihiv (1896–1920), Katerynoslav (1903–19), Poltava (1903–19), and Simferopol (as Tavriia Learned Archival Commission, 1887–1931), made an important contribution to the improvement of archives and the advancement of historical and archeographical research. These commissions published their own scholarly series: Izvestiia Tavricheskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi komissii (57 vols, 1887–1920), Trudy Chernigovskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi komissii (12 vols, 1898–1918), Trudy Poltavskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi komissii (15 vols, 1905–17), and Letopis' Ekaterinoslavskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi komissii (10 vols, 1904–15). The commissions gathered significant collections of valuable historical documents; in particular, in the archive of the Chernihiv commission there were over 20,000 storage units, of the Tavriia commission, over 10,000. The commissions also united a wide circle of scholars (Chernihiv commission, over 150 members in 1915; Tavriia commission, 191 in 1923) and trained a number of prominent historians and archivists (Vasyl Bidnov, Dmytro Doroshenko, Mykola Ernst, Volodymyr Miiakovsky, Vadym Modzalevsky, Yakiv Novytsky, Dmytro Yavornytsky, Nataliia Polonska-Vasylenko, and others).
Ukraine’s struggle for independence (1917–20)
The first attempts to establish a national archival structure through creating a state archival service in Ukraine were made during the period of Ukraine’s struggle for independence (1917–20). These, however, consisted largely of plans that lacked both the time and money for implementation. Under the Central Rada Oleksander Hrushevsky, who headed the library-archives branch of the secretariat (later ministry) of education of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) from September 1917 to April 1918, set out plans for archival development in the fledgling republic—including the establishment of a national archive as a central archival institution as well as the provision of state support for existing regional archives and the creation of new ones. Cultural transformations were hindered by the Bolshevik uprising in Kyiv, the intervention of the Red Army, and then the entry of German-Austrian troops into the city. After the Ukrainian State was established in April 1918 Vadym Modzalevsky, a non-partisan historian from Chernihiv, was put in charge of the archival-library branch of the newly established Chief Administration for Arts and National Culture Affairs under the ministry of people’s education; Hrushevsky co-operated with his efforts to develop a centralized archival system and even participated in drafting the statute for a Ukrainian National Archive in the summer of 1918. Not much of this reform was implemented at the time, but, during this period, the funding for the Kyiv Central Archive of Old Documents was significantly increased, the Regulations on the Archives of the Southwestern Front were developed, and the Kyiv Archeological Institute was opened, where future archivists were supposed to be trained. Modzalevsky retained his position after the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic assumed power in December 1918. After the Directory was forced to leave Kyiv early in February 1919 by the advance of Bolshevik troops toward the capital, it relocated to Kamianets-Podilskyi where it established the Department of Protection of Monuments of Antiquity and Art (headed by the dean of historical-philological faculty at Kamianets-Podilskyi National University Pylyp Klymenko) under the ministry of people’s education. The Department’s task was to save archival and artistic treasures. It published one issue of a special museum-library-archival journal Ukraїns'ka starovyna. At the end of 1919 and the beginning of 1920, the state of archival affairs deteriorated due to the departure of most well-known cultural figures from Kamianets-Podilskyi. Meanwhile, much of Right Bank Ukraine was devastated by hostilities which led to the loss of archival documents.
