Central State Film, Photo, and Sound Archive

Central State Film, Photo, and Sound Archive (Tsentralnyi derzhavnyi kinofotofonoarkhiv Ukrainy im. H.S. Pshenychnoho, or TsDKFFA). The central Ukrainian state repository for non-textual historical records, including film, photography, and sound recordings, located in Kyiv and functioning under the auspices of the State Archival Service of Ukraine. It was established in 1932 under the name All-Ukrainian Central Photo-Film Archive as a repository for audiovisual documentation. The archive was not evacuated following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and a large part of its holdings went missing or were destroyed; a substantial portion was recovered after the war in finds in Vienna (over 17,000 items) and near Dresden (some 50,000 items), but still about half the archive’s materials had been lost. In December 1943 the archive was reconstituted as the Central State Archive of Film, Photo, and Phonographic Documents of the Ukrainian SSR. The archive was then headed for 25 years (1943–78) by H. Pshenychny. In 1992 it was given the TsDKFFA name, to which Pshenychny’s own name was added in 1998. In addition, in 1997 the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, Germany returned an additional 3,000 photographs and 30 documentary films which had been captured during the Second World War.

The film division of the archive has approx 10,000 individual titles with a total of over 50,000 rolls of documentary film. These have been gathered from the major producers of film in Ukraine, including the Kyiv Studio of Chronicle-Documentary Films, the (Dovzhenko) Kyiv Artistic Film Studio, the Kyiv Studio for Popular Science Films, and the State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting. In 1998 TsDKFFA also began archiving video materials. The photographic collection has over 350,000 individual items, while the sound archives hold over 21,000 tapes and phonographic records. In each division the holdings date back to the earliest days of their respective media—the 1890s for film, the 1850s for photographs, and the early 20th century for sound recordings—although the majority of the collection in each field consists of post-Second World War material.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Grimstead, P. Archives and Repositories in the USSR: Ukraine and Moldavia (Princeton, NJ 1988)
Tsentralnyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotofonodokumentov Ukrainskoi SSR (Kyiv 1988)
Altukhova, O. et al (comps); Onyshchenko, O. et al (eds). Arkhivni ustanovy Ukraïny (Kyiv 2000)