State Archives of Minsk Region
Description of holdings
Amount of holdings: 5 941 fonds, 13 collections, 1 476 243 items
Chronological scope: from 1917 to the present
Geographical coverage:
- abolished Minsk gubernia (province)
- abolished Zaslavl and Rudnia districts
- the city of Minsk and the Berezino, Dzerzhinsk, Kletsk, Minsk, Nesvizh, Pukhovichi, Smolevichi, Stolbtsy, Uzda and Cherven districts of the Minsk region
Contents:
The State Archives of Minsk Region holds a complex of records created by the agencies of government and administration, finance, statistics, planning, control, courts, prosecutor’s, education, culture, social welfare, and sport. There are many fonds of various enterprises and institutions in the field of industry, agriculture, forestry, construction, transportation, the press, publishing, radio and television broadcast, and more.
In 1996 the Archives acquired over 600 000 files from the former archives of the Minsk Region Communist Party Committee, previously held at the National Archives of the Republic of Belarus.
The fonds of the German Occupation (February – December 1918) and Polish Occupation (July 1919 – July 1920) throw light on the economic and penal policy of the interventionists.
The Archives contains the fonds of various social organizations (trade unions, the Red Cross Regional Committee in Minsk, the Minsk Regional Council, and more) and various institutions dealing with the affairs of religious confessions (the Minsk Region Plenipotentiary of the Council for Religious Affairs at the USSR Council of Ministers, the Minsk Region Plenipotentiary of the Council for Religious Affairs at the BSSR Council of Ministers, and more).
The valuable source for research into the period of the Nazi occupation in the region are the declassified records concerned with the mass extermination of Minsk Jews on 7-8 December, 1941 and the annihilation of psychiatric patients in December 1941; lists of burned villages; instructions and appeals of the German command for strict measures against Partisans and Resistance members.
Records of Nazi crime in the Minsk region are represented by the collection of positive prints of the Extraordinary State Commission for Investigation of Nazi Crime and Estimate of Nazi Damage.
The Archives also contains a number of collections that include records from various small-size fonds of local authorities and private institutions and enterprises.