The National Archive of the Republic of Moldova (ANRM) is the most extensive document repository in the country and holds the most representative collection of archival sources in Moldova. In the interwar period, the Romanian administration created a branch of the State Archives in Bessarabia (1918–1925), which was later reorganised into the Chișinău Directorate of the State Archives (Direcția Arhivelor Statului Chișinău). Immediately after the Second World War, the Soviet authorities merged the former Bessarabian provincial archives (which were still holding files that had not been evacuated to Romania in 1944) and the former central archives of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR). As a result, two main archives were created in 1945: the Central State Historical Archive of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (MSSR) and the Central State Archive of the October Revolution and Socialist Construction of the MSSR. These two central archives were merged in 1958 under the name of the former. The National Archive in its current form was established in 1990, through the merger of the Central State Historical Archive of the MSSR with the Central State Archive of Photo- and Cinematographic Documents of the MSSR, which had been created in 1977. At present, the National Archive of the Republic of Moldova preserves all the historical archival collections belonging to various administrative, judicial, ecclesiastical, economic, and cultural institutions of Bessarabia during the period 1812–1944, with the exception of collections transferred to the Ukrainian regional archives of Odessa and Chernivtsi/Cernăuţi, as well as certain collections that were evacuated to Romania after 1944. The institution also holds archival materials of the MSSR from the administrative, economic, and cultural spheres, as well as the main administrative archives of the Republic of Moldova, including materials related to the governmental institutions, a number of private collections and personal archives, etc. The documents stored in the National Archive cover the economic, social, political, and cultural history of this area from the fifteenth century to the present. The archival holdings consist of over 947,000 files, grouped into around 2000 archival funds and collections. The archive also preserves a valuable collection of audio-video materials, numbering over 257,000 documents and other related materials. The history of the Moldavian SSR during the period 1940–1941 and 1944–1989 is reflected in several categories of archival documents, including papers issued by central government institutions, ministries, state committees and commissions, judicial organs and the Prosecutor General’s Office, various industrial enterprises, cultural and educational institutions, etc. In 2011, a number of collections formerly held in the Archive of the Intelligence and Security Service of the Republic of Moldova, mostly files dealing with significant and representative cases of opposition to the Soviet regime, were transferred to the National Archive. The transfer occurred as a consequence of the activity of the Commission for the Study and Evaluation of the Communist Totalitarian Regime in Moldova, which recommended it as a means of increasing the accessibility of these archival records. However, the transfer process is still incomplete, while the access of interested researchers and the wider public to these funds remains heavily restricted.
