Flowers at the grave of the first head of the Archival Service of Belarus

On September 9, 2022, as part of the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Belarusian Archival Service, the staff of the State Archives of Mogilev Region visited the symbolic grave of Dmitry Zhilunovich (Tishka Gartny) in the Pechersk Forest Park. The state and public figure of the BSSR, writer and historian, whose fate was connected both with archives and with Mogilev.

Involved in political and literary activities at the beginning of the 20th century, D. Zhilunovich took a direct part in the first proclamation of the BSSR in 1919, taking the post of the head of the government.

In January 1923, he was appointed head of the Central Archives of Belarus, which in 1927 was reorganized to the Central Archives Department of the BSSR. At this time, D. Zhilunovich succeeded to combine several posts at once: head of the board of the Institute of Party History of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus, chief of the State Publishing House, Deputy People’s Commissar of Education of the BSSR. At the time of his assumption of office, the archival heritage of Belarus included only several dozens of archival fonds. Therefore, the main tasks for him were to recover the lost documents and to collect new materials. It was at the proposal of D. Zhilunovich that in 1925 a commission was created at the People’s Commissariat of Education of the BSSR to search for Belarusian archival collections. For the preservation of the documents relating to the period of 1917-1922, a Historical-Revolutionary Department was organized at the Central Archives of Belarus at Zhilunovich’s initiative.

Dmitry Zhilunovich was at the head of the archival industry in Belarus until 1929, when the campaign against the so-called “national democracy” began, in the course of which he was fired from his post and expelled from the Communist Party.

On November 15, 1936, he was arrested by the NKVD. In March 1937, for health reasons, he was placed in the Mogilev psychiatric hospital, where he died on April 11, 1937. Fifty years later he was fully rehabilitated and in 1988 he was reinstated in the ranks of the Communist Party.