The decisions archivists make on what documents to keep and how to arrange them determine what raw materials are available to historians for their research. In late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Europe, archival practice began to centre around three principles: provenance, original order and respect des fonds. Implicit to them was the image of the archivist as a neutral and objective actor. Archivists in the Russian Empire and early Soviet period initially adopted the three central tenets of archival thought. However, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Stalinist revolution from above strengthened the understanding of the archivist as an active agent creating a socialist society. This led Soviet archival theorists to challenge the sacrosanctity of provenance, original order and respect des fonds. The new orthodoxy had profound implications for what materials were kept and how. At the same time, there were divergences between the approaches of archivists in the Russian and Ukrainian Soviet republics. A distinct Ukrainian school of archival thought was perhaps developing, cut short by the Stalinist repressions.
