THE ROLE OF UKRAINE’S PARTY ARCHIVES IN THE SHAPING OF THE SOVIET MYTH OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR IN THE 60S-80S OF THE 20TH CENTURY (A CASE STUDY OF THE ARCHIVE DEPARTMENT OF KHERSON OBLAST COMMITTEE OF THE CPU)

The goal of the paper is to study the activity of the party archives of the Communist Party of Ukraine (the CPU) in 1960-1980, aimed at creating sets of documents about the Second World War - the documents of personal origin and thematic collections; to determine the main principles that guided the archival institutions while conducting the selection of fund-forming agents and documents which in their opinion were supposed to adequately reflect the Second World War events; to characterize the directions of search, archeographic and publishing work of Soviet archivists; to analyse the information content, completeness, and reliability of the created sets of documents, the consequences of the party archives' activity for the historical memory of the Second World War events. Research methodology. In the course of the research, general scientific and specific historical methods of source and archival heuristics, scientific criticism of sources, diplomatic, textual, and hermeneutical analysis were used. Scientific novelty. The paper introduces the previously unpublished documents on the history of party archives into scientific discourse and reveals the technologies for falsifying the Second World War history at the level of archival institutions during the specified period.Conclusions. In the course of the research, it was found out that the document collections were made in violation of the principles of archival science, which led to the shaping of the Soviet myth of the Great Patriotic War. However, as a result of their activities, the archivists accumulated a lot of interesting historical material, which was not made public due to ideological principles and it creates a certain field for contemporary studies on the history of the Second World War.