The Novgorod Occupation Archives
(A catalogue can be accessed on the web. See below.)
The Novgorod Occupation Archives, kept at the National Archives in Stockholm, are unique due to their age and size. They are war booty and date back to the years 1611 and 1617. Here the Muscovite state’s administrative routines from the 16th century are still being reflected. The Occupation Archives are considered to be the most complete older Russian state archives preserved to our day.
During the years that Swedish troops were in Novgorod and the Novgorod region, the bureaucratic apparatus kept working in the traditional fashion, albeit under Swedish supremacy. Thus the Occupation Archives are Russian archives, kept by Russian scribes and under-secretaries.
They are divided into two series, based on the appearance of the documents. Series I consists of books (141 items). These are mostly fair copies intended for central filing in Moscow. Here we will find, e.g. provision accounts, confiscation books, land grant books, revenue and expenditure books from state institutions such as the taverns, the public saunas, the mills, the law court and the customs. A large group consists of inspection books upon which the taxation of the people was based.
Series II consists of rolls (368 items) of various lengths. If the documents in Series I are the finished product, Series II is the raw material for the books. Here we will find protocols from inspections and examinations of peasants, drafts of accounts and contracts of sale, etc. Series II also contains an extensive correspondence between the Novgorod authorities and bailiffs and under-secretaries travelling around the province. There is also a large number of petitions from the people to the authorities concerning a wide range of issues. Thus it is in Series II that we will find the most information about the everyday life of the people.
The Swedish general Jakob De la Gardie had the archives removed from Novgorod after the conclusion of peace in February 1617. The documents were of great value as reference material before the delimitation had been carried out and the peace had been properly regulated, and before a Swedish administration had been established in the newly conquered territories. The archives soon lost their importance, however. Via De la Gardie’s estates in Estonia, they eventually ended up at the National Archives in Stockholm, where they sank into oblivion. It was not until the middle of the 19th century that the archives were rediscovered. Since the end of the Second World War, they have been more and more widely used in research thanks to Sergej Dmitrievsky’s type-written catalogue from 1964.
In 2005, the first part of a more comprehensive and systematic printed catalogue came out (Elisabeth Löfstrand, Laila Nordquist »Accounts of an Occupied City. Catalogue of the Novgorod Occupation Archives. Pt 1»). The second and concluding part of the catalogue was published in 2009. It covers Series II of the archives, which, because of its low availability, so far has been used to a lesser extent by the scholars (Elisabeth Löfstrand, Laila Nordquist »Accounts of an Occupied City. Catalogue of the Novgorod Occupation Archives. Pt 2»).
The catalogue can be accessed on the following websites:
Source: Stockholm University, Department of Slavic Languages / Elisabeth Löfstrand
www.slav.su.se