Documentary Heritage of Mongolic Peoples: Russia’s Archival Depositories Reviewed

Introduction. The present review article is devoted to written Mongolian collections from repositories in different regions of Russia, which were formed thanks to the selfless work of brilliant Orientalists. At present, there is an urgent need in systematization, analysis, search for information, and distant access to archival records and written sources, which will give researchers more opportunities for distant work with sources. Accordingly, perspectives of using information technologies will fascilitate the coordination and wider cooperation, as well as greater openness in the academic environment, the urgency of which is quite obvious. It is the right moment, too, because, first of all, the data on written sources is still scattered in a variety of publications; secondly, 2018 saw the launch of a grandiose project ”World Heritage of Mongolians”, which is primarily designed to create a uniform inventory of historical-documentary heritage of Mongolian peoples.  The project plans include the publication of twenty volumes to present collections of written monuments dispersed in various countries of the world: Russia, Japan, China, the USA, France, Denmark, Hungary, etc. Three volumes will be devoted to Mongolian sources from Russian repositories. The purpose of the present article is to give an overview of the repositories of the documentary heritage of the Mongolian peoples in different regions of Russia. Results. The largest collections of Mongolian written sources are stored in St Petersburg (Scientific Library of St Petersburg University, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences, State Museum for the History of Religion, National Library of Russia), in Buryatia (Center for Oriental Manuscripts and Xylographs, Institute for Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies of the Siberian Branch of the RAS; V. A. Obruchev Kyakhta Museum for Local Studies), in Tyva (Aldan-Maadyr National Museum of the Republic of Tyva, Scientific Archive of the Tyva Institute for Studies in the Humanities and Applied Socio-Economics), in the Republic of Tatarstan (National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan), and in Kalmykia (Scientific Archive of the Kalmyk Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, National Archive of the Republic of Kalmykia, N.N. Pal´mov Kalmyk Museum of Local Studies); these comprise representative collections, including rare and unique monuments of Mongolian written literature. Some of these collections have been studied to a degree, but there are still many to be introduced into scientific circulation. That is why it is of urgent importance to represent written Mongolian sources, their significant part kept in Russian repositories. Further work on identifying and describing the documentary heritage of the Mongolian peoples will contribute to our knowledge of the field that still needs to be investigated.

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