The interwar period
The first Soviet Ukrainian archival body was the library-archives section of the All-Ukrainian Committee for the Preservation of Ancient and Artistic Monuments, which was formed in Kharkiv in January 1919 and headed initially by Viktor Barvinsky. The section was moved to Kyiv in short order and headed briefly (April–June 1919) by Vadym Modzalevsky. It managed to establish the Ukrainian Chief Archive and house in it the collections of Kyiv institutions that had been closed down. In parallel with state archival institutions, the Communist Party set up the All-Ukrainian Commission for the Study of the History of the October Revolution and the Communist Party with the goal to identify, extract, and organize archival documents on this topic. This later led to the formation of a separate ‘archival fund of the Communist Party of Ukraine’ contrary to the declared goal of creating a single state archival fund in the entire Ukrainian SSR. The transfer of the capital from Kyiv to Kharkiv, which resulted in the de-facto peripheral status of Kyiv institutions, also did not contribute to the formation of a coherent archival system. Responsibility for archival matters was then transferred to the Chief Administration for Archival Matters under one of the branches of the Ukrainian SSR People's Commissariat for Education in July 1919. In turn, it was succeeded by the Chief Archival Administration of the People's Commissariat for Education in September 1921. During this period the responsibility for assessing the historic value of individual archives (and/or various specific holdings) fell to the Special All-Ukrainian Archival Commission, which was active from February 1920 to August 1921. Also, in 1922 a regular system of the gubernia-level archival administrations (hubarkhy) was developed.
The establishment of the Central Archival Administration (Ukrtsentrarkhiv) of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee in January 1923 represented a milestone in archival development in Soviet Ukraine. Active until 1938, Ukrtsentrarkhiv was able to consolidate archival work in the republic and oversee its orderly administration. In the 1920s and 1930s, the archival system consisted of a state body for administering archival affairs (Ukrtsentrarkhiv), central archives (including Kharkiv Central State Historical Archive, Central State Archive of the Revolution (est 1920) in Kharkiv, Kyiv Central Historical Archive (est 1922), and the Kyiv Central Archive of Old Documents), and local (gubernia, county, oblast) archival administrations. Ukrtsentrarkhiv expanded the number of archives in the republic and set up gubernial historical archives. The government’s resolution ‘On the Unified State Archival Fund of the Ukrainian SSR’ (1925) established the state’s jurisdiction over the entire documentary heritage of Ukraine, which further consolidated the archival system. By the late 1930s Soviet Ukraine had a solid network of archival institutions. Ukrtsentrarkhiv published the journal Arkhivna sprava (1926–31), which was succeeded by Radians’kyi arkhiv (1931–2) and then by Arkhiv Radians’koї Ukraїny (1932–3). There were also several information bulletins, including Biuleten’ Ukrtsentrarkhivu (1925–31), Chervonyi arkhivist (1924–5, published by the Kyiv gubernia archive), and Arkhivnyi robitnyk (1926–7, published by the Luhansk gubernia archive). Ukrtsentrarkhiv also made specific efforts, particularly in the 1920s, to assist in upgrading the qualifications of archival workers in Ukraine.
Administrative territorial division changes required some redefinition of local or regional archival administrative bodies in 1925, when the gubernias were abolished and restructured along okruha lines, and in 1932, when the okruha system was abandoned in favor of oblasts. The earlier nine gubernia archival bodies were replaced first with 40 okruha (in reality, only 28 of them actually functioned), and then seven oblast archival administrations that began organizing oblast historical, county, and municipal state archives. The network of state archives was supplemented in 1926 by the Central Labor Archive, created to store the fonds of central trade union organizations. Following the resolutions of the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Archival Workers of 1926 regional historical archives were established in Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, Poltava, Kharkiv, and Chernihiv to store documents from the liquidated gubernia and county institutions. In 1928 Ukrtsentrarkhiv set up the Archeographic Commission. Aside from publishing archival materials, it also had an ideological role: to promote a ‘materialist understanding of history’ and to highlight the ‘class struggle in the history of Ukraine’ in its publications. Nonetheless it published a number of valuable archival inventories, descriptions, and catalogues, including a pioneering guide to the Kyiv Central Archive of Old Documents edited by Viktor Romanovsky (1929) and the ‘elementary textbook’ on archival science (1932). The local branches of the Archeographic Commission were opened in Kyiv and Odesa (which prepared and published an inventory of the Archive of the Kish of the New Zaporozhian Sich in 1931). An important achievement of Ukrtsentrarkhiv was the creation in 1930 of the first scholarly institution in the field of archival affairs: the Cabinet of Archival Studies. It was engaged in the development of methods for the preservation and restoration of archival documents, the theory of archival inventorying, the design of archive buildings, and the creation of a scientific reference library. The network of central archival institutions was expanded in the 1930s by adding the All-Ukrainian Central Archive of Ancient Acts, created on the basis of the Kharkiv Central State Historical Archive, the Kyiv Oblast Historical Archive, reorganized in 1932 from the Kyiv Central Historical Archive (est 1922).
