Издан сборник архивных документов «Владимирская губерния и Российская революция в документах 1913–1918 гг.», посвященный 100-летию Российской революции

Abstract

The review assesses the documents collection Vladimir Gubernia and the Russian Revolution in Documents: 1913-1918 prepared by the staff of the State Archive of the Vladimir Region and notes the novelty of the publication and its significance in the light of the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution. The compilers strove to select and make available to researchers the more informative and multifaceted documents that had been ideologically unapproachable in the Soviet era. The reviewer briefly describes documentary composition of the anthology and informative value of its documents. According to the reviewer, the published documents from the Vladimir gubernia clearly show growing discontent of the population and weakness of the central government on the eve of tsar’s abdication, weak efficiency of the democratic institutions formed in 1917, and revolutionary violence required to transform old administration and organize new power in the periphery. This development opened the door to the Civil War. Official documents in the collection are felicitously supplemented with personal provenance sources (memoirs of revolutionary events’ participants), which, according to the reviewer, immerse the reader in the context. The reviewer underscores the value of illustrative material included in the anthology. Color copies of documents (including telegrams, which are particularly difficult to read) add to appreciation of archival sources, not all details of which can be presented in a popular science edition. The significance of the collection, from the point of view of the reviewer, is in its being a source base for historical research: it has the necessary reference apparatus. The collection is most useful to school and university students.