The aim of this project has been to create a modern catalogue of the Russian-language “Smolensk Archives”, or “Handlingar från Smolensk” (“Documents from Smolensk” ) (1609–1611), held at the Swedish National Archives in Stockholm. In the 1830s, part of the original collection was taken from Sweden to Russia, and these documents are now to be found at the St Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IISPbRAN). Our aim has been to describe these documents, too, in the framework of the project.
    The first year of the project saw the development of a digital platform, which has been continuously improved to allow as much information as possible on each individual document to be presented in a readily accessible manner. The catalogue of the Smolensk Archives is thus a digital one, and – together with scanned copies of the original documents – it will be freely available via the Digital Research Room on the Swedish National Archives website. The National Archives will thus be responsible for maintaining the necessary infrastructure. We expect both the digital catalogue and all of the scanned documents to become accessible to scholars during the autumn of 2018 or, at the latest, the spring of 2019. (A large number of scanned documents are already on the website.)
    The Smolensk Archives are spoils of war. When Smolensk capitulated to the Poles in 1611, the victors seized the archives of the city’s Chancellery and they were taken to the Sapieha family estate, not far from the city of Brest in present-day Belarus. At some point, they were mixed together with documents in Russian from the archives of King Sigismund III’s camp outside the walls of Smolensk. All of this material was in turn seized as war booty by the troops of Charles X (Karl X Gustav) of Sweden in the middle of the 17th century, ending up at Skokloster Castle.
    There, the documents were discovered in the 1830s by Sergej Vasil’evič Solov’ev, a professor of Russian literature at Helsinki University. Working for the Archaeographical Commission of St Petersburg, he travelled round Sweden in search of interesting Russian historical documents. By some means – it is not known how – he took a large number of sheets from the Smolensk Collection to St Petersburg. The Commission considered the documents to be of such interest that it published over half of them as early as 1841.
    In 1893 the manuscripts at Skokloster Castle were transferred to the Swedish National Archives. Four years later, the Smolensk Archives were discovered by the young Russian historian Jurij Gautier (Got’e). He realised their value and compiled a brief catalogue, which was published in 1898. A few years later, in preparation for the forthcoming tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty having ascended the Russian throne (in 1613), a decision was taken in Russia to publish previously unknown documents from the Time of Troubles. In 1912 Gautier issued a text edition, presenting around two-thirds of the National Archives’ Smolensk Collection in chronological order (the third left unpublished has, until now, been unknown to scholarship). However, the edition lacked both references to the short catalogue of 1898 and the shelf marks of the original documents.
    The Chancellery archives reflect life in a city under siege. They include lists detailing the manning of the walls and towers and the arms carried by their defenders, reports of individuals who have escaped from the city, lists of people allocated grain from the state granaries, and inventories of food supplies on properties in the city. Meanwhile, everyday life goes on, with disputes between townspeople giving rise to numerous court cases and investigations. We get particularly close to the inhabitants in the letters they wrote to relatives outside Smolensk, letters that were intercepted by the Poles and ended up in Sigismund’s archives. As the city was besieged, certain types of document normally common in Russian chancellery archives, such as applications to be granted service estates, are not found here. They do occur, though, among the papers originating from Sigismund’s camp.
    The language of the Smolensk Archives is chancery Russian, sometimes interspersed with spoken language, and the documents are written in the cursive hand, or “fast handwriting” – skoropis’ – typical of the period.
We now have a database containing 847 records – one for each individual document or matter. Each record contains a number of fields, under four main headings: “Physical description”, “Content description”, “Location” and “Earlier descriptions”. An important field under “Content description” is “Summary”, i.e. a brief description of the contents of the document, which is provided in both English and Russian. Apart from that, the language of the catalogue is English throughout.
         All the documents at the Swedish National Archives are currently being scanned, but not those at IISPbRAN (nor was that envisaged in the application). On the other hand, the original texts of the latter documents are almost always transcribed in their entirety in a separate field in the database records.
        As the work progressed, certain unforeseen problems arose:
1. The Smolensk documents in the National Archives were known to be in considerable disarray, but putting the collection in order was nevertheless a more demanding task than expected. Parts of documents which quite evidently belong together are often to be found in different boxes. Such documents have not been physically reunited in the course of the project, the original order (or rather lack thereof) being preserved. The digital catalogue, on the other hand, contains numerous cross-references, making it relatively straightforward to find one’s way about the material. An additional difficulty has been that so many documents lack both a beginning and an end (or one or the other).
2. Entirely as planned, the documents at IISPbRAN have been integrated in the catalogue. This undertaking was more time-consuming than anticipated, however. Thanks to the catalogue’s search functions, we now know how large a proportion of the original collection Solov’ev took with him to Russia, and the documents in question can also be related to the ones that remained in Sweden. The IISPbRAN collection comprises some 560 sheets, considerably more than we believed. It thus represents a third of the original collection at Skokloster Castle. The Smolensk Collection at the Swedish National Archives consists of just short of 1,300 sheets. Furthermore, Solov’ev made a careful selection: for example, he took with him almost the whole of the diplomatic correspondence (i.e. intercepted letters) to and from the Governors. He primarily chose complete documents (84 per cent of the matters in the collection at IISPbRAN are complete, compared with 35 per cent in the National Archives collection), and also had a preference for dated or indirectly datable documents (only 15 documents cannot be dated, as against 229 at the National Archives).
The title of our project – “Digital Catalogue of the Stockholm Smolensk Archives” – thus proved too narrow. We have produced a digital catalogue of the original Smolensk Collection at Skokloster Castle prior to the 1830s.
3. Working our way through the National Archives collection of “Documents from Smolensk”, we found just over 30 items not directly linked to Smolensk. These are from the field archives of Hetman Jan Piotr Sapieha, and relate to the years 1609–1610. Sapieha’s forces operated to the north-east of Moscow. Here we come across the most spectacular find of the project: a previously unknown letter from Tsar Boris Godunov’s daughter Ksenija. The National Archives has a significant number of documents from Sapieha’s field archives in another part of the Extranea Collection of the Skokloster Archives, and these have all been published. As the papers from the field archives among the “Documents from Smolensk” were previously unknown, we have decided that, despite their having no connection with Smolensk, they will be retained in the digital catalogue.
One deviation from the original plan is that the intended catalogue in book form has had to be deferred to some future date, as both bringing order to the actual collection and clarifying the provenance of the various documents required more work than we were able to foresee before embarking on the project.
Up to now, the digital catalogue has only been accessible to the three project members. A separate list of articles published by them relating to the project is attached.