10 March is Archive Day in Russia. This is a professional holiday for workers at the VDNH Archive, which has been maintained for more than 80 years. It comprises of over 500,000 pictures and pieces of footage and 125,000 historical documents, including award certificates, orders, blueprints of historical pavilions and other VDNH objects.
'The entire history of the Nation's Main Exhibition can be traced back with documents and pictures from the Archive. This was made possible with many years of work of several generations of VDNH Archive Keepers: they have preserved materials dating all the way back to 1935, which survived not only the war but several periods of reconstruction at the exhibition grounds', said Sergei Shogurov, the General Director of JSC VDNH.
To preserve and grow: the history of the VDNH archive since 1938
The central archive of the Exhibition was created by order of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition No. 233 on 29 June 1938 'to organise and store the organisation and construction materials of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition'. The archive staff was also approved at that time. The Archive Director had a salary of 500 roubles per month, and the Archive Keeper's salary was 300 roubles per month. These workers had to concentrate their efforts on storing the technical, architectural, financial and other materials. In the 83 years that have passed, the main goal of the VDNH Archive Keepers has remained unchanged—carefully preserve the documents in their keep and accept and record new documents pertaining to the Nation's Main Exhibition.
Since the first years of the Exhibition's operations up until the present day, some of the materials related to the VDNH has been stored by the state. The storage funds of the VDNH have changed locations across the country over the history of their existence. From 1939 to 1958, the documents were stored in Moscow, on the premises of the current State Archive of the Russian Federation. As time went on, the volume of documents in storage kept expanding, and additional storage space was given to VDNH in Samara, where the archives were kept until the 2000s. Then the archival fund of VDNH became a supplier for the Russian State Archive of Economics. Today, the archives located in the Voronovo village (near Moscow) host the Exhibition's documents for the years 1939–1981. These documents are available on-demand. The materials for years 1982–2021 are stored on the VDNH grounds.
Value of the past in detail: the inner workings of the VDNH Archive
The modern archive of the Nation's Main Exhibition is located on the Exhibition grounds. It is divided into three collections: Technical Documentation, comprising of materials from 1935 to 2018, VDNH USSR fund, comprising of materials from 1982 to 1991, and AO VDNH fund, which comprises of documents from 1992 to the present day.
The question of value for the documents in the archive does not have a definite solution: nobody knows when and where any of the archival documents will become important, if ever. For example, from 2014 to the present day, when the restoration of the historical pavilions of VDNH is being carried out at a brisk pace, the original drawings and photographs of the Exhibition's monuments are of great interest to the people in charge of restoration. Architects, builders and restorers actively employ these documents in their work—these materials make restoration of the details of pavilions, fountains and flower beds in their original form possible. Documents stored in archives often become part of thematic museum expositions and temporary historical exhibitions at the Exhibition and beyond.
VDNH's archival treasure trove is now open to everyone: Mediateca and the Award Materials Portal
The development of VDNH Archival Fund entered a new stage in 2019—on the 80th anniversary of the Exhibition. The VDNH museum opened in the main entrance arch along with the Online Mediateca—it was the first public database with digital documents on the history of VDNH. The Mediateca stores digitised documents of the Exhibition, from the 1930s to the present day: copies of photographs, newspapers, drawings, maps and other documents. The Mediateca is constantly being updated. In addition to archive digitalisation efforts, the database was expanded with help of motivated citizens. In 2019, the son of Yuri Budakov, a photojournalist at VDNH in the 1950s–1970s, transferred to the archive a large collection of photographs of the Exhibition taken by his father during the years he worked at VDNH.
The next step for creating publicly available resources with archival Exhibition documents was the launch of the free Archive and Library Fund of VDNH portal in August 2020. It contains almost 11,500 award certificates issued between the years 1939–1991. During the project's implementation, more than 5,200 cases mentioning about 1.1 million people were processed. The portal is still being updated: the second stage of its development involves adding the documents up to 2014. Anyone can find information about relatives who received VDNH awards by visiting the website.