Echoes from Russia's Colonial Past: The Pre-revolutionary Files of the Kalmyk National Archive

Dittmar Schorkowitz

Published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg 2023

Echoes from Russia's Colonial Past

The Pre-revolutionary Files of the Kalmyk National Archive

Dittmar Schorkowitz
Funded by: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110984231

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Dittmar Schorkowitz, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale), Germany.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	I
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	VII
List of Figures and Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	IX
Acknowledgements Publicly Available Download PDF	XI
К русскому читателю Publicly Available Download PDF	XIII
1 Introduction Publicly Available Download PDF	XV
2 A Brief Archival History Publicly Available Download PDF	XXI
3 Archival Fonds and Record Books: Description and Inspection Lists Publicly Available Download PDF	XXIII
4 What Numbers Can Tell Us: A Metadata Analysis Publicly Available Download PDF	LXXXVIII
5 References Publicly Available Download PDF	CXI
Volume 1
Archival Inventory
№№ 1- 1889 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
№№ 1890- 3761 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	100
№№ 3762-5772 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	200
№№ 5773- 7909 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	300
№№ 7910- 10497 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	400
Volume 2
Archival Inventory
№№ 10498- 12331 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	529
№№ 12332- 14149 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	629
№№ 14150- 16072 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	729
№№ 16073- 18040 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	829
№№ 18041- 19987 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	929
№№ 19988- 22585 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1029
Volume 3
Archival Inventory
№№ 22586- 24399 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1171
№№ 24400- 26132 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1271
№№ 26133- 27609 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1371
№№ 27610- 30271 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1471
Indices
Subject Index (Предметный указатель) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1605
Place and Ethnic Name Index (Указатель географических и этнических названий) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1649
Personal Name Index (Именной указатель) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1687

(Deutsch)

Languages: English, Russian
Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
Audience: Historians with a focus on Russian history as well as Historical Anthropology, and Archival Studies
Pages
- Front matter: 113
- Main content: 1812
Illustrations
- Coloured Illustrations: 55
Keywords: Russian and Kalmyk history; colonial history; imperial turn; historical and political anthropology.

eBook

Published: January 30, 2023
ISBN: 9783110984231

Hardcover

Published: January 30, 2023
ISBN: 9783110996401