An employee of the State Archives of Vitebsk Region, Svetlana Myasoedova, took part in recording the history of archives before the Great Patriotic War and in the first months after the liberation of Vitebsk from the Nazi invaders
Throughout the century long history of the Belarusian State Archival Service, its major functions have been gathering, preserving, accounting and organizing the use of the documents of the National Archival Fonds of Belarus.
The archivists of the Vitebsk Region made colossal efforts in this field in the 1940s.
In November 1943, in the territory of the liberated by that time Smolensk region, there was organized the Department of State Archives of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs for the Vitebsk Region headed by Pavel Kudryashov. At the beginning of 1944, it included an operative group of 20 persons, mainly partisans of the disbanded 1st and 2nd Drissa Brigades. The archivists were among the first to enter the ruined Vitebsk on June 26, 1944 to fulfill their main task of gathering documentary materials.
For temporary storage of the documentary materials collected in Vitebsk and the region, the staff adapted a broken box of the house (former military bunker) on Mogilevskaya Square. There remained only 80 thousand out of the more than 1 million files accumulated before the war in Vitebsk.
By June 1946, the State Archives of Vitebsk Region had already concentrated 794 thousand items of storage.
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| 1. Fragment of TV program |
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| 2. Chief of the operational group for the restoration of archival bodies of the Vitebsk region, head of the archive division of the Department of Internal Affairs of the Vitebsk Region Executive Committee, Pavel Kudryashov (24 May 1948, Vitebsk) |
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| 3. Acting Deputy Director of the State Archives of Vitebsk Region, Nikolai Lobyr (24 May 1948, Vitebsk) |
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| 4. Senior archivist at the department of collections of October Revolution and Socialist Construction at the State Archives of Vitebsk Region, Vladimir Zimnitsky (24 May 1948, Vitebsk) |