Vasylenko V. Archival and criminal cases as a source for studying the repression of the Bolshevik regime against the participants of the rebel movement for the restoration of the UNR

The thesis is the first source study research on the repression of the Bolshevik regime against the participants of the rebel movement for the restoration of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR). The object of study is archival and criminal cases that are little-known and have been inaccessible until recently, unique and at the same time sufficiently specific sources of state security organs of Soviet Ukraine. They are currently stored in the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (hereinafter – SSA SBU) and archival divisions of the regional bodies of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), as well as in the Central State Archives of Public Organizations of Ukraine and regional state archives. The tracking of long process of formation, transformation and transfer of documentary multitude of archival and criminal cases as the main source complex has been succeeded due to the involvement of unknown and not well-known normative regulatory, information statistical and reporting documents of separate cases of special fonds of the SSA SBU for the scientific circulation. A general analysis of the internal structure of the archival and criminal cases (ACS) documents gave grounds to distinguish two main groups by origin: procedural and non-procedural. The first group included such subgroups as investigators, punitive (judicial and extrajudicial) cassation and rehabilitation documents. According to the examples of the ACS proceedings of different years, varieties of documents of each subgroup have been described. The specific and content features of the ACS procedural documents of a certain theme have been emphasized. The question of providing a worthy historical and legal assessment of the sacrificial national liberation struggle of the UNR rebels has been raised. At the same time, a detailed classification of widely represented in the ACS and less investigated documents of non-procedural nature of rebel and Soviet origin has been drawn up. Within the coverage of the informational and personification potential of the investigated source complex, only according to the materials of the least well-known «Main» fonds of the SSA SBU, the reliable personal information about over one thousand one hundred participants of the national liberation rebel movement of the first half of the 1920s, consisting of 135 rebel headquarters, committees and troops was found out. At the same time, dozens of hundreds of investigated archival and criminal cases have been introduced into the scientific circulation. The collected information should become a starting point for certain historical and legal research in order to prepare a solid ground for the rehabilitation and popularization of Ukrainian patriots.