History of the formation of the fund "Office of the Mykolaiv military governor"

Abstract

This study examines the history of the formation of the fond & laquo;Office of the Mykolaiv Military Governor & raquo; as one of the most important archival complexes for the study of the administrative, military, and socio-economic history of South-ern Ukraine in the nineteenth century. Particular attention is given to the insti-tutional circumstances of the fond's emergence, its archival transmission, losses, rearrangements, and the gradual shaping of its present composition in the State Archive of the Mykolaiv Region and the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Kyiv. The article addresses the insufficiently explored problem of how politi-cal upheavals, imperial and Soviet archival policies, wartime destruction, and postwar archival practices affected the preservation and structure of this docu-mentary complex. The relevance of the research lies in the need to reconstruct the archival history of the fond not only as a technical issue of record-keeping, but also as an important component of source studies and the history of archival institutions in Ukraine. The scientific novelty of the article consists in the inte-grated reconstruction of the fond's formation on the basis of internal archival documentation, including fond files, inventories, acts, reports, and administrative correspondence, a substantial part of which has not previously been introduced into wider scholarly circulation. The study also clarifies the relationship between the Mykolaiv and Kyiv segments of the same archival complex and explains the historical circumstances under which part of the records was separated and transferred to another repository. The purpose of the article is to reconstruct the main stages in the formation of the fond, to identify the factors that influenced its preservation and reorganisation, and to determine the historical conditions that shaped its present structure. Drawing on materials from the State Archive of the Mykolaiv Region and the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Kyiv, the research combines the principles of historicism, systematic analysis, and objectivity with archival and source-study approaches. The author applies his-torical-genetic and historical-typological methods, document analysis, and ele-ments of content analysis in order to trace both the institutional development of the record-creating body and the subsequent archival fate of its documentation. The article demonstrates that the fond was formed under the influence of several successive and often destructive processes, including the development of admin-istrative institutions in Mykolaiv, the functioning of municipal and departmental archives, the transfer of part of the records to the Black Sea Central Naval Ar-chive, the losses caused by the & laquo;paper famine & raquo; of the 1920s and 1930s, wartime damage during the Second World War, evacuation and re-evacuation, and post-war scientific and technical processing. Particular attention is paid to the secret section of the records, which was later incorporated into fond no. 356 in Kyiv. The study confirms that the history of the fond's formation was complex and mul-ti-layered, and that its current composition reflects not a single act of archival accumulation, but a long process of institutional change, fragmentation, preser-vation efforts, and repeated reorganisation. Despite substantial losses, the fond has retained exceptional value as a source for the study of governance, policing, urban life, and broader social processes in Southern Ukraine. The article also shows that recent digitisation initiatives have significantly expanded access to this documentary heritage and created new prospects for its preservation and scholarly use