By Top War
Sources of historical knowledge. The Penza State Archive is not just an institution where old documents are stored. It is a place where history comes to life, where every sheet of paper, every register book and newspaper file tells about the lives of our ancestors. The archive combines modern requirements for document storage and the atmosphere of past eras, attracting researchers, students and simply curious people.
On the wall of the building we are greeted by a memorial plaque to Tatyana Alekseevna Evnevich, a historian, local historian, archivist and director of the State Archives of the Penza Region from 1991 to 2016.
If you make inquiries, you can find out that the initiative to install a memorial sign was put forward by the scientific and creative community of Penza. The memorial plaque itself is a high relief made by the Penza branch of the Union of Artists of Russia, and the author is the Penza sculptor, Honored Artist of Russia Valery Kuznetsov. Inside, you can feel the spirit of the Soviet era: marble tiles in the hall, ornate metal partitions, green plants in pots. The atmosphere here is cozy, you can’t say it any other way!
Painting on the wall of the reading room…
Getting into the archive is not that easy — you need to make an appointment in advance, fill out a request and wait… Because you can’t search for the same family trees every day — there are certain days set aside for this. And on these days, the composition of the “researchers” changes greatly. Grandmas with curls come, almost all in masks, and many in gloves, and start working with thick registers that record births and deaths by village, town, city. But it may also happen that on this very day a business traveler from another city will come to the archive. And he, as they say, has an honor and a place, because who could have foreseen this? And the person may have a dissertation at stake. Whereas for the same old lady… nothing more than a purely personal interest. So although there are not enough seats in the reading room, it also happens that there is always a place for a guest.
A reading room that has everything…
Well, it is clear that the rarest documents, many of which have existed for several centuries, are not so easy to obtain. You need to write down what, why, how, where from… But in principle, you can get everything if it is a serious matter. Well, the most accessible thing in the Penza Regional Archives is the newspapers. There are… well, just a lot of them. Regional, and district, and… all sorts. In first place, of course, is the newspaper “Pravda”. But that was Soviet times. And there is also the newspaper “Gubernskie Vedomosti” from… 1837. To be honest, reading them is not at all interesting. It is not even clear what people read in them back then. Although… here is buying and selling with prices. Here are statistics (for some reason, the newspapers of that time were simply crammed with them), and government decrees on the front page. It became possible to read at least something interesting in this newspaper only after 1864. That’s how! And we are getting a little ahead of ourselves with our story. For now, we have only just climbed the steep stairs to the second floor, where visitors find themselves in a spacious hall with leather chairs and stucco on the windows. This is where the immersion into history begins.
The newspaper “Pravda” with the news about Kirov’s murder. Apparently, his portrait was in the center, but most likely someone cut it out, and the archive workers had to cover the empty rectangle!
From the depths of centuries: how the archive was created
The history of archival work in Russia began with the General Regulations of Peter I (1720), which prescribed that each institution should have an archivist – a specialist in document management. In the Penza province, archival work developed thanks to the efforts of enthusiasts.
The very beginning of the systematic work on collecting and cataloguing archival materials of historical value for the Penza region was laid by the Penza provincial scientific archival commission, which operated from 1901 to 1917, when scientists began collecting important documents for the history of the region. In 1919, a provincial archives department was created, which dealt with the documents of old institutions. In 1922, this department turned into an archival bureau.
After the abolition of the Penza province in 1928, the archival bureau became a district one. Then it changed its name and subordination several times. And only in 1939, after the creation of the Penza region itself, the NKVD archival department appeared…
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