During the years of Stalinist terror archives and archivists in Ukraine suffered the same fate as other Soviet Ukrainian institutions and individuals involved in scholarly activity. Spetsfondy, the special depositories established in 1931, limited access to many significant collections. Moreover, a major purge of archive workers began early in 1933, resulting in the dismissal of numerous experienced people and their replacement with more politically compliant personnel. This also led to the decline of the movement of the so-called archival correspondents, i.e., members of local intelligentsia who helped identify and rescue lost and endangered archival documents. Fittingly, in April 1938 control over Ukraine’s archival network was handed over to the Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR. In March 1939 control over Ukrainian archives were delegated to the republic’s NKVD security service. On 29 March 1941 the central government adopted the resolution about the reorganization of state archives, which presupposed the creation of Central State Historical Archive (TsDIA) of the Ukrainian SSR. Its opening, however, was postponed until the end of 1943 due to the outbreak of the Second World War.
In Western Ukraine during the interwar period archives were supervised by the authorities of the states that incorporated its territory after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918— Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. The administration of archives in Polish-ruled Galicia followed the decree on the establishment and oversight of state archives issued by the Polish government on 7 February 1919. The newly created State Archives Department provided scientific and technical supervision of municipal and communal archives, ensured document protection, and developed regulations governing the acquisition, storage, and use of archival materials. The department oversaw the State Archive of Lviv (est 1908) and the Lviv magistrate’s Archive of Ancient Documents that had been founded in the mid-thirteenth century. Between 1913 and 1939 the State Archive was headed by the prominent Ukrainian and Polish archivist Yevhen Barvinsky. When in November 1939 the Soviet authorities established the Central Archive of Ancient Documents in Lviv, it incorporated the holdings of several existing Lviv archives, including the Archive of Ancient Documents of Lviv (magistrate), State Archive in Lviv, Land Archive, as well as a number of departmental, corporate, and private collections.
The archives of Romanian-ruled Bukovyna sustained major losses during the First World War and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Commission of State Archives of Bukovyna (1924–38) subsequently played a key role in rebuilding the region’s archival system by consolidating documents and organizing the district archive. This archive incorporated Austrian administrative and court documents, as well as older documents dating from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. In 1938 the Chernivtsi Regional Directorate of State Archives was established, overseeing archival operations until 1940, when the territory became part of the Ukrainian SSR. The new authorities opened the Chernivtsi Oblast Historical Archive, which during the next few years of Romanian and German occupation (1941–44) lost 600,000 storage units.
After its incorporation into Czechoslovakia, the archives of Transcarpathia were placed under the administration of autonomous Subcarpathian Ruthenia, which sought to consolidate the region’s archival materials into a single institution—the Regional Archive of Subcarpathian Ruthenia which existed in 1919–39. Dedicated premises were assigned to the archive in the late 1920s. The archive later sustained substantial losses during the Second World War. After the region’s incorporation into the Ukrainian SSR in 1945, the new authorities established the Central State Historical Archive of Transcarpathian Ukraine. It was based on the former county (komitat) archives and included documents of various institutions of Transcarpathia.
The Second World War
The beginning of the Soviet-German war in 1941 spelled a disaster for Ukrainian archives. In 1941–3 the Ukrainian SSR archival administration was evacuated from the country, but many holdings were left behind. The Soviet central government ordered to destroy all valuables, including archival documents that could not be evacuated. Plans for the evacuation of archives were being developed, but their criteria were questionable, as there was no clear definition of ‘particularly valuable and unique documents.’ Documents of exceptional historical importance that could not be evacuated were allowed to be left in place, dispersed across storage facilities and collections. By October 1941, around 60 train carriages full of documents of 6,500 fonds were evacuated, but countless invaluable documents were left behind in occupied Kyiv. There was a massive destruction of archival buildings and collections during the fighting. For instance, Kyiv Central Archive of Old Documents (KTsADA) lost two-thirds of its holdings, and all its buildings were destroyed. The Nazi occupation authorities created a special body, the Regional Administration of Archives, Libraries, and Museums within Reichskommissariat Ukraine, tasked with finding archival valuables and transporting them to Germany. KTsADA continued to operate during the Nazi occupation in 1941–43 under the name of the Antonovych Central Historical Archive. In September 1943, thousands of old books of acts from the 16th–18th centuries were taken from the Kyiv archives to Kamianets-Podilskyi, as well as other valuable documents from KTsADA, the Poltava Oblast Archive, and artefacts from Kyiv and Poltava museums. All these looted materials ended up in the archival center in Troppau, Silesia (now the city of Opava, Czech Republic).
In November 1943 the State Archival Administration of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR returned to Kyiv, and on 1 December the Central State Archive of the October Revolution and Socialist Construction of the Ukrainian SSR (TsDAZhR) (now Central State Archive of Higher Organs of Government and Administration of Ukraine), the Central State Historical Archive (TsDIA) of the Ukrainian SSR (see Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Kyiv), and the Central State Archive of Film, Photo, and Audio Documents of the Ukrainian SSR (see Central State Film, Photo, and Sound Archive) resumed work in Kyiv, while in Kharkiv the branches of two Kyiv archives (TsDAZhR and TsDIA) started operating.
Postwar Soviet Ukraine
In 1947 the State Archival Administration of the Ukrainian SSR was subordinated to People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. By this time the archival administration had taken over or established a number of institutions in the country’s expanded western reaches. It established the Central State Historical Archive in Lviv in 1944 (see Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Lviv), as a branch of TsDIA in Kyiv (see Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Kyiv), on the basis of the earlier State Archive (est 1912 on the basis of an even earlier archive) as well the so-called Bernardine Archives (est 1784 as a repository for court and administrative records). The Chernivtsi Oblast State Archive was set up in 1947 on the basis of the Bukovynian Regional Provincial Archives, established in 1907 as a central repository for the papers in Bukovyna. The Transcarpathia State Archive was established in Uzhhorod as a completely new institution, although it incorporated municipal records that had been kept in Berehove and Uzhhorod from as early as the 13th–14th centuries. At the same time, a number of archives were liquidated: in Kharkiv, the Central State Historical Archive and the Central Labor Archive, whose fonds were transferred to the branches of TsDAZhR, and the Central Archive of the Revolution, whose fonds were transferred to TsDIA; in Kyiv, Lviv, and Kharkiv, central archives of old documents, whose documents were incorporated into TsDIA and its branches in Lviv and Kharkiv. The return of Ukrainian archives continued until 1946, when the bulk of documents were returned from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and the RSFSR. The lack of space for archives often led to their location in the premises of religious buildings, e.g., a former Catholic church (Stanislav Oblast State Archive in today’s Ivano-Frankivsk), a synagogue (Melitopol branch of the Zaporizhia Oblast State Archive), or an Orthodox church (Chernivtsi Oblast State Archive).
