Today we witness a growing collectors' interest for documentary rarities. The circulation of documents, in particular, an illegal one, has significantly increased on European antique markets and shops; and even through Internet auctions. Written historical monuments are more and more becoming products with a fixed market price. Thus, there appears a danger of the theft of documents, archival records included.
Some time during the Spring/Summer of 2004, a large-scale theft of unique documents of the sixteenth-twentieth centuries occurred at the oldest archive in Europe, the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Lviv (CSHAUL) which holds more than 1,200,000 units from the twelfth-twentieth centuries. The stolen documents even appeared on the "black market" outside Ukraine.
The top management of the State Committee on Archives of Ukraine immediately ordered a thorough checking of archival records in CSHAUL to determine exactly which documents were missing. Since July 2004, a systematic and intensive inventory of the fonds (record groups) has been undertaken.
As a result, it was necessary to close the reading room to researchers in order to limit the document circulation within the archive and to conduct this inventory of the archival records in the shortest time.
During the investigation of this theft by the Ministry for Internal Affairs and the Security Service of Ukraine in Kyiv and Lviv, about 1,500 pages of archival documents were identified and returned to the Archive.
Anyone with information about this theft or any other documents that have been removed from this archive, should contact the State Committee on Archives in Ukraine.
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