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# 11 roubles 73 kopecks
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/11-rublei-73-kopeiki/
- Published: 2026-08-29T06:14:46.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:19.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Observations, Society

11 roubles 73 kopecks. That is now the price of looking at a single leaf of an archival file in the Sverdlovsk Region online. Not downloading it, not printing it, merely seeing it on a screen.

Many people are discussing the resolution issued by the regional government on 19 August: it hits not only professional historians. Everyone who has ever searched for a great-grandfather, compiled the history of a local factory, or writes a book of local lore in their spare time will suffer.

Parish priests kept metrical books every year, and if you wish to trace your family through even the nineteenth century alone, you will have to open some hundred files in succession. Each of them may run to two hundred leaves, or five hundred, or a thousand when it is a consistory book. Do the multiplication yourself, and bear in mind that the tariff is promised to rise by a further 4% every year.

In neighbouring regions everything is arranged differently. Krasnoyarsk, Samara, Vologda, Irkutsk and nearby Perm Krai charge nothing whatever for remote access.

What troubles me is not only the colossal sum but the logic of the decision. Archival holdings are digitised so that a person in Vladivostok or Kaliningrad may work with Ural documents on equal terms with a resident of Yekaterinburg. Here the result is the reverse: sitting at home with a laptop turns out to cost more than buying a ticket, taking a hotel room and spending a week in a reading room, where, under federal rules, documents are issued free of charge.

I graduated from the Historical and Archival Institute and have a fair idea of why the state keeps confessional rolls of the eighteenth century at all: so that someone may one day read them. But our country, it seems, now possesses some of the most expensive archives for readers in the world! And if in Scotland access costs more, say, £1.50 per item from the parish registers, there all the information has already been processed before you, and you open the image of a specific entry that already contains what you need, rather than leafing through the entire book from cover to cover, running the risk of not finding the name at all.