Some riddles of archival heuristics

Abstract. The article deals with the issue of the illegal transfer of part of the documents of the state institutions of the Caucasian and Siberian committees in private use, when they were transferred from the office and archive of the Caucasian committee to the archive of the Committee of Ministers in 1882, after the abolition of the Caucasian governorship and the Caucasian committee. The main part of the archive of the Caucasian and Siberian Committees is kept in the Russian State Historical Archive. The owner of a significant collection of official documents, among which a tenth of which are autographs, was a high-ranking official, the manager of the affairs of the Caucasian Committee, K.F. Ostrovidov, who abused his position in order to have at hand a collection of documents on the history of the activities of the Siberian and Caucasian Committees. Various assumptions can be made about Ostrovidov’s intentions in relation to this collection, consisting of almost 5,000 sheets, since, after lying with him for 14 years, he did not use it, and after Ostrovidov’s death in 1896, these documents were transferred by his nephew P.D. Elpidov for safekeeping to the Imperial Public Library in 1898 and kept there in the fund under his name.

Keywords: archival heuristics, Caucasian Committee, K.F. Ostrovidov, collection of documents, P.D. Elpidov, National Library of Russia.