In postwar years, the main center for training archivists was Kyiv University, where department of archival studies was opened in 1944, followed by the archival graduate school. Publishing of archival periodicals resumed in 1947 with Naukovo-informatsiinyi biuleten' Arkhivnoho upravlinnia URSR, which for a long time remained the only printed organ of the archival system. The archives administration in Soviet Ukraine was reorganized after 1960, when it became the Archival Administration (Chief Archival Administration from 1974) of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR. This period saw the establishment of several important new repositories (including the Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art of the Ukrainian SSR in 1966 and the Central State Archive of Scientific-Technical Documentation of the Ukrainian SSR in 1969 [see Central State Scientific-Technical Archive]); the transfer of the Central State Museum of the October Revolution from Kharkiv to Kyiv in 1970; the transformation of the TsDIA branch in Lviv into a separate TsDIA of the Ukrainian SSR in Lviv (see Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Lviv); the creation of municipal state archives in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Sevastopol with a permanent collection of documents; and the founding of Arkhivy Ukraïny as a journal (since 1966). During the 1970s, the material conditions of the archival system improved significantly. For example, between 1971 and 1991, new premises were built for multiple archives, including the Central State Archive of Film, Photo, and Audio Documents of the Ukrainian SSR (see Central State Film, Photo, and Sound Archive) in Kyiv and a number of oblast state archives: Volhynia (Lutsk), Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Kirovohrad, Luhansk, Crimea, Rivne, and Khmelnytsky. At the same time, there was a strengthening of ideological dictate in the research topics and forms of use of archival information. For instance, publications of sources on the history of the Zaporozhian Sich, the diary of Ukrainian lawyer Oleksander Kistiakovsky, and a collection of documents about the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, which had already been prepared for publication, were excluded from the TsDIA’s publishing plan as ‘irrelevant.’
Independent Ukraine
In 1992 the Supreme Archival Administration of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine assumed command of the archives system in independent Ukraine. It was restructured into the State Committee on Archives of Ukraine in 1999 and into the State Archival Service of Ukraine in 2010. In the period immediately following the 1991 Ukraine’s Declaration of Independence, archives in Ukraine were thrown into chaos as a result of substantial cuts to their budgets, and there have been ongoing concerns about Ukraine’s ability to maintain its archives in conformity with the standards. At the same time, the archives in independent Ukraine have been made openly accessible (in contrast to the Soviet period), and many Ukrainian archivists have subscribed to an ethos in which they see their work as part of a nation-building process. Since 1992 the head archivists of Ukraine have been Borys Ivanenko (1989–96), Nina Kystruska (1996–98), Ruslan Pyrih (1998–2002), Hennadii Boriak (2002–6), Olha Hinzburg (2006–8, 2009–14), Oleksandr Udod (2008–9), Tetiana Baranova (2014–19), and Anatolii Khromov (since 2019). During this period, several state central archives were reorganized and several new specialized archives were opened on the basis of the existing archives of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, the Ministry of Interior of Ukraine, the Security Service of Ukraine, and the Fund of State Property of Ukraine. These archives are subordinated to the State Archival Service of Ukraine in organizational and methodological terms.
All archival documents, regardless of their type, place of creation, and form of ownership—as long as they are stored on the territory of Ukraine, reflect the history of the spiritual and material life of the Ukrainian people and other peoples, and have cultural value—constitute the National Archival Fund of Ukraine (according to the 2001 Law on the National Archival Fund of Ukraine and Archival Institutions). The National Archival Fund of Ukraine has 59,004,415 storage units on paper and 1,638,772 units of audiovisual and electronic documents that are stored in state archives, archival departments of state scientific institutions of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and archival departments of raion state administrations and city councils. A further 41.7 million storage units of the National Archival Fund of Ukraine are stored in the archival departments of various public institutions, manuscript departments of museums and libraries, private archival collections, and archival institutions founded by individuals or legal entities under private law. As of 2025, the total number of documents of the National Archival Fund, stored in archival institutions and collections of all levels, subordinations, and types of ownership, including all media, is over 102 million storage units. Among state archives, the single largest collection of documents of the National Archival Fund of Ukraine is in the Lviv-based State Archive of Lviv Oblast that stores a total of over 2.5 million items. Among the oldest documents in state archives is a debt letter written on a birch bark dating from the 12th century (the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Lviv) and a Greek Gospel on parchment from the 13th century (the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Kyiv). The oldest documents of the National Archival Fund are clay tablets dating back to the 3rd millennium BC and the Kyiv Glagolitic folios of the late 9th–10th century (both stored in the Institute of Manuscripts of the National Library of Ukraine)
The State Archival Service of Ukraine oversees the work of 2,284 institutions which in 2023 employed over 3,466 archivists (2,796 females and 670 males). These include seven national-level archives (the Central State Archive of Higher Organs of Government and Administration (TsDAVO), the Central State Archive of Civic Alliances and Ukrainica (TsDAHOU), the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Kyiv (TsDIAK), the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Lviv (TsDIAL), the Central State Audiovisual and Electronic Archive (TsDAEA), the Central State Scientific-Technical Archive (TsDNTA), and the Central State Archive-Museum of Literature and Art (TsDAMLM); 24 regional archives in every oblast as well as a separate Crimean archive; 2 municipal state archives in Kyiv and Sevastopol; 468 archival departments (sectors) of raion state administrations; 134 archival departments (sectors) of municipal councils; 12 specialized archives and 1,628 labor archives created at municipal, raion, village, and settlement councils; and 2 scientific research institutes (Ukrainian Scientific Research Institute of Archival Affairs and Record Keeping [UNDIASD] and Research, Design, and Technological Institute of Micrography).
