Physicist Yuri Rumer's personal files as a source on the history of science

Personal files belonging to the scientists are stored in archives and museums. These archives are important sources for biographical and historical studies. The topicality of the investigation of personal files is its profound information potential. Personal documents permit us not only to trace a biography but to place it in the historical context, identify the impact of historical events on a person's life and assess their humanitarian content. The article provides a source study analysis of the corps of documents belonging to the life and activities of physicist Yuri Rumer (1901-1985), who in 1957-1964 headed the Radiophysics and Electronics Institute (Novosibirsk), Siberian Branch, USSR Academy of Sciences. In 2011, the project of the Electronic Open Archive of the Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, was conceived and started. Documents from the archives of the scholars and scientists who have made an outstanding contribution to the development of national science and research - Academician M.M. Lavrentiev, Corresponding Member A.A. Lyapunov, Doctors of Physics and Mathematics A.I. Fet and Yu.B. Rumer - will be published/introduced in the free-access electronic archive. Today, Yu.B. Rumer's archive includes not only documents from his family archive. In order to gain a deeper insight in the life of this scientist, more research has been carried out. We have studied many documents kept at the Academic Archive of the Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, archives of Novosibirsk State University and Moscow State University (the case of a student and worker of the MSU Research Institute of Physics), Central Archive of the Russian Federal Security Service, Archive of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Berlin State Library and the Archive of the State of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsisches Landesarchiv). Also, we have investigated Yuri B. Rumer's personal data file kept at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics. Some documents used in our investigation come from the personal archive of the Novosibirsk physicist D.D. Saratovkin. Nevertheless, the work has not been completed: there are some blind spots left, which fuels our interest.

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