NOVOSIBIRSK STATE PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY
The project "Bridging Affairs and Fates" is being carried out at NSPU with the support of Acting Rector, Sergey Aleksandrovich Nelyubov. In the year of the university's 90th anniversary, the IIGSO NSPU teaching staff, along with first-year students undergoing their archival internship, initiated the analysis and digitisation of the oldest collections in the university archive – documents dating from the 1930s to the 1950s. Not all records from this period have survived; some of the earliest materials were irretrievably lost during the Great Patriotic War when the Novosibirsk State Pedagogical Institute was relocated to Kolpashevo. The initiative to analyse the archives was inspired by Irina Valerievna Barmatina, Head of NSPU Quality Management department, and Oksana Nikolaevna Sidorchuk, IIGSO Deputy Director.
- The NSPU archive has amassed a vast collection of varied, unsystematised materials, including personal student files from 1937 to 1957, individual certificates, identification documents, student cards, and grade books. Our first-year students have organised these materials according to document type. Subsequently, we identified rare documents dating back to the era of the Russian Empire – such as certificates of completion from gymnasiums and real schools – and began digitising them, along with record books from other universities in Novosibirsk and various cities across the USSR. Currently, under the supervision of Associate Professor Tatyana Anatolyevna Kebak from the Department of Russian and World History, students are compiling inventories and registers of the documents; after that they will prepare a report on their work, - explained Oksana Nikolaevna Sidorchuk.
From the very beginning the project bought unexpected and highly valuable results.
- While sorting through the documents, we came across a school leaving certificate dated 1913. Its unusual appearance immediately caught our attention – it was not the typical blue of similar pre-revolutionary certificates, but white and festive, commemorating the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. It featured portraits of the dynasty’s founder, Mikhail Fedorovich, and Nicholas II, the reigning monarch at the time. The certificate had been issued by the St Catherine's Girls' Gymnasium in Kyiv. The holder, Varvara Afanasyevna Bulgakova, had completed eight grades of the gymnasium with only A’s, or “very satisfactory” as the document records. It was a well-known fact that the renowned writer’s sister had taught German in Novosibirsk schools, yet no one had suspected that her high school diploma was preserved in the NSPU archive. So, Tatyana Anatolyevna Kebak and her students discovered a duplicate of Varvara Afanasyevna’s record book, completed in 1951, - explained Vera Alexandrovna Spesivtseva, Associate Professor of the Department of Russian and World History.
For reference: Varvara Afanasyevna relocated from Kyiv to Novosibirsk in 1934 to join her husband, Leonid Sergeyevich Karum, who had previously been exiled here. In Novosibirsk, she taught German in schools and pursued correspondence studies at the Faculty of Foreign Languages at the Novosibirsk State Pedagogical Institute. As the document shows, she took three state examinations and achieved an “excellent” grade in German and “good” grades in the Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism and Pedagogy. Interestingly, her record book also shows a “good” grade in Latin, awarded by her husband. Leonid Sergeyevich taught German and Latin at the Medical Institute and at NSPI’s Faculty of Foreign Languages. However, his documents haven’t been found in the NSPU archive. Mikhail Bulgakov’s sister passed away in 1956.