With the beginning of the Russian invasion of the Crimea and Donbas in 2014, Ukraine has lost several large archival collections on occupied territories, including the State Archive of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (1,473,322 storage units on all media as of 2014), the State Archive of Sevastopol (241,163 storage units), the State Archive of Donetsk Oblast (1,969,814 storage units), and the State Archive of Luhansk Oblast (1,519,732 storage units). More losses followed the outbreak of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, including a severe damage to the Chernihiv archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (where the majority of non-digitalized documents on the repression in the USSR were lost) and the looting of the State Archive of Kherson Oblast by Russian occupiers (half of all documents pertaining to the history of the region dating back to the late 18th century—around 360,000 storage units—were taken to the occupied Crimea). Some of the destroyed and looted documents had been digitalized and can be restored. In addition, dozens of labor archives and archival departments of raion state administrations found themselves on the newly occupied territories of Kherson oblast, Zaporizhia oblast, Donetsk oblast, and Luhansk oblast.
Outside of the state archival system, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine also oversees several major manuscript repositories, including the Kyiv-based National Library of Ukraine, the Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and the Lviv-based Lviv National Scientific Library of Ukraine. Individual archives publish or co-publish multiple collections of documents. The State Archival Service of Ukraine publishes the journal Arkhivy Ukraїny (344 vols, 1947–). Other national archival periodicals include the yearbook Studiї z arkhivnoї spravy ta dokumentoznavstva (27 vols, 1996-2019) and Biuleten' Haluzevoї sluzhby naukovo-tekhnichnoї informatsiї z arkhivnoї spravy ta dokumentoznavstva (37 vols, 2001–22). Many archives have digitalized specialized inventories for their collections, as well as a growing number of fonds that are available on individual archives’ official websites. The State Archival Service of Ukraine through its website (https://archives.gov.ua/) provides a broad range of information on archival matters in addition to links to individual Ukrainian archival sites. It also provides the selection of digitalized documents titled ‘The Unique Documents of the National Archival Fund of Ukraine’ (https://archives.gov.ua/?uniq=1&s=) stored in Ukraine’s national archives. Its Inter-Archival Search Portal (https://searcharchives.net.ua/) offers a single access window to digital resources of Ukrainian archives.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Grimsted, P.K. Archives and Manuscript Repositories in the USSR: Ukraine and Moldova (Princeton, NJ 1988)
