Irina Tunkina

Several earlier publications by archivists and historians criticized the fact that Miller's manuscript collection ended up split between the archives of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The issue is not as trivial as it appears. Miller's vast collection includes not only his personal documents, but also his voluminous official correspondence as secretary of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Even after his relocation to Moscow in 1765, the Academy of Sciences sent him many original documents of its conferences, since he was assigned the task of writing the official history of the Academy. In 1782 Catherine II ordered the purchase of Miller's entire collection for the Moscow Archive of Foreign Relations, but in 1829 some of the documents related to the history of the Academy and its expeditions were returned to the archive of the Academy in St. Petersburg.