Metadata: Administration of the Security Service of Ukraine in the Nikolaev Region; Nikolaev
Collection
- Country:
- Ukraine
- Holding institution:
- State Archive of the Nikolaev Region
- Holding institution (official language):
- Державний архів Миколаївської області; Государственный архив Николаевской области
- Postal address:
- 54001, Украина, г. Николаев ул. Московская, 1, тел./факс: +380 (512) 37-0065 e-mail: mail@mk.archives.gov.ua http://mk.archives.gov.ua
- Reference number:
- F. R-5859
- Title:
- Administration of the Security Service of Ukraine in the Nikolaev Region; Nikolaev
- Title (official language):
- Управление Службы безопасности Украины в Николаевской области, г. Николаев; Управління Служби безпеки в Миколаївській області, м. Миколаїв
- Creator/accumulator:
- Administration of the Security Service of Ukraine in the Nikolaev Region; Nikolaev
- Date(s):
- 1920/2008
- Language:
- Russian
- Ukrainian
- Yiddish
- Extent:
- (32,273 files)
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Photographic images
- Scope and content:
-
Op. 1, which consists of filtration files, includes documents of I. L. Dobkin, a resident of the city of Nikolaev who (as his autobiography makes clear) changed his name to Drobchenko when held in a German camp, since “upon encountering him, someone might recognize him as Dobkin and turn him over to the Germans as a Komsomol [Communist Union of Youth] member and a person with some Jewish blood running through his veins.”
Op. 2 contains discontinued archival-investigative files on repressive measures carried out by extrajudicial entities (the GPU Collegium; the “troikas”; the USSR NKVD Special Conference; etc.) in the 1920s-40s, which were used to finalise these persons’ rehabilitation. These materials include files from 1924-41 on a number of residents of the Nikolaev region (Sh. N. Gershov, M. Ia. Druian, L. N. Krasnianskii, Iu.-L. A. Melamud, A. N. Rozenberg, G. Ia. Segal, I. E. Spivakovskii, D. O. Frenkel, and others) accused of engaging in counterrevolutionary activity and belonging to illegal Zionist parties and organizations (Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa’ir, right and left He-Ḥaluts, He-Haver, the United All-Russian Organization of Zionist Youth, the Jewish Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and Jewish Communist Party Po’ale Tsiyon, the Zionist-Socialist Party, the Zionist Labor Party, Ze’ire Zion, Yugent-Farband, the Zionist-Socialist Union of Youth, etc.) active in Nikolaev, Voznesensk, Pervomaisk, Ochakov, Balta, and Bol’shaia Seidemenukha (Snigirevka district, Nikolaev region); these persons were also accused of conducting anti-Soviet nationalist propaganda among the Jewish population; agitating for emigration to Palestine to establish an independent Jewish state there; etc.
Also included files on charges brought on 25 June 1941 against Nikolaev Rabbi Sh. Z. Shneerson, who was accused of engaging in “anti-Soviet nationalist activities,” organising “illegal gatherings of clerical elements” in his home, and having ties to foreign Jewish organisations; and charges brought on 24 December 1950 against Z. I. Knopov and M. I. Rabkin, accused of attempting to illegally leave the USSR for Palestine; etc.
Aside from information on indictments and sentencing (those found guilty were shot; imprisoned in “corrective-labour” camps; or exiled from the Ukrainian SSR to Kazakhstan, Siberia, the Zyrianovsk district, the Urals, or to Palestine “via one of the USSR’s southern ports”), there are photographs of the accused; minutes of interrogations and witness confrontations containing data on real and imagined Zionist entities (including organisations operating outside the Nikolaev region, in the city of Odessa and the Odessa region, the city of Korosten’, and the village of Chepovichi [Korosten’ district, Kiev region]); on defendants’ contacts with Zionist organisations in the USSR and abroad; on emigration to Palestine; and on Jewish life in Ukraine and the activities of the religious underground; names of the most prominent Jewish activists (persons the Soviet authorities dubbed “clericals”: chairs of Jewish congregations, rabbis, and ritual slaughterers [shokhtim]); “material evidence” seized during searches: the journal Ha-shakhar; the pamphlets “Plantation Agriculture in Palestine” and “Cooperative Farming in Palestine”; self-education guides prepared by the merkaz (central committee) of He-Haver (1916), and the same organisation’s appeal “To Jewish Students”; minutes of sessions of the Zionist-Socialist Union of Youth’s “foreign commission,” and resolutions of the Fourth Congress of the Zionist-Socialist Party in the USSR (1924); circulars and instructions of the Zionist-Socialist Union of Youth on party matters; various correspondence in Russian and Yiddish; etc.
