Echoes from Russia's Colonial Past

Covering a large portion of the period from the early seventeenth century to the contemporary era, the Kalmyk National Archive has particularly rich holdings from the pre-revolutionary period, which makes it an outstanding source for historical studies on Russia’s ‘internal colonialism’ at the Empire’s southern frontiers.

Unfortunately, most of this documentation was lost after the revolution and the civil war. Another part of the archive disappeared during WW II or was deliberately destroyed during the subsequent deportation of the Kalmyk people in 1942. Prior to this, the archival funds still numbered about 70,000 complete files. We know this because information about the pre-revolutionary holdings is well-documented in the inventories contained in the archival primary record books and their inspection lists which were created mainly in the late 1930s and early 1940s and still contained the titles of all documents with a special mark next to those that had been lost over time. These old inventories were revised in the late 1990s and became the subject of an updated edition. Unfortunately, in this case, too, all the lost documents were deleted from the new archival inventories. These previous records, which, given the loss of the documents themselves, provided the only historical record of much of Kalmyk and Russian imperial history, have now disappeared.

However, in the mid-1990s I could take copies of the primary inventories, which already then were in a deplorable state. During my archival research in recent years, I began to work with these old archival books in order to describe, inventory and analyse this particular ‘colonial archive’. The results of this work are presented in this publication. Thus, we have a description of the metadata, including the titles of those documents that were either subjected to the horrendous waste campaign of the Soviet era, or were destroyed to erase inconvenient historical truth. In addition to such echoes from the distant and now inaccessible past, this publication presents an up-to-date inventory of pre-revolutionary documents stored to this day in the Kalmyk National Archive.