Koval', O.; Matiash, I.; Shandra, V. Ukraïns'ki arkhivisty: Biobibliohrafichnyi dovidnyk. Vol 1: XIX st.–1930-ti rr. (Kyiv 1999)
Matiash, I. Ukraïns'ka arkhivna periodyka 1920–1930-kh rr.: Istoriia, bibliohrafiia, bibliometriia (Kyiv 1999)
Altukhova, O. et al (comps); Onyshchenko, O. et al (eds). Arkhivni ustanovy Ukraïny (Kyiv 2000)
Matiash, I. Arkhivna nauka i osvita v Ukraïni 1920–1930-kh rokiv (Kyiv 2000)
Grimsted, P.K. Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II, and the International Politics of Restitution (Cambridge, Mass. 2001)
Matiash, I. Osoba v ukraïns'kii arkhivistytsi (Kyiv 2001)
Matiash, I.; Klymova, K. Narysy istoriï arkhivnoï spravy v Ukraïni (Kyiv 2002)
Bolotenko, G. “Frost on the Walls in Winter: Russian and Ukrainian Archives since the Great Dislocation,” The American Archivist, vol 66 (Fall/Winter 2003)
Arkhivni ustanovy Ukraïny: Dovidnyk. Vol 1: Derzhavni arkhivy. 2nd ed. (Kyiv 2005) https://undiasd.archives.gov.ua/doc/Archivni_ustanovy_Ukrainy_1.pdf
Ukraїns'ki arkhivisty (XIX–XX st.): Biobibliohrafichnyi dovidnyk (Kyiv 2007)
https://undiasd.archives.gov.ua/doc/Ukrainski_arkhivisty_XIXXX_st.pdf
Natsional'nyi reiestr vtrachenykh ta peremishchenykh arkhivnykh fondiv. Vol 1: Arkhivni fondy Ukraїny vtracheni v period Druhoї svitovoї viiny (Kyiv 2007) https://undiasd.archives.gov.ua/doc/reestr%20vtrachenux-1.pdf
Natsional'nyi reiestr vtrachenykh ta peremishchenykh arkhivnykh fondiv. Vol 2: Arkhivni fondy, vyvezeni za mezhi Ukraїny u 1945–1991 rokakh (Kyiv 2008) https://undiasd.archives.gov.ua/doc/reestr%20vtrachenux-2.pdf
Ukraїns'ka arkhivna entsyklopediia (Kyiv 2008)
Arkhivna Ukraїnika v Kanadi: Dovidnyk (Kyiv 2010) https://undiasd.archives.gov.ua/doc/AUC.pdf
Arkhivni ustanovy Ukraïny: Dovidnyk. Vol 2: Naukovi ustanovy, muzeї, biblioteky. Book 1: Natsional'na akademiia nauk Ukraїny, Avtonomna Respublika Krym, Vinnyts'ka, Volyns'ka, Dnipropetrovs'ka, Donets'ka, Zhytomyrs'ka, Zakarpats'ka, Zaporiz'ka, Ivano-Frankivs'ka, Kyїvs'ka, Kirovohrads'ka, Luhans'ka, L'vivs'ka, Mykolaїvs'ka, Odes'ka oblasti (Kyiv 2010) https://undiasd.archives.gov.ua/doc/Arkhivni_ustanovy_Ukrainy.pdf
Arkhivni ustanovy Ukraïny: Dovidnyk. Vol 2: Naukovi ustanovy, muzeї, biblioteky. Book 2: Poltavs'ka, Rivnens'ka, Sums'ka, Ternopil's'ka, Kharkivs'ka, Khersons'ka, Khmel'nyts'ka, Cherkas'ka, Chernivets'ka, Chernihivs'ka oblasti, mista Kyїv ta Sevastopol' (Kyiv 2012) https://undiasd.archives.gov.ua/doc/Arkhivni_ustanovy_Ukrainy_2-2.pdf
Archives of Ukraine: Guide Book (Kyiv 2012) https://undiasd.archives.gov.ua/doc/Archives%20of%20Ukraine%20Guidebook%202012.pdf
Arkhivna ukraїnika u federal'nykh arkhivakh Rosiї: reiestr arkhivnykh fondiv (Kyiv 2013) https://undiasd.archives.gov.ua/doc/ArkyUkrFRF_2013.pdf
Andrii Makuch, Serhiy Bilenky
[This article was updated in 2026.]