Russian State Archive of Contemporary History
Open-knowledge reference entry

The Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI) (Russian: Российский государственный архив новейшей истории (РГАНИ)) is a large Russian state archive managed by Rosarkhiv, which preserves post-1952 documents of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was established in 1999 as the successor to the Center for Preservation of Contemporary Documentation (TsKhSD, Russian: Центр хранения современной документации (ЦХСД)), which acquired current records of the Communist Party nationalized after the failure of the Soviet coup attempt in 1991. A very large percentage of its files are still classified and many others are still difficult to access. In 1992 Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky worked in the archive and secretly scanned copies of some documents.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7382141. VIAF identifies the subject as 265300977. The Library of Congress control number is n00088957. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1952, 1999, 1991 and 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “Russian State Archive of Contemporary History” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.