Russian Archives in Prague: a Safe Depository of Iosif Ilyin’s Archives

Abstract

Russian exile and emigration after the revolution of 1917 linked Russia and Europe for several generations with thousands of invisible family and ancestral threads. The author's ancestor (maternal grandfather), Joseph S. Ilyin, an officer of the Kolchak's army who emigrated first to Harbin (1920–1956), then to Switzerland (from 1957 until his death in 1981), kept a diary all his life. His edited version of «Memoirs of Biographical Character» from the Russian Foreign Historical Archive in Prague, stored in State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) is now published in Russia. The Swiss part of the archive sheds light on Ilyin's incessant attempts to tell about his experience and to leave a mark on history.