SUMMARY:

The article treats the history of the Russian State Historical Archive in St. Petersburg as the major repository of documents pertaining to the political history of the Russian empire. A large-scale modern history of this archive has yet to be written, and the author expects such a history to deal with the information space of imperial power, with its political visions and its perceptions of the past. At the same time, the author does not argue for the Archive as a political institution and even less so as a locus of imperial power. Rather, he examines imperial Russia’s patterns of document preservation as bureaucratically motivated, and therefore characteristic of all modern states – be they empires or nation states. The author also rejects the view that the RGIA as the first centralized all-Russian archive, established after the collapse of old Russia by the Bolshevik government, was aimed at producing an “usable past” for the political purposes of the new regime. The article stresses that the RGIA as an institution, as well as the RGIA’s archival policies and principles of preservation, cataloging, and other aspects were results of complex negotiations between the Soviet power and the archivists and researches. The article treats as comparable the loses caused by ideological choices, by natural disasters, or by what the author defines as an archivists’ technological thinking (e.g., to clean up space for new documents, to destroy redundant materials and focus on preservation and study of more valuable documents). In his view, the RGIA remains the major mandatory site for a better imperial history of Russia. The author believes that the major obstacle to the production of this better history is the RGIA’s confused internal organization, including the absence of modern catalogues and electronic indexes that enable scholars to reach the ideal of a “comprehensive source base.” The article concludes with the belief that 6.5 million RGIA documents – were they fully accessible – would give rise to a better history of Russia as an empire.