Orenburg state university

From the correspondence between sultans to the drawings of Kalashnikov: why archives of Russia and Kazakhstan are interesting to each other

On January 29, Orenburg welcomed members from central and regional archives of the two countries to discuss the perspective cooperation in the study of common history. The International Round Table «Collaboration of archives in Russia and Kazakhstan: forms, fields of activities and prospects» was initiated by OSU Research Institute of History and Ethnography of the Southern Urals, the Orenburg region Committee for Archives and the autonomous non-profit organization «Commonwealth of the Peoples of Eurasia». It united specialists from the archives in Orenburg, Aktobe, West Kazakhstan, Kostanay, Kyzylorda. Members from the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Archive of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan joined the online session.

The participants of the meeting noted that thanks to of neighborly 40 years since the establishment of diplomatic contacts and 260 years of living in the same state in the past the documents about people of Russia and Kazakhstan have been kept together. And without mutual reference to the archives in both countries it would be impossible to get a full understanding of the common and national history. It is not surprising that researchers from Kazakhstan outnumber other international visitors to the reading rooms in the archives of the Russian Federation, and the hichest visiting rate to the archives of the Republic of Kazakhstan belongs to Russian people.

In 2019 the State Archive of the Orenburg Region hosted a group of researchers from Aktobe who copied 150 valuable documents on the history of their region like a diplomatic correspondence of Kazakh khans and sultans, the city plan of Aktobe and the case files on providing the city’s first settlers with plots of land. In their turn the archives of Kazakhstan store a unique data about common past and achievements that are of great interest to Russia. Thus, at the request of Russia, the Archive of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, handed over to the Museum of M. T. Kalashnikov the copies of his first submachine gun drawings. He made them in 1942 while being on leave after injury in Alma-Ata.

The participants of the round table defined new perspective fields of mutually beneficial cooperation. Now the archives of Russia and Kazakhstan are planning to open joint exhibitions devoted to the 60th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s space flight. Orenburg archivists invited their Kazakh colleagues to take part in the conference «Party Archives. Problems and prospects for development» scheduled for May 19–20 in Orenburg.