Metadata: Office of the Kiev Department Censor
Collection
- Country:
- Ukraine
- Holding institution:
- Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Kyiv
- Holding institution (official language):
- Центральний державний історичний архів України, м. Київ
- Postal address:
- 03110, м. Київ-110, вул. Солом'янська, 24
- Phone number:
- 380 (044) 275-30-02
- Web address:
- cdiak.archives.gov.ua
- Email:
- mail.cdiak@arch.gov.ua
- Reference number:
- F. 294
- Title:
- Office of the Kiev Department Censor
- Title (official language):
- Канцелярия киевского отдельного цензора
- Creator/accumulator:
- Office of the Kiev Department Censor
- Date(s):
- 1865/1906
- Language:
- Russian
- Extent:
- 461 files; another part of this institution’s archive is held at the Manuscript and Textology Department of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine’s Shevchenko Institute of Literature (Kiev) (see f. 70).
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Scope and content:
-
Housed in the fond are circulars of the Main Administration for Press Affairs barring the import into Russia of a number of Hebrew- and Yiddish-language journals and newspapers published abroad; the Kiev governor’s copies of Main Administration for Press Affairs circulars and orders barring press publication of information on anti-Jewish pogroms, or on the work of commissions and government institutions dealing with relations between the “native” and local Jewish populations (1881-82); applications for permission to publish Jewish periodicals (in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian) – the journals Der morgn shtern, Ha-Peles, Kievskii evreiskii vestnik, and the newspaper Dos Yidishe vort – and publication plans of these periodicals; a memorandum of the department censor for foreign literature to G. Barats, the “learned Jew” serving the Kiev, Podolia, and Volhynia governor-general, conveying sheet music with Hebrew text mailed from abroad to the Uman’ cantor Z. Zinger, so that Barats could perform censorial examination of this material (1867); correspondence of the Kiev Censorship Committee and the Office of the Kiev Department Censor with the Committee on Foreign Censorship and the director of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary on allocating responsibilities for censoring Jewish publications between a Kiev Censorship Committee censor and the inspector of the Zhitomir Rabbinical Seminary; correspondence with customs houses on providing packages shipped or smuggled from abroad that contained Hebrew- or Yiddish-language books for censorship examination (1848-70); and on turning over forbidden Jewish books to the library of the former Kiev Censorship Committee for storage (1866).
There are also the conclusions of the censor of Jewish publications regarding manuscripts and books submitted to the Office of the Kiev Department Censor for publication and reprint permission, including A. Fishzon’s Collection of Jewish Folk Songs, I. I. Linetskii’s History of the Jewish People (based on the work of Heinrich Graetz), Josephus Flavius’s The Jewish War, I. Kh. Ravnitskii’s Rabbi Akiba ben Yosef, A. A. Kupernik’s Historical Sketches of the Jews in Kiev, etc.; registration logs of books and manuscripts coming in to the office for preliminary censorship containing records of the censoring of Jewish religious publications and of works by Sholom Aleichem and other authors; reports on the censorship of Jewish books; orders of the Kiev department Censor on the need to compile and distribute printed catalogues of Jewish publications, and lists of such publications both allowed and forbidden by the censorship; etc.
- Administrative/biographical history:
- Pursuant to the Law on the Press of 6 April 1865 and by order of the minister of internal affairs of 1 December 1865, two separate censor posts, one for foreign and the other for domestic publications, were established to replace the liquidated Kiev Censorship Committee. These did not last long in the form of two separate institutions with their own record-keeping in Kiev; already in the 1870s-80s, these institutions were merged into one, the Office of the Kiev Department Censor. Its staff included censors for domestic and foreign publications, headed by the latter (this censor’s role included censoring manuscripts in foreign languages and non-Russian languages of the Russian Empire, as well as performing censorship examination of foreign publications brought or shipped into Russian territory from abroad); a freelance censor handled Jewish publications. The Office of the Kiev Department Censor answered to the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Main Administration for Press Affairs. It was liquidated pursuant to the new rules on the press of 26 April 1906 and in connection with the formation of the Kiev Temporary Committee on Press Affairs (see f. 295).
- Access points: locations:
- Kiev
- Access points: persons/families:
- Barats, G.
- Fishzon, A.
- Graetz, Heinrich
- Josephus
- Kupernik, A. A.
- Linetskii, I. I.
- Sholem Aleichem
- Zinger, Z.
- System of arrangement:
- The fond includes a single inventory; files are systematised according to the chronological-thematic principle.
- Finding aids:
- An inventory is available.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary