Central State Audiovisual and Electronic Archive (Центральний державний аудіовізуальний та електронний архів or ЦДАЕА; Tsentralnyi derzhavnyi audiovizualnyi ta elektronnyi arkhiv or TsDAEA); formerly known as H. S. Pshenychny Central State Film, Photo, and Sound Archive of Ukraine. The central Ukrainian state repository for non-textual historical records, including film, photography, video, and sound recordings, located in Kyiv and functioning under the auspices of the State Archival Service of Ukraine. It was established in 1932 under the name All-Ukrainian Central Photo-Film Archive as a repository for audiovisual documentation. In prewar years, the collections were replenished almost exclusively with photographic documents (by 1 January 1941 it had approximately 117,000 items). In 1940, for the first time, the archive received film documents totaling about 200 items (50,430 meters of film). The archive was not evacuated following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and a large part of its holdings went missing or were destroyed; a substantial portion was recovered after the Second World War in finds in Vienna (over 17,000 items) and near Dresden (some 50,000 items), but still about half the archive’s materials had been lost. At the same time, the archive collection was replenished with captured German newsreels (series Wochenschau) and films about military operations, the occupation regime on the territory of Ukraine, and the working conditions of Soviet citizens deported to Germany as Ostarbeiter. It also received photo documents (more than 30 photo albums) from the collection of the Ukrainian Cabinet of History in Prague. Among them were photo albums illustrating the history of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen and two family albums of the poet Olena Teliha. In December 1943 the archive was reconstituted as the Central State Archive of Film, Photo, and Phonographic Documents of the Ukrainian SSR. The archive was then headed for 25 years (1943–78) by H. Pshenychny. In 1992 it was given the name Central State Film, Photo, and Sound Archive of Ukraine (TsDKFFA), to which Pshenychny’s own name was added in 1998. In addition, in 1997 the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, Germany, returned an additional 3,000 photographs (positive copies from photo negatives on glass) and 30 documentary films which had been captured during the Second World War. They reflect the life in Ukraine in the 1920s–30s. In 2022 the TsDKFFA merged with the Central State Electronic Archive of Ukraine (est. 2007) and has assumed its current name.

The archive’s collection includes over 460,000 documents related to film, photography, sound and video recording, which recreate events of national and world history from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, including the Ukrainian struggle for independence (1917–20), First World War, interwar period, Second World War, and independent Ukraine after 1991. The film division of the archive has more than 12,000 individual titles with a total of over 62,000 rolls of documentary film. These have been gathered from the major producers of film in Ukraine, including the Kyiv Studio of Chronicle-Documentary Films, the Dovzhenko Film Studios in Kyiv, the Kyiv Studio for Popular Science Films, and the State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting. In 1998 TsDKFFA also began archiving video materials. Mostly these are releases of information programs of national TV channels: 1+1, ICTV, Inter, First National, STB, Channel 5, etc. The photographic collection has over 380,000 individual items, while the sound archives hold over 21,000 tapes and phonographic records. In each division the holdings date back to the earliest days of their respective media—the 1890s for film, the 1850s for photographs, and the early 20th century for sound recordings—although the majority of the collection in each field consists of post-Second World War material. The earliest documents in the archive are film footage of the coronation of Russian Emperor Nicholas II (1896), The 200th Anniversary of the Battle of Poltava (1909), The Flights of Aviator S. Utochkin in Kishinev (1911), and the film The Funeral of A.N. Tereshchenko (1912); reproductions of photo portraits of Taras Shevchenko (from the late 1850s), participants in the defense of Sevastopol during the Crimean War of 1853–56, an album of photographs with views of Kyiv in the second half of the 19th century, the first original photo negative on glass (1898), which records the construction of the blast furnace of the metallurgical plant Union in Makiivka; and a priceless collection of gramophone records produced in Riga by Zonophone Record of the joint-stock company Gramophone and the German companies Stella Record, Beka Record, and Favorite Record (1900–14). There are preserved sound recordings of the luminaries of the Ukrainian music scene: Ivan Patorzhynsky, Mariia Lytvynenko-Volgemut, Ivan Kozlovsky, Zoia Haidai, Mykhailo Hryshko, Anatolii Solovianenko, and others.

The TsDAEA has prepared a series of annotated catalogues of its collections that are available online at its official website: https://tsdaea.archives.gov.ua/kinolitopysy-3/.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Grimstead, P. Archives and Repositories in the USSR: Ukraine and Moldavia (Princeton, NJ 1988)
Tsentralnyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotofonodokumentov Ukrainskoi SSR (Kyiv 1988)
‘Tsentral'nyi derzhavnyi kinofotofonoarkhiv Ukraїny im. H.S. Pshenychnoho (TsDKFFA Ukraїny imeni H.S. Pshenychnoho.’ Arkhivni ustanovy Ukraïny: Dovidnyk, vol. 1: Derzhavni arkhivy. 2d ed. (Kyiv 2005)
Tsentral'nyi derzhavnyi kinofotofonoarkhiv Ukraїny im. H.S. Pshenychnoho (Kyiv 2011) 

Serhiy Bilenky

[This article was updated in 2026.]