Thanks to the heroic work of archival workers in Kherson region, the archive of Kherson State University was saved. As is well known, the occupiers behaved like “masters” during the occupation of the region, taking out museum valuables and entire archives in trucks. Thus, the State Archives of the Kherson region was almost completely looted. However, the university’s documents were preserved thanks to the bravery of its employees, who risked their lives to save them.
Kherson State University is the only university in Ukraine that has its own museum and archive center. Its shelves hold more than 700 thousand files, one fifth of which is part of the National Archive Fond of Ukraine. The demand for university documentation is always high, as the personal files of teachers and students are actively used by historians and writers.
“Thanks to the coordinated work of each employee of the Ivano-Frankivsk and Kherson offices of KSU, we managed to preserve the stories of thousands of people whose fate is connected with our educational institution. Now that Kherson has been liberated, we can speak openly – we managed to protect archival documents, personal files, and other documentation from the occupiers and traitors. What we have done is fantastic, and it was made possible by courageous people, our colleagues. They did not allow our history to be looted and destroyed, and we were spared the sad fate of the regional archive, which was completely taken to the left bank, and from there, probably, to the temporarily occupied Crimea,” said KSU’s Rector Oleksandr Spivakovsky.
Employees of the Kherson University Archives do not like to talk about what they went through during the occupation. But they promise that someday they will be able to tell this story. In the meantime, they are organizing the university’s documents, putting them in order, and will soon be able to make them available to inquirers.