There are also letters, appeals, and statements of condemned persons and their relatives; materials pertaining to prosecutorial examinations; and materials pertaining to rehabilitation work in the 1950s-90s, including minutes of witness interrogations and review documentation on NKVD personnel that had been involved in fabricating cases and themselves subsequently convicted; etc.
- Administrative/biographical history:
-
This entity began operations in March 1919 as the Nikolaev Provincial Cheka [ChK; Emergency Commission], which was simultaneously under the jurisdiction of the Nikolaev Provincial Executive Committee and the All-Ukrainian Cheka (VUChK). When in March 1922 the All-Ukrainian Cheka was dissolved and replaced with the GPU [State Political Administration] of the Ukrainian SSR NKVD, a GPU department for the Nikolaev province was established. Due to changes in administrative-territorial divisions in November 1922, this was renamed the Nikolaev County Department, and in March 1923, the Nikolaev Area Department of the GPU (and from November 1923 on, of the OGPU); and from September 1930 (when Nikolaev became a city of republic-level jurisdiction) on, a municipal department of the OGPU was in operation.
Upon the founding of the USSR NKVD in July 1934, the Odessa Regional NKVD organised a Nikolaev Municipal Department, and when the Nikolaev region was established in September 1937, the Nikolaev Regional Administration of the Ukrainian SSR NKVD was organised. Due to the approach of the frontline in late 1941, the regional administration was evacuated to the Donbass and deactivated. In April 1943, entities of the USSR NKVD were detailed to form the People’s Commissariat of State Security; thus in March 1944, when the Nikolaev region was liberated from German and Romanian occupation, the collection creator resumed operations as the People’s Commissariat of State Security for the Nikolaev Region.
In March 1946 it was reorganised as the Nikolaev Regional Administration of the Ukrainian SSR Ministry of State Security; in March 1953, of the Ukrainian SSR Ministry of Internal Affairs; and in March 1954, upon the establishment of the USSR Council of Ministers’ State Security Committee [KGB], of the Ukrainian SSR Council of Ministers’ KGB. It was subsequently renamed the Ukrainian SSR KGB Administration for the Nikolaev Region.
Upon the declaration of Ukrainian independence and the dissolution (by edict of the Supreme Rada of 20 September 1991) of the Ukrainian SSR KGB, the National Security Service of Ukraine (SNBU) was established, with a corresponding administration for the Nikolaev region which, in connection with the adoption of the law “On the Security Service of Ukraine,” began to be called (15 March 1992) the Administration of the Security Service of Ukraine in the Nikolaev Region.
Documents from the archive of the Administration of the Security Service of Ukraine in the Nikolaev Region began to be submitted to the State Archive of the Nikolaev Region pursuant to a decree of the presidium of the Supreme Council of Ukraine (9 September 1991) stipulating that so-called filtration files kept on former Soviet POWs, and files pertaining to discontinued criminal cases that had been decided by extrajudicial entities, be transferred to state archives. (On extrajudicial entities and juridical acts that discontinued cases they had heard pertaining to persons subjected to political repression, and on the subsequent transfer of these case files from archives of subsections of the Security Service of Ukraine to state archives, see the historical information given in the description of f. R-8065 [“The Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine in the Odessa Region”] of the State Archive of the Odessa Region.)
- Access points: locations:
- Balta
- Chepovichi
- Kazakhstan
- Nikolaev
- Ochakov
- Odessa
- Pervomaisk
- Siberia
- Ukraine
- Ukrainian SSR
- USSR
- Voznesensk
- Zyrianovsk district
- Subject terms:
- Anti-religious activity (Soviet Union)
- Chabad
- Communism
- Communism--Communists
- Correspondence
- Hebrew periodicals
- Jewish daily life and religious practices
- Law enforcement
- Legal matters
- Migration
- Migration--Emigration
- Occupation (military)
- Photographs
- Rabbis
- Ritual slaughter
- Zionism
- Zionism--Anti-Zionism
- System of arrangement:
- The fonds includes two inventories systematised alphabetically.
- Finding aids:
- Inventories are available.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary