Archival Research in Moscow:

Progress and Pitfalls

Cold War International History Project
By Mark Kramer

The British writer and literary critic Lytton Strachey once remarked that "ignorance is the first requisite of the historian -- ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits."1 By this criterion, historians studying the Soviet Union were remarkably lucky until very recently. Unlike scholars of American politics and foreign policy, who had the daunting task each year of poring through thousands of newly declassified documents, specialists on the Soviet Union normally were forced to go about their work without reading a single item from the Soviet archives. Soviet authorities exercised tight control over all official documents and archival repositories, and no procedures were in place to release any of these materials to the public. For nearly 75 years, the information available about Soviet policy-making was so sparse that Western scholars often had to rely exclusively on published sources, supplemented by a few interviews.

Now that the Soviet Union has ceased to exist, several of the key Soviet archives have finally been opened -- if only on a limited and sporadic basis -- for scholarly research. This development has brought both benefits and drawbacks. The focus here will be mainly on the drawbacks, but that does not mean the benefits have been negligible. As recently as three to four years ago, the notion that Western and Russian scholars would be permitted to examine sensitive postwar documents in the archives of the Soviet Foreign Ministry or the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) would have seemed utterly fanciful. Although the most important archives in Moscow are still sealed off and access to the Central Committee and Foreign Ministry collections is still highly problematic, the Russian government has made at least some effort to release materials to researchers from both Russia and abroad. When I first went to the Central Committee archives and the Foreign Ministry archives in 1992 I assumed I would have to fight constant battles to get the documents I wanted. But soon after I began working there, I found that the main problem I was having was just the opposite: namely, how to cope with the thousands of pages of materials they were quite readily bringing me. Even after some three months of work in those archives, the difficulty of absorbing everything remained as acute as ever. For a brief while I even began to suspect that Strachey was justified in regarding ignorance as a scholarly virtue.

That feeling quickly dissipated, however, when the situation at the archive containing the post-1952 holdings of the Central Committee took a sharp turn for the worse in the spring of 1993. The abrupt dismissal of one of the top archival officials, Vladimir Chernous, in February 1993 was the first sign of an impending clampdown. Chernous had been a prominent advocate of greater openness in the CPSU archives. Two months later the director of that same Central Committee repository, Rem Usikov, was also fired after being accused of "laxness in enforcing regulations on access to confidential material."2 Although Usikov had been a long-time CPSU functionary and was never a proponent of opening up the archives, he had gone along -- if only grudgingly -- with the more relaxed policy that was introduced in the latter half of 1992 and early 1993.3 Thus, his ouster and the initial charges lodged against him were a further indicator that a period of retrenchment was under way. The extent of the retrenchment soon became clearer when Usikov's successor, Anatolii Prokopenko, did away with all the procedures that had been adopted in 1992 to make the archive more accessible. The new director's intention of adhering to what he described as a "more restrictive approach" was well summed up in a remark he made during a conversation in May 1993: "Yes, these documents have been declassified, but that doesn't mean people should be allowed to look at them."4 In the span of just a few days, all the progress at the Central Committee archives that had been achieved since August 1991 seemed to come undone, perhaps irreparably.

Fortunately, this adverse trend did not greatly affect the Foreign Ministry archives, where the degree of access for scholars continued gradually to expand. Although the main reading room at the Foreign Ministry was closed temporarily in mid-1993 (a smaller, temporary one was then opened following complaints from researchers), this was done mainly so that renovations and a much-needed expansion of the room could be completed. The clampdown at the CPSU archives may have engendered a somewhat more cautious atmosphere at the Foreign Ministry, but the trend at the latter was still toward greater openness.

Furthermore, even at the post-1952 Central Committee archives the situation as of mid-1993 was by no means hopeless. In the past, Prokopenko espoused a distinctly liberal view of the need to curb "senseless, deliberately obstructive, and phony" restrictions on "supposedly classified" materials, arguing that "only a small number of these documents genuinely contain secrets."5 At one point he even quit his job as director of the USSR's "Special Archive" -- the repository in which captured document collections and other highly sensitive items were stored -- because he could no longer put up with the "extremely ignorant people" in the Main Archival Directorate (Glavarkhiv) who "insist on keeping everything secret."6  Moreover, in conversations with Cold War International History Project officials in July 1993, both Prokopenko and other archival authorities expressed a willingness to continue cooperation with foreign researchers and projects. Hence, even before Prokopenko was replaced because of health reasons by Natalia Tomilina in September, there were some grounds for optimism that the setback at the former CPSU archives would be only temporary.

Nevertheless, even if the regressive steps that Prokopenko implemented in the spring of 1993 are eventually reversed by his successors, the sudden change of policy was a sobering reminder of how little the Russian authorities understand about the way a government archive is supposed to operate. In the West, state archives are expected to be independent of day-to-day political considerations, and the archivists are responsible for assisting scholars in historical research. Documents in the archives are considered to be part of the public domain and are thus freely accessible to all who work there. In Russia, by contrast, none of these conditions yet holds true. Archival policy in Russia is still determined by the prevailing political winds, and professional archivists find themselves obliged to respond to the demands and whims of high-level bureaucrats. The notion that archival materials and other official records belong to something called the "public domain" is still alien in Russia. Access to documents often depends instead on political connections or, in some cases, on who offers the highest bid. Although the degree of political manipulation and interference at the Russian archives is not as great now as it was during the Soviet era, most of the official repositories in Moscow still fall woefully short of acceptable standards of professional integrity.7

Some Russian and Western observers have expressed hope that the situation will improve, at least somewhat, now that a comprehensive "Law on Archival Collections of the Russian Federation," to regulate all the far-flung state repositories in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere, is finally in place.8 This law was under consideration for several years (initially by the Soviet legislature and more recently by the Russian parliament), and the version of it that was approved in July 1993 was somewhat better than expected, especially compared to other measures adopted by the Russian parliament in the wake of the April 1993 referendum. Still, there is little reason to believe that the archival law will improve matters much in the absence of a broader, well-developed legal system in Russia. Indeed, some features of the new law could actually be used to tighten up, rather than loosen, existing restrictions on archival access.9 An ominous precedent along these lines was nearly set in July 1993 when the Russian legislature approved a new "Law on State Secrets" in a second reading.10 If Russian President Boris Yeltsin had signed the secrecy law, as he did with the archival legislation, it could have been used to seal off vast quantities of information indefinitely.

Whatever the ultimate effect of the archival law may be, the broad changes set in motion by the dissolution of the Russian parliament in September 1993 and the defeat of the hard-line rebellion in Moscow in early October do offer greater reason for hope that access to the Russian archives will improve again. The leeway for reform in the wake of Yeltsin's victory over his opponents should alleviate the concerns that some Russian officials, including those in the archives, had about exposing themselves to reprisals by hard-line forces. Conditions at the archives also are likely to improve if the Russian Security Ministry (the main successor to the Soviet KGB) is drastically scaled back and restructured, as has been proposed.11 By all accounts, hard-line officials from the Security Ministry were among those most responsible for the clampdown at the archives in the spring of 1993. An overhaul of the Ministry that leaves it a good deal weaker will almost certainly be beneficial for those hoping to work in the archives. Whether such an overhaul will be lasting is a different matter, however. After all, the Soviet/Russian security organs were restructured, pared back, and deprived of some of their key functions right after the August 1991 coup attempt, but they were soon able to reclaim almost all of their lost powers and prerogatives. The officials who helped the ministry regain its strength the last time are still firmly ensconced there.

Thus, even if the ascendancy of reformist elements leads to some immediate or short-term improvements in archival access and a more open climate is soon restored to the Central Committee archives, there is no guarantee that what was taken away once will not be taken away again. Until the archival system in Russia -- and the country's whole political system, for that matter -- are placed on a sounder institutional footing, the degree of access to materials in the former CPSU archives and other key repositories in Moscow will continue to depend on capricious judgments and pressures from above.

Scholarly Opportunities

Despite recent setbacks, the Russian government's willingness to allow even a modicum of access to certain archives is a notable departure from the past. Neither Tsarist Russia nor the Soviet Union had any tradition of releasing archival materials to the public. During the Soviet period, the only historians permitted to use secret postwar documents were trusted employees of the CPSU Central Committee, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or the Committee on State Security (KGB). The main responsibility of Soviet archival officials was to ensure that no items, no matter how inconsequential, fell into the hands of unauthorized researchers.12

Fortunately, though, this obsessive secrecy did not prevent the emergence of well-stocked and -- to varying degrees -- well-organized repositories. The collapse of the Soviet Union came so suddenly that the bulk of the archives (with the important exception of the KGB's holdings, as noted below) was left largely intact. Soviet officials never expected that their top-secret documents would one day be exposed to public scrutiny, so they tended to preserve almost everything, even the most incriminating materials. On only a few occasions in the past were large quantities of documents destroyed either deliberately or inadvertently. In 1940 Lavrentii Beria, the infamous secret police chief of the Stalin era, ordered certain materials from the 1920s and 1930s to be shredded. Other items were lost or destroyed during the Second World War as a result of the fighting and the confusion accompanying the mass evacuation of official records. In the early post-Stalin years, especially just after the 20th CPSU Congress in 1956, senior officials who wanted to cover their tracks ensured that key materials were shredded or transferred to remote locations.13 All these episodes in combination may have created substantial gaps in the documentary record of certain events from the Stalin era.

Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that the gaps will prove fatal, not least because copies were made of many documents so that they could be sent to one or two other repositories. Even when materials were destroyed or removed from one archive, copies or closely-related items may turn up elsewhere.14 Furthermore, the scope of what was destroyed may not have been as great as sometimes feared. Crucial documents that have been unearthed in recent years -- such as the lists of mass executions and torture that Stalin routinely ordered, the Russian-language version of the secret protocol to the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and the memorandum ordering the execution of Polish officers in Katyn Forest -- are as incriminating as one could possibly imagine.15 The fact that these and countless other items are still in the archives suggests that any gaps which may have been created are modest compared to the evidence that was not destroyed.

A potentially more vexing problem comes from documents that never existed at all -- that is, from decisions which were made without leaving an explicit "paper trail" of written orders, notes, or transcripts of deliberations. The methodological pitfalls associated with this phenomenon can be seen outside the Soviet field in the works of certain historians who have examined Hitler's decision to order the mass destruction of European Jews. Because Hitler himself refrained from committing the extermination policy to paper (leaving that to subordinates like Himmler, Heydrich, and Eichmann) and resorted to euphemisms when describing the policy in his speeches, a few "revisionist" historians such as David Irving have argued that the Holocaust went on without Hitler's knowledge or approval.16 This thesis has been decisively refuted by a large number of historians both inside and outside Germany, but the very fact that Irving can make his claims -- no matter how tendentious they may seem -- underscores the way the lack of written records on particular matters can be abused and manipulated by historians.17

To a certain extent at least, this same problem is bound to arise with the former Soviet archives. In a country like the Soviet Union, where "telephone justice" (i.e., telephone calls from top CPSU officials to state functionaries ordering them how to resolve specific issues) and "word-of-mouth-only" decision-making long prevailed, one is apt to find important activities or decisions that were not committed to paper. This may well be the case, for example, with the assassination in 1934 of the head of the Leningrad party, Sergei Kirov. Although most historians agree that Stalin himself ordered the murder, no written order to that effect has yet been located, and it is likely that none exists.18  Problems of this sort also crop up from time to time in the study of Soviet foreign policy. Deliberations about key foreign policy decisions, both during and after the Stalinist era, did not always get recorded in full. Such may be the case, for example, with the decision in 1962 to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Although a vast amount of evidence about the Cuban missile crisis has recently come to light, there is little reason to expect that documents will emerge explaining precisely what the Soviet leadership hoped to gain from the missile deployments.19

Nevertheless, despite the obstacles caused by gaps in the written record (especially from the Stalin era), these need not hinder efforts to understand Soviet history. For one thing, in a country that was as obsessed with record-keeping of all sorts as the Soviet Union was, the documentation of most events and decisions was far more extensive than one would find virtually anywhere else. Shortly before the archives were opened, a few Western scholars had speculated that access to Soviet repositories would be of only limited value because the records in Moscow "are probably sparse."20 Even a brief stint at the ex-Soviet archives will show how unfounded this claim was. Far from being "sparse," the archives in Moscow are overflowing with documents and information that will greatly enrich our historical understanding. What is more, even when genuine gaps in the record exist, one can always try to work around them. The specific order for Kirov's assassination may not have been put down on paper, but an enormous amount of other evidence points to Stalin's complicity, as Robert Conquest and others have demonstrated. If freer access is granted to the most important archives in Moscow (i.e., the Presidential Archive, the military archives, and the KGB archives), the amount of documentation that will help fill in gaps will only increase.

Furthermore, even though some gaps are likely to remain once all the archives have been opened, that will not necessarily inhibit scholarly endeavors. No matter how complete or incomplete the written record may be in any particular instance, there will always be room for legitimate differences of interpretation. New documentary evidence can help narrow those differences and cast doubt on certain interpretations -- which is precisely why archival research is valuable -- but it would be naive to think that the archives alone will generate a grand scholarly consensus on every important matter. With or without greater access to the former Soviet archives, disagreements about how to interpret specific events and documents will persist in the future.

This is not to say, however, that the importance of archival research should be discounted; quite the contrary. The opportunity to examine declassified Soviet documents and the latest memoirs by ex-Soviet officials may not be a panacea, but it is the only way we are going to obtain a better understanding of Soviet history. Archival evidence and new memoirs can bring to light previously unknown data; and, equally important, they can corroborate or undercut interpretations that had long been taken for granted. Several years ago John Lewis Gaddis noted the value of declassified materials for the study of U.S. foreign policy, and his remarks seem even more apposite now, mutatis mutandis, for the study of Soviet foreign policy:

I am familiar with the argument that the [New York] Times is usually two steps ahead of the Central Intelligence Agency in any event, and that access to internal government documents would not substantially alter our knowledge of what is going on at any given point. But that is simply not true: anyone who has looked carefully at declassified government documents from the post-1945 era will know how inadequate the public record is as a guide to what was actually happening. . . . And even when the public record does faithfully reflect what goes on behind the scenes, the psychology of many policymakers -- at least those who believe that nothing is worth reading unless it is stamped "top secret" -- might well cause them to discount generalizations based solely upon what appears in "open" sources, however thorough they may be.21

The disjunction that Gaddis noted between the "public record" and "what was actually happening" raises troubling questions about traditional Western analyses of Soviet foreign policy.  Of necessity, these analyses were based exclusively on open sources. Yet the very fact that secret documentation was not released by the Soviet government would lead one to expect that the discrepancy between open and closed sources in the Soviet Union was at least as great as -- or even greater than -- in the United States.

To be sure, most Western scholars did their best to make allowance for the constraints imposed by the lack of primary Soviet documentation. Nevertheless, many were tempted, at least occasionally, to infer too much from the public record.22 Some scholars even led themselves to believe that "the debate and controversies to be discerned among the Soviet press organs constitute a faithful reflection of the actual debates taking place in closed forums."23 Such confident assumptions about what could be gleaned from open sources have not been borne out by the new documentary evidence in Moscow. On the contrary, we can now see from the Russian archives that the divergence between the "public record" and "what was actually happening" in Soviet foreign policy was, if anything, even wider than one might have expected.24

Thus, for scholars who hope to be more knowledgeable and more accurate about the topics they are exploring, access to declassified Soviet documents will be of great benefit. The potential value of the new archival sources is apparent from the way the earlier release of American and West European documents enriched our understanding of Stalin's foreign policy. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when "post-revisionist" scholars began reexamining the Soviet Union's role in the early Cold War years, they were able to exploit newly declassified Western materials to bridge at least part of the gap between the "public record" and "what was actually happening."25 The opportunity to take advantage of this evidence helped ensure that the post-revisionist works surpassed all previous studies in the field, both in nuance and in scope. Needless to say, the likelihood of further advances is even greater now that declassified documents will be available not only from Western countries but from Moscow as well.

Already, in fact, new evidence from the ex-Soviet archives has shed a good deal of light on key topics in Soviet domestic affairs and foreign policy. For example, recently declassified materials confirm that Stalin played a direct and expansive role in the mass repressions of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, contrary to what some Western "revisionist" historians had been arguing.26 The new evidence also undercuts the revisionists' claims that the scale of the Stalinist repressions was much smaller than earlier Western estimates had suggested. It turns out that the earlier estimates, far from being too high, may in some cases have significantly understated the actual number of victims.27 With regard to foreign policy, declassified materials have helped clarify such important issues as the Sino-Soviet split, the Soviet role in the Korean and Vietnam wars, and Moscow's decision to invade Afghanistan. On this last topic, for example, many hundreds of pages of newly released documents indicate that Soviet leaders in December 1979 were well aware of the potential difficulties that Soviet troops might encounter, but were convinced that all those problems could be overcome relatively easily.28

As more documents are declassified in the future, our understanding of many other issues is also bound to improve. Materials from the Presidential Archive, the military archives, and the KGB archives, which are not yet freely available, should be especially valuable in helping to clarify some of the most mysterious and controversial topics. To be sure, scholars will have to be cautious about what they find in the archives, and will have to resist some of the methodological pitfalls discussed below. Also, it is worth stressing again that new evidence, no matter how important, cannot guarantee a scholarly consensus. The room for legitimate disagreement may narrow considerably, but differences over the best way to interpret complex events will inevitably remain. Yet, despite all these caveats, it is clear that the opening of the ex-Soviet archives has provided immense opportunities for scholars.

New Archival Collections

Until late 1991, the central state archives of the Soviet Union were administered by the Main Archival Directorate (Glavarkhiv) of the Soviet Council of Ministers. Glavarkhiv also supervised several thousand regional and local archives in the USSR. The CPSU archives, however, were managed separately by the party itself.  The Institute of Marxism-Leninism was responsible for the Central Party Archive, while the Central Committee apparatus supervised its own 140 archives as well as those of the Secretariat. Documents from the Politburo, as noted below, were stored in a special archive in the Kremlin, under the direct control of the CPSU General Secretary.

Following the aborted coup in August 1991 and the dissolution of the USSR four months later, the archives in Moscow were extensively reorganized. Glavarkhiv was abolished, and almost all of its vast staff and bureaucratic apparatus, including its specialized archival research institute, were transferred intact to the newly created Russian State Committee on Archival Affairs (Roskomarkhiv). The 15 central state archives in Russia that had been administered by Glavarkhiv were placed under the direct jurisdiction of Roskomarkhiv. Most of the nearly 2,200 other state archives in Russia -- including 47 republican archives, 170 regional sites, and 1,981 provincial and local repositories -- also came under the new agency's indirect control, though they were accorded much greater autonomy than they ever were permitted when they had to report to Glavarkhiv.29 As of late 1992, the 17 federal archives under Roskomarkhiv's direct control housed some 65.3 million files, comprising many billions of pages of documents. The other state archives in Russia -- at the republic, regional, and provincial levels -- accounted for another 138.7 million files, with billions more pages of documents.

In early 1993, Roskomarkhiv was reorganized and renamed the "State Archival Service of Russia" (Rosarkhiv), in accordance with a governmental decree signed in late December 1992.30 The change of name and restructuring of the agency were intended to place Rosarkhiv on a par, both symbolically and substantively, with other federal agencies such as the Russian External Intelligence Service (RSVR). The current director of Rosarkhiv is Rudolf  Pikhoya, who was formerly the prorector of the university in Sverdlovsk (now called Ekaterinburg), where he became acquainted with the then-first secretary of the Sverdlovsk branch of the CPSU, Boris Yeltsin. It was also in Sverdlovsk that Pikhoya got to know a faculty member, Gennadii Burbulis, who later became a top aide to Yeltsin. Thus, it is not surprising that Yeltsin would have chosen Pikhoya to supervise Russia's archives, a post that is far more politically sensitive than it would be in most countries. Nor is it surprising that as the head of Rosarkhiv, Pikhoya has been unusually attentive to the political interests of Yeltsin, not only by releasing documents that are embarrassing to Yeltsin's opponents (especially Mikhail Gorbachev), but also by serving as a presidential envoy when materials have been turned over to foreign countries.31

Although Pikhoya is the leading archival official in Russia, his agency does not yet have jurisdiction over some of the most important archival collections, including the CPSU Politburo's records. Rosarkhiv does, however, have control over the rest of the former CPSU archives in Moscow, which are now divided between two major sites: the Russian Center for the Storage and Study of Documents of Recent History (RTsKhIDNI), which includes the former Central Party Archive and other CPSU holdings through October 1952; and the much larger Center for Storage of Contemporary Documentation (TsKhSD), which includes all CPSU Central Committee holdings from October 1952 through the end of the Soviet regime in December 1991.32 Even though the two repositories are both subordinate to Rosarkhiv and are geographically propinquitous to one another, there seems to be relatively little interaction or collaboration between them.

Together, the former CPSU archives include some 30 million files with more than six billion pages of documents accumulated by the Central Party Archive and the Central Committee apparatus (Fond No. 5), plus a smaller number of documents pertaining to the CPSU Secretariat (Fond No. 4). For the most part these documents, especially those in Fond No. 5, key "inputs" into the decision-making process, rather than how decisions were actually made at the top levels. The materials collected by the Central Committee apparatus include a vast number of items produced by the Foreign Ministry, KGB, Defense Ministry, and other state agencies, copies of which were routinely sent to the relevant CPSU departments. RTsKhIDNI's holdings also include the voluminous files of the Comintern (Fond No. 495), the Soviet-sponsored organization that coordinated and directed international communist activities until it was formally dissolved in 1943.

In general, the documents from the post-October 1952 period at TsKhSD are better organized than the older documents stored at RTsKhIDNI; but the finding aids at RTsKhIDNI, which have now been listed in a computerized data base, are elaborate enough to compensate for most deficiencies in organization. (The main exception is the Comintern files, for which finding aids are unavailable.) The finding aids at TsKhSD are also of superb quality, even by Western standards. Researchers at the archives can look up whatever files they need under the appropriate Central Committee departments, relevant timeframe, and even specific topics. Whether requests to look at the files will be granted is, of course, a different matter, especially at TsKhSD.

The archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID), which were recently renamed the "Foreign Policy Archives of the Russian Federation" (AVPRF), are not under Rosarkhiv's jurisdiction and thus have operated along somewhat different lines. In accordance with the liberal and pro-Western orientation of Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, the AVPRF was the first of the former Soviet archives to open its postwar holdings to outside researchers, despite resistance by some archivists within the ministry. (Some noteworthy progress toward opening the MID archives had already begun under the final three Soviet foreign ministers--Eduard Shevardnadze, Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, and Boris Pankin, especially Pankin and Shevardnadze--whose outlook was similar to Kozyrev's.) Although the declassification procedures at the AVPRF are still cumbersome and slow, the archive overall has become increasingly accessible since mid-1992 and has remained so even while the CPSU archives have been retrenching. This auspicious trend at MID is at least partly attributable to the existence of a multi-country arrangement that has helped foster an institutionalized framework for the AVPRF, as will be discussed below.

The bulk of the AVPRF's holdings consists of cables, reports, and other documents generated either at Soviet embassies or within the ministry's own departments and agencies.33 Although many of the cables and reports are routine and uninformative, others contain important transcripts of conversations with foreign leaders or cogent assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet policy. A special division of the AVPRF, Fond No. 59, contains all the ciphered (i.e., supersecret) cables transmitted to and from Soviet embassies over the years, but this entire division, unfortunately, is still off limits.34 Even without access to the most sensitive items, however, researchers are bound to come across plenty of valuable documents in the AVPRF.

The main problem with the Foreign Ministry archives, in fact, is not that materials are inaccessible, but that no finding aids of any sort have been disseminated. This deficiency has compelled researchers to depend entirely, or almost entirely, on archival employees to find out what is available on a particular subject. Even the best-intentioned and most capable archivists will not be able to provide the comprehensive coverage one can get by perusing finding aids such as those at the Central Committee archives. Moreover, the lack of finding aids at the AVPRF precludes the serendipitous discovery of materials closely (or not so closely) related to the researcher's project, which the archivist may not realize would be of interest. Although officials in charge of the Foreign Ministry archives are aware of the problems caused by the lack of finding aids, they say that severe funding constraints have prevented them from taking remedial steps. Among other things, they would have to pay for the reproduction of dozens of inventories (opisi), and would have to hire and pay additional staff (retired senior diplomats) to scrutinize and declassify every page of the opisi. Some rudimentary finding aids, including lists of fonds and opisi, are supposed to be compiled in 1993 and 1994, and more elaborate materials should be available by 1995 or 1996. Those measures will certainly help, but the utility of the AVPRF will be limited until it provides finding aids comparable to those at the CPSU archives.

As illuminating as the former Central Party Archive, the former Central Committee archives, and the Foreign Ministry archives may be, they are not the most important repositories in Moscow. Scholars hoping to understand how decisions were made at the highest levels, as opposed to the "inputs" into the decision-making process, must look elsewhere.35  All transcripts and notes from the CPSU Politburo's meetings, all materials in the vast personal files of top Soviet officials, and all other items deemed to be of greatest sensitivity are in the Kremlin Archive (Fond No. 3), which during Mikhail Gorbachev's time was reorganized, expanded, and renamed the "Presidential Archive."36  During the final years of the Soviet regime, countless documents that had been stored in the CPSU archives were removed from their files and transferred permanently to the Presidential Archive, in keeping with Gorbachev's broader efforts to shift power from the central party apparatus to the state presidency. The rest of the CPSU holdings have been under the jurisdiction of Roskomarkhiv/Rosarkhiv since late August 1991, but the Presidential Archive has remained independent. In December 1991 the outgoing Soviet president (Gorbachev) relinquished control of the Presidential Archive to the Russian president, and it has been under Yeltsin's direct supervision ever since.

No change in that status is envisaged any time soon under the new archival law, even though there have been periodic intimations that the Presidential Archive would be surbordinated to the archival service. In late 1991 and early 1992, Pikhoya and other senior archival officials maintained that the entire holdings of the Presidential Archive would soon be transferred to repositories controlled by Roskomarkhiv.37 Nothing of the sort actually occurred. In the winter and spring of 1993, Pikhoya again averred that all "historical" items in the Presidential Archive would be turned over by the end of the year to TsKhSD and RTsKhIDNI.38 Whether that will be the case is questionable, however. Although it seems likely that a substantial portion of the documents in the Presidential Archive will eventually be reassigned to Rosarkhiv, the new archival law does not mandate any such transfer in a fixed time period.39 Moreover, even if the law did set a time limit, the schedule that Pikhoya proposed is far too compressed and subject to disruption by the recent turmoil at the former CPSU archives and by the expense involved in relocating such large quantities of materials. Most important, the question remains whether a change of formal jurisdiction will truly bring greater access to documents that have been almost totally sealed off until now.40

So far, the only materials that have been released from the Presidential Archive have been declassified exclusively for political rather than scholarly reasons: in some cases to improve relations with foreign countries, and in other cases to provide documentary evidence for the trial of the CPSU before the Constitutional Court. Among the documents released to foreign governments are items pertaining to the 1983 Korean airliner incident, the Katyn Forest massacres, the 1956 invasion of Hungary, the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the 1980-81 crisis in Poland. The documents provided to the Constitutional Court now come to many thousands of pages, and comprise some of the most sensitive items from the whole Soviet period, including a large number of materials from the Gorbachev era. A special commission was set up in May 1992 under Mikhail Poltoranin (who was later removed) to oversee the declassification and transfer of documents for the Court's proceedings.41  Until recently, lists of many of the items provided to the Court were available at TsKhSD in Fond No. 89, and copies of the documents could be freely ordered for review or photocopying, no matter what the topic. That is no longer the case, however, under the stricter rules adopted in April 1993. Any use of materials in Fond No. 89 now requires the archive director's explicit approval, archive director, and only materials germane to the researcher's specified topic may be requested.

In addition to the Presidential Archive, two other crucial repositories that are still closed are the former KGB archives, which include a total of some 10 million files, and the military archives of the Defense Ministry. During the Soviet period, the KGB's main archives in the Lyubanka were hermetically sealed off to all but a few authorized personnel. Even after Gorbachev came to power, no effort was made to prod the KGB into releasing materials for scholarly purposes.42 In the wake of the August 1991 coup attempt, reports surfaced that large stocks of documents in the KGB's central archives were being destroyed. Although President Yeltsin and the newly appointed head of the KGB, Vadim Bakatin, quickly took steps to halt the destruction, Bakatin later surmised that many valuable items had been shredded or burned.43 Similar conclusions were reached by a special parliamentary commission that was set up in October 1991 to monitor the fate of the KGB's documents.44  This loss of materials compounded the effects of earlier sprees of archival destruction, which had been directed predominantly against the KGB's holdings.

Jurisdiction over the KGB's entire archives was formally transferred to Roskomarkhiv during the last few months of the Soviet regime, in accordance with a decree Yeltsin issued on 24 August 1991.45 Under Roskomarkhiv's auspices, the parliamentary commission and its local branches were able to begin assessing the scope and content of the archives and, in certain instances, publicly disclosing what they found. These steps, combined with Bakatin's efforts to make some materials more accessible, brought a modicum of openness to the KGB's central archives for the first time.46 Many observers expected that the trend toward greater openness would continue while Roskomarkhiv tried to figure out expedite and payfor the physical transfer of KGB documents to state repositories at all levels.

No sooner had the Soviet Union collapsed, however, than Bakatin lost his job and the newly renamed Russian Ministry of Security (the main successor to the KGB) reasserted control over the KGB's central archives.47 Although Roskomarkhiv retained nominal jurisdiction over the archives, Pikhoya effectively eschewed any further attempts to interfere with the KGB's materials. For his part, the new head of the Security Ministry, Viktor Barannikov, promptly retracted all the steps Bakatin had introduced to make certain documents available. By mid-1992 the commission that was established to oversee the transfer of the KGB's central archives to independent sites largely ceased to function, despite having failed to complete its mission. Moreover, even when the Security Ministry announced plans in May 1993 to open a reading room in the central archives by late 1993 or 1994, this did not adumbrate a genuine shift in archival policy. The only ones for whom the room is intended are individual citizens hoping to be given information about close relatives who died in the Stalinist repressions. Although a few scholars may eventually be permitted to review scattered files, broad access to the KGB archives is not in the offing. Nor is any improvement likely under the new archival law. On the contrary, most of the KGB's documents could end up being even less accessible than before, with files sealed off completely for 50 to 75 years or more.

Even the one seemingly bright spot in this gloomy picture -- a deal that an American company, Crown Publishing, struck with the Russian External Intelligence Service (RSVR, the successor to the KGB's First Main Directorate) in mid-1992 to publish as many as ten books compiled from selected KGB documents -- may be less positive than it appears at first glance. Indeed, there are some indications that the arrangement will be counterproductive. Although the books will cover important topics such as the Berlin crises, espionage operations in Great Britain, the Cuban missile crisis, and the case of Leon Trotsky, the deal sets a number of highly undesirable precedents. For one thing, officials from the RSVR have exclusive say over what Crown's authors will be permitted to see. Thus, the version of history that these books yield will be the KGB's own.48 More important, the documents selected for Crown's volumes will reportedly be denied to all other scholars for at least 10 years following publication (and perhaps indefinitely after that as well), an arrangement that runs directly contrary to the principle of greater openness. By the same token, the huge sum that Crown is doling out ($1 million) creates a disincentive for the RSVR to release any of its other materials for public use in the future unless comparable monetary inducements are forthcoming. Finally, the deal pertains only to the holdings of the RSVR, which for obvious reasons are the easiest for the Russian government to withhold on grounds of "national security." Crown will have no access at all to the much larger central archives controlled by the Security Ministry.49

The unavailability of documents from Soviet military archives is an equally serious obstacle to researchers, especially for those studying postwar Soviet foreign policy. Soviet military documents have long been scattered among several archives in or near Moscow and St. Petersburg, including the General Staff Archives (IATsGSVS), the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense (TsAMO), the Archive of the Main Intelligence Directorate (AGRU), the Central Naval Archive of the Ministry of Defense (TsVMAMO), the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA), the Russian State Military-Historical Archive (RGVIA), and the Russian State Archive of the Navy (RGAVMF).50 The first four of these repositories contain highly classified military items from World War II and the post-1945 period, and all four archives are independent of Rosarkhiv. Although the other three sites -- RGVA, RGVIA, and RGAVMF -- are now under Rosarkhiv's supervision, their holdings are less sensitive than those at the first four archives and they do not include any materials from the post-1941 period. Thus, all military documents from the Cold War era are outside Rosarkhiv's jurisdiction.

By the mid- to late 1980s a few researchers were able to gain partial access to military holdings from the early Soviet period, especially the revolutionary and civil war years. Eventually, some scattered collections from as late as World War II also were released.51 Moreover, in early 1989 a five-volume annotated list of nearly 34,000 fonds in the Central State Archive of the Soviet Army (TsGASA, the former name of RGVA), covering the years from 1917 to 1941, was declassified. Subsequently, the list was authorized for commercial distribution in the West.52 All these measures, however, still fell far short of the access that serious scholars would need. A fitting illustration of how closed and secretive the military archives remained even at the height of glasnost came in 1990 when one of the most trusted Soviet military historians, General Dmitrii Volkogonov, publicly complained that he and other senior officers at the Soviet Defense Ministry's own Institute of Military History were being denied access to holdings from World War II and earlier.53

In the post-Soviet era, the kind of problem that Volkogonov cited may have ebbed, but military documents from the post-1945 period have remained as tightly sealed as ever, and the military intelligence (GRU) archives are still totally off-limits even to the Russian Defense Ministry's own historians. Vast quantities of military documents from the past five decades, numbering billions of pages, are known to be in either TsAMO or one of the other three defense archives mentioned above; but there is little way, short of having an inside contact, of knowing precisely what is there or how well it is stored.54 Judging from articles by high-ranking Russian military officers who have been granted selective access to postwar military documentation, the main Defense Ministry repositories and General Staff archives contain reasonably well-organized collections, with detailed sets of operational plans and instructions from the major postwar crises.55 Only a minuscule fraction of this material has been released or even cited, however, and there is little indication that access to the military archives will improve in the future. The continued lack of access prevents scholars from exploring key aspects of the foreign policy-making process in the Soviet Union as well as some of the still-mysterious episodes in Soviet internal politics (e.g., the July 1957 Zhukov affair, in which the celebrated World War II hero and Soviet defense minister, Marshal Georgii Zhukov, was abruptly removed from office56).

Collaboration With Foreign Partners

In 1992 and the first few months of 1993, Pikhoya's agency and some of the individual Russian archives established cooperative links with foreign archival experts and scholarly institutes to help make the collections in Moscow more accessible. Universities, research centers, and national archives from some 25 countries, including Finland, Israel, Poland, Hungary, China, South Korea, and Iran as well as all the leading Western countries, have entered into such arrangements. By far the largest of the deals was one that Roskomarkhiv arranged with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University soon after the aborted August 1991 coup. The status of this particular deal was not impaired by the retrenchment at the CPSU archives in mid-1993, though this may have been because the initial phase of the deal pertained only to the inventories at the archives, rather than the documents themselves.57 Other cooperative ventures of special importance are one involving TsKhSD and the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, another that has provided an international supervisory panel for the Foreign Ministry archives, and a third involving joint production of a new journal called Istoricheskii Arkhiv ("Historical Archive"). Each of these arrangements will be briefly discussed below to provide a sample of the nearly five dozen cooperative ventures that have been established since 1991, some with greater success than others.58

The Hoover Institution's project with Rosarkhiv, which is closely tied to separate deals that the U.S. Library of Congress and the British firm Chadwyck-Healey set up earlier, is expected to cost between $3 million and $5 million over a period of at least five years. The deal, as signed in April 1992, covers the "preservation, exchange, and publication" of archival materials.59 It stipulates that Hoover archivists will catalog and microfilm at least 25 million pages of documents from the CPSU Central Committee archives and assorted state archives, ranging from 1917 to 1991. The project began in mid-1992 and will not be completed until 1996 or later. An editorial board of prominent international scholars, chaired by Pikhoya, is responsible for selecting which of the billions of pages of documents will be microfilmed.60 (They will designate entire fonds for microfilming, rather than specifying individual items.) All such documents are supposed to be fully available to scholars even while the project is under way, a notable contrast to the Crown Publishing deal with the RSVR archives. The first phase of the Hoover project involves the microfilming of the complete opisi (inventories) of the former CPSU and state archives, an impressive undertaking in itself. The total number of pages in the opisi is close to 3 million.

When the project is completed, one copy of the 25,000 reels of microfilms will be deposited at Hoover, and another will be given to Rosarkhiv along with the original negatives. In addition, a copy of the most important microfilms will be deposited at the U.S. Library of Congress and at the Russian State Library (formerly known as the Lenin Library). Chadwyck-Healey will have the right to market a smaller set of microfilms around the world except in the former Soviet Union, where Rosarkhiv will retain full control. Profits from the sales are to be shared with Pikhoya's agency and Hoover. In return for the microfilms from the Russian archives, Hoover not only will underwrite all costs of the project and transfer the advanced microfilming equipment to Rosarkhiv, but will also provide the Russian archival agency with a full set of 4,000 reels of microfilmed documents from Hoover's own large collection of materials about Russia. When further portions of the Hoover documents on Russia are microfilmed in coming years (eventually reaching as much as 25,000 reels), Hoover will supply copies of those microfilms to Rosarkhiv as well.

From the outset, the Hoover-Roskomarkhiv deal's size and scope made it the target of attacks in Russia. Nationalist commentators and parliamentarians accused Pikhoya of the national heritage.61 Members of the quasi-fascist group Pamyat' claimed that the project was part of a Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy to turn over Russia's "treasures" and "deepest secrets" to the West. Some criticisms of the deal also appeared in the liberal Russian press, where commentators voiced "bewilderment" that "a project on such a vast scale would be undertaken by a state-run archive." 62 Even Yurii Afanas'ev, a distinguished historian and rector of the Russian State Center for the Humanities (formerly the Archival-Historical Institute), who had long been noted for his radical democratic views, immediately expressed skepticism about the deal with Chadwyck-Healey and, a few months later, bitterly complained that Roskomarkhiv was "selling out Russia's past" in its deal with Hoover.63

Although many of the objections to the project were inaccurate or grossly exaggerated, the unease felt by some of the critics, particularly Afanas'ev, was understandable in certain respects. Professional historians in Russia were aware that the economic plight of the archives and the lack of a concept of "public domain" had created temptations for archival officials to secure funding through any means necessary, including unsavory "exchanges" and "transfers" of documents. It is not surprising, therefore, that Russian historians would have questioned the propriety of a deal as large as the one that Hoover and Roskomarkhiv concluded.

Moreover, Afanas'ev and his colleagues seemed to feel a special obligation to "protect" the archives because they sensed -- with some justification -- that most Russian citizens had little or no interest in what happened to the documents. In 1992, the number of researchers who actually worked in the 17 federal archives in Russia was only about 3,000, and of these more than 45 percent were foreigners.64 On average, then, each of the archives hosted a total of just 92 Russians during the entire year, or about one person every four days.  This low turnout, Afanas'ev feared, meant that archival holdings could be sold off without arousing a hint of public protest.

These two factors -- the pervasive economic stringency in Russia, and the public's seeming indifference to the fate of the archives -- induced even the best-intentioned critics (not to mention those whose aims were less benevolent) to misconstrue and misrepresent the Hoover-Roskomarkhiv project. Confronted by charges of a "sell-out," Pikhoya vigorously defended the arrangement and was at least partly successful in overcoming the more vitriolic and tendentious attacks.65 In a few cases when legitimate concerns about the project were raised, the officials overseeing the effort sought to accommodate and respond to those concerns.66 Although criticisms in the Russian press gradually faded in the latter half of 1992, the lingering effects of the controversy were significant enough to impede the consummation of other proposals to microfilm archival collections in Russia.67 Moreover, fresh complaints about the Hoover project suddenly appeared in the spring of 1993, in line with the retrenchment at the former CPSU Central Committee archives.68 Those attacks, as noted above, did not create any immediate problems for the ongoing work of the Hoover archivists, but it remains to be seen whether the arrangement will hold up if Russia's political climate takes a sharp turn for the worse.

The deal between TsKhSD and the Wilson Center's Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) involved a third partner as well, the Institute of Universal History (IVI) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. A tripartite agreement signed in July 1992 stipulated that Western and Russian scholars involved with the project must be given equal and unrestricted access to "declassified materials" in the CPSU archives, with all materials made available to the international scholarly community and no restrictions whatsoever placed on the rights of scholars to use declassified documents.69 At a preliminary meeting in Moscow in January 1992, participants discussed exactly what is available in the Russian archives and the terms and principles of possible collaboration. A follow-on conference in Moscow, in January 1993, which was organized by the IVI and CWIHP and funded by the latter, allowed researchers to present the initial findings of their work. Among the topics explored at this conference were the breakdown of wartime cooperation, the Soviet response to the Marshall Plan, the division of Germany, the Korean War, the Suez and Berlin crises, the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Sino-Soviet relations, the Vietnam War, and the 1972 U.S.-Soviet summit. Revised versions of selected papers are supposed to be compiled as a book, but the prospects for continued collaboration were thrown into doubt by the clampdown at TsKhSD in the spring of 1993.

One of the distinctive features of the original CWIHP-TsKhSD deal was the requirement that any documents released in connection with the project must subsequently be made available to all scholars, Russians and foreigners alike. Initially, the access that participants were given to the CPSU archives was less than satisfactory, but starting in the early autumn of 1992 the archivists were willing to comply with most requests. That policy continued for several weeks after the January 1993 conference.70 Even so, a few of the archival officials were uncomfortable with the arrangement from the very start, and they often seemed to be erecting as many obstacles as they could to prevent materials from being disseminated. Although TsKhSD received $12,500 from CWIHP in return for preparing reports and accelerating the declassification of its holdings, that sum apparently was not enough to deter certain TsKhSD officials from trying to renege on the agreement. In May 1993 Prokopenko indicated that he did still intend to abide by the agreement, but it is difficult to square that pledge with some of his actions, especially his decision to deny or limit access to Fond No. 89.71

For Western scholars not associated with CWIHP, the task of working in the former CPSU archives has been more arduous still. Although all scholars were supposed to have access to materials released in connection with the CWIHP-TsKhSD-IVI project, those materials were deemed to be "classified" until they were formally released.72 Consequently, researchers not affiliated with the CWIHP venture (or with one of the other Western deals with Roskomarkhiv/Rosarkhiv) almost invariably found that they were denied access to materials at TsKhSD, despite CWIHP's repeated requests that all scholars receive equal access to released materials. Although this situation should have been rectified once thousands of documents were "declassified" for the CWIHP-TsKhSD-IVI participants, it is not yet clear whether TsKhSD will live up to its obligations. Certainly the archive's rigidity in providing access to some researchers but no access at all to others in 1992 and early 1993 was a telltale sign of the much more vexing problems to come in the spring and summer of 1993. Those problems will be discussed at greater length in the next section.

A collaborative project that has been more durable, at least so far, is an effort to link the Russian Foreign Ministry archives with a panel known as the International Academic Advisory Group (IAAG). This multinational undertaking is sponsored by the Norwegian Nobel Institute, which has helped raise funds of more than $100,000 for the archive from Japanese and U.S. donors, and administered by the International Archives Assistance Fund (IASF). The arrangement provides for four senior Western scholars (Odd Arne Westad from Norway, William Taubman from the United States, Jonathan Haslam from Great Britain, and Gerhard Wettig from Germany) to serve on a joint board with archivists and historians from MID. The panel, which is chaired by Westad and has Sven Holtsmark of the IASF as its secretary, has assisted the AVPRF in applying for funds from Western and Japanese sources to help ameliorate specific features of the archive that are most deficient (e.g., finding aids, the size and working conditions of the reading room, and salaries for the staff). The funding allotments themselves give the IAAG considerable leverage over the AVPRF's priorities, and the panel also can make recommendations for other improvements as it sees fit, especially regarding declassification procedures.

Among the concrete results of the IAAG's work was the establishment of a set of guidelines for declassifying and releasing materials, which the group presented to the Foreign Ministry collegium in March 1992. Their proposals were adopted largely intact the following month, when the Foreign Ministry published new sets of rules for archival declassification and access.73 The new regulations stipulate that the AVPRF must make items older than 30 years available as soon as possible except when doing so would "demonstrably impede" Russia's security or cause "danger or distress" to individuals. Although these clauses are phrased so broadly that they may be susceptible to abuse, the IAAG has been careful to monitor the implementation of the new rules and to recommend improvements when needed. Despite relatively slow progress in spurring the AVPRF to release and produce more finding aids, and to declassify deciphered telegrams, the international advisory panel has generally been successful in fostering a climate of greater openness.

Another collaborative project that has been valuable in helping to open up some of the most important Russian archives is the renewed publication -- after a 30-year hiatus -- of Istoricheskii arkhiv, which covers the latest developments in archival affairs. The journal's chief editor is A. A. Chernobaev, and the editorial board, chaired by Pikhoya, consists of distinguished Russian, American, British, and German scholars and archival officials, who are able to ensure that Istoricheskii arkhiv meets high professional standards. Two prominent U.S. specialists connected with the Hoover project -- the deputy director of the Hoover Institution, Charles Palm, and the Librarian of Congress, James Billington -- are on the journal's editorial board, as are all three of the Russian archival officials (Pikhoya, Volkogonov, and Nikolai Pokrovskii) who are most directly involved in the Hoover project. Initial funding for the revival of the journal came from Rosarkhiv, with supplementary aid from the Cultural Initiative Fund and the Center for Democracy. Eventually, the publishing effort is to become part of the larger scholarly programs associated with the Hoover-Rosarkhiv deal. The previous version of Istoricheskii arkhiv was published for eight years during the post-Stalin "thaw," but was abruptly closed down in 1962 because of its boldness in featuring controversial documents.74 Unlike that earlier version, the new journal is independent in its editorial judgments and enjoys discretion to print whatever documents it can obtain.

The first issue of the new Istoricheskii arkhiv, designated as Issue No. 1 for 1992, appeared in early 1993. It contained some 220 densely-printed pages of recently declassified documents, along with thoughtful introductions and annotations for all the items covered. Most of the documentation came from TsKhSD, RTsKhIDNI, or one of the 15 state archives under Rosarkhiv's direct jurisdiction. Nothing was included from the KGB and Defense Ministry archives or even from the AVPRF, but a few items from the Presidential Archive were published, and the editors promised to obtain more documents from that key repository in the future. Although most of the materials in the first issue were from the pre-1945 period, a surprisingly large number of documents from more recent years were featured as well, including some from the last year under Gorbachev. No doubt, a few of the items were included mainly to embarrass Yeltsin's opponents, but overall the journal hewed to its scholarly mission and avoided being used for partisan political ends. Among the topics covered were the Stalinist purges, the Bolsheviks' early conceptions of foreign policy, Soviet preparations for World War II, the persecution of renowned literary figures (Mikhail Zoshchenko and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn), the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954, the crackdown in Lithuania in early 1991, and the attempts by hard-line CPSU officials to stave off the collapse of the Soviet regime. Although the first issue of Istoricheskii arkhiv contained no startling revelations, it was a very useful start for a journal of its kind.

More valuable still was the next issue, which was designated as Issue No. 1 for 1993. As before, almost the entire 225 pages of the issue were given over to the publication of documents, which were grouped thematically and supplemented by cogent introductions and annotations. Among the items included were the stenographic report of the October 1964 Central Committee plenum that ousted Nikita Khrushchev, secret orders issued by the highest Soviet wartime organs (the State Defense Committee and the Stavka) during the battles around Smolensk in the summer of 1941, classified exchanges about the much-delayed repatriation of Japanese prisoners of war in 1956, and top-level KGB reports on the disturbances and massacre in Novocherkassk in 1962. Other documents dealt with such matters as the Stalin-era repressions against Comintern activists, the Soviet regime's anti-religious campaigns and propaganda, and the role of the Cadet Party in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution. Some topics from the pre-Soviet era, such as the activities of the deposed Romanov family between March and July of 1917, were covered as well.

This issue of Istoricheskii arkhiv was put out in conjunction with the first in a new series entitled Arkhivno-informatsionnyi byulleten' ("Archival Information Bulletin"), which is projected to be a regular "supplement to the journal Istoricheskii Arkhiv." Like the journal itself, the supplement is put out by the Archival Information Agency of Rosarkhiv; and it is edited by V. P. Kozlov, who is also one of the main editors of Istoricheskii arkhiv. The premier edition of Arkhivno-informatsionnyi byulleten', which is designated Issue No. 1-2 for 1993, is sub-titled "Arkhivy Kremlya i Staroi ploshchadi" ("Archives of the Kremlin and Staraya ploshchad'") and is described as the opening segment of "Series I -- Directories and Informational Materials." The entire issue consists of a directory of more than 1,000 documents released from the Presidential Archive and TsKhSD for the trial of the CPSU at the Constitutional Court. The 140-page directory provides an annotated list of documents in chronological order from March 1940 through December 1991. The vast bulk of the documents come from the Gorbachev period, especially the years 1989 to 1991, which account for roughly 62 percent of the total. Because the directory includes detailed subject and name indexes, it is an incomparably better finding aid than the scattered, disorganized lists for Fond No. 89 at TsKhSD, which previously were the only means available of keeping track of what had been turned over to the Court. One can only hope that future issues of Arkhivno-informatsionnyi byulleten' will, as promised, offer additional compendia of the holdings of Fond No. 89 that are as convenient to use as this directory is.

The journal Istoricheskii arkhiv, as well as its new supplement, is obviously not -- and does not pretend to be -- a substitute for on-site research in the archives, but it certainly is a welcome successor to the now-defunct Izvestiya TsK KPSS ("News of the CPSU CC"), which featured a few new documents every month when it was published between 1989 and August 1991.75 Istoricheskii arkhiv goes far beyond that and thus helps compensate for the clampdown at TsKhSD and the continued lack of free access to other key archives. In particular, the publication of materials from the Presidential Archive enables researchers to peruse valuable documents that would otherwise be unavailable. Although the new journal and supplement may not be able to live up to their projected publication schedules of six and four issues a year, respectively (only one issue of Istoricheskii arkhiv was put out for 1992, and the first for 1993 was not published until May), they both should be appearing more frequently once the inevitable delays associated with the start-up of an ambitious new project have been overcome.76 Provided that the adverse repercussions of the TsKhSD controversy do not interfere with the publication of Istoricheskii arkhiv, the journal in its latest incarnation will be an indispensable resource for specialists on the Soviet Union, as well as a model of what can be gained from cooperative archival efforts.

The "Morris Affair"

From the fall of 1992 through the first few months of 1993, access to the postwar holdings of the CPSU Central Committee steadily increased. That trend came to a jarring halt, however, when a document from TsKhSD about U.S. prisoners of war (POWs) in Vietnam was suddenly publicized in April 1993. The controversy surrounding this document was the ostensible reason for the clampdown at TsKhSD, but it seems likely that archival officials had been intending to restrict access anyway and that they merely latched onto the Vietnam document as a pretext for their actions. (The evidence to this effect includes, among other things, the firing of Vladimir Chernous, which occurred long before the POW document came to light.) Regardless of what the precise connection was between the uproar stemming from the Vietnam document and the sudden clampdown at TsKhSD, the repercussions from the incident were important enough to warrant at least a few comments here about the so-called "Morris affair."

In December 1992 and January 1993 an Australian researcher named Stephen J. Morris, who was affiliated with Harvard University's Center for International Affairs, worked at TsKhSD with documents concerning Soviet-North Vietnamese relations in the early 1970s. Morris hoped to write a book about Soviet policy during the Vietnam War, and he asked the Wilson Center's Cold War International History Project to help him gain access to materials at TsKhSD. As with all other researchers who sought aid in gaining access, CWIHP agreed to intervene on his behalf. Although Morris was not then formally listed on the conference agenda, CWIHP subscribed to the general principle that all interested scholars deserve equal access to the archives and invited him to attend the conference and present findings based on his research. Morris's research proceeded smoothly until early January 1993, when he came across a 25-page translation into Russian of a report that was purportedly delivered by the deputy chief of the Vietnamese People's Army (VPA) General Staff, General Tran Van Quang, to a meeting of the North Vietnamese Politburo on 15 September 1972.77 Morris had ordered the document in the same way he would have requested any other item, and the archival staff delivered it to him in a perfectly routine manner.78 Contrary to what was later alleged in the Russian media, nothing that Morris did in ordering and receiving the document was at all unusual. His discovery and subsequent use of the report were in full conformity with TsKhSD's rules. Contrary to charges made by the Vietnamese government, it is inconceivable that the document could have been planted or forged, or that Morris could have been steered to it in any way. Any doubts about the authenticity of the Russian document can thus be safely laid to rest. (Questions about the authenticity and accuracy of the Vietnamese original are of course a different matter.)

The translation was one among many items that Morris requested and received at TsKhSD in early December 1992 and January 1993. Initially he worked with some of the other materials, unaware of what he would find in General Quang's report. When he finally turned to the translated document, he was surprised to discover an extended discussion of American POWs two-thirds of the way through what was otherwise a routine assessment of the war's progress. Morris was even more surprised -- indeed, quite startled -- to read General Quang's assertion that North Vietnam in 1972 had been deliberately "keeping secret the number of American prisoners" in the hope of "using the issue to resolve the political and military aspects of the Vietnam question."  According to the translation, the real number of American POWs at the time was 1,205, a figure three times higher than the 368 prisoners that the North Vietnamese government had publicly acknowledged it was holding. The report claimed that "the U.S. government itself does not know the exact number of POWs," and warned that any disclosure of the true figure would simply be a "premature concession to the United States" that would "cost us [i.e., North Vietnam] a great deal" of leverage.

Elsewhere the translated report specified the political goals that the North Vietnamese authorities hoped to achieve by secretly holding the American POWs. The document provided detailed statistical breakdowns of the 1,205 American prisoners by rank, military specialty, place of capture, place of imprisonment, and even "ideological orientation." The translation left no doubt that the publicly-cited figure of 368 covered only the POWs whose "progressive political leanings" made them willing to "condemn the unjust and aggressive war that the United States is waging in Vietnam." At least some of these 368 prisoners were due to be "released in the near future to bring pressure to bear on the Nixon administration" and "to demonstrate our [i.e., North Vietnam's] good intentions in this matter." The other 837 American POWs, including 372 who were deemed to hold "neutral political views" and 465 who were classified as outright "reactionaries," were to be held back for future bargaining.79

The discrepancy between the statistics in the report and the figures that were made public by the North Vietnamese government was significant in its own right, but it took on even greater importance in light of a three-page memorandum accompanying the translation.80 The memorandum was prepared by the head of Soviet military intelligence (GRU), Army-General Pyotr Ivashutin, who had the most sensitive information in the Soviet armed forces at his disposal. The memorandum clearly shows that Ivashutin regarded the figures in the translation to be accurate, that he believed "the U.S. government does not know the exact number of POWs in North Vietnam because the VPA command has kept this matter in strict secrecy," and that he was pleased by "the VPA command's success during the interrogations of the prisoners in extracting valuable information about the U.S. armed forces, about military technology, and about specific types of weaponry." In view of the close links between the Soviet GRU and the North Vietnamese intelligence organs, Ivashutin's acceptance of the higher totals of American POWs indicates that those numbers must be taken seriously.

The revelations in the document -- both the translated report and Ivashutin's introductory memorandum -- were of such obvious importance that Morris was initially inclined to go straight to the Western press. However, he readily agreed, at my urging, that he should first pursue the matter quietly in case the translation was accurate and some of the hundreds of unaccounted-for prisoners might still be alive. After returning to the United States at the end of January 1993, Morris contacted officials in the Clinton administration and traveled to Washington to discuss what he had found. These contacts yielded few immediately evident results, which is understandable for an issue that has been the object of so many hoaxes and unfounded claims. Skepticism would naturally tend to prevail, and the administration cannot be faulted for being wary of Morris's initial overtures. Having failed to make headway in Washington, Morris returned to Moscow in early April to pursue further research.

His return visit proved short-lived, however, as an international controversy soon erupted. Although Morris had not given a copy of the document to U.S. officials when he was in Washington in February and March, his description of the report had prompted a few behind-the-scenes measures by the Clinton administration. Inquiries were made through an official U.S.-Russian commission that had been set up in mid-1992 to investigate the fate of American POWs and MIAs (soldiers Missing In Action) from World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The panel, which was co-chaired by Volkogonov and a former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Malcolm Toon, contacted the staff at TsKhSD and asked for a copy of the document. Toon himself paid a special visit to Moscow at the beginning of April to follow up on the matter, and a copy of the translated report was finally turned over to the commission on 8 April. The following day, through circumstances that are still unclear, news of the document was leaked to Valerii Rudnev, a reporter from the Russian newspaper Izvestiya who had been covering the activities of the POW/MIA commission since it was founded. Rudnev published a story about the Vietnamese report on 10 April.81 Apparently, he did not yet have a copy of the document because he did not quote it directly, but he certainly was aware of the data about POWs, which he cited in his article.

Once this story appeared, the existence of the document effectively became public knowledge. Only then did Morris approach the Moscow bureau of The New York Times to discuss what he had found. A front-page story about the document, by Celestine Bohlen, was published in the Times on 12 April.82 As soon as the story appeared, a lively and at times highly acrimonious debate arose about the implications of the translated report. Over the next few weeks, countless other stories and news broadcasts about the document ensued, temporarily derailing what had seemed to be steady movement toward the normalization of U.S.-Vietnamese relations. To try to clarify matters, the Clinton administration asked General John Vessey, the former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, to travel on an investigative mission to Hanoi. Vessey met with General Quang (the purported author of the document) and other senior Vietnamese officials, all of whom insisted that the report was a forgery and that Quang had not been deputy chief of the General Staff in September 1972.83 At the end of his trip, Vessey publicly averred that he believed there were significant inaccuracies in the translation.84 He acknowledged that the translated version of the report was an authentic Soviet document, but he said he was unable to ascertain whether the Vietnamese original was authentic, much less accurate.

Those conclusions seemed reasonable for the most part, but even so, the purpose and value of Vessey's inquiry were unclear. Presumably, if a U.S. envoy had gone to Moscow in, say, 1950 to ask Stalin and Lavrentii Beria about the Katyn Forest massacres, the Soviet response would have been a vehement denial of any part in the murders. Surely no one in Washington could have expected that General Quang or other leaders in Hanoi would acknowledge that they had done something wrong in 1972, if in fact they did. Not until several generations passed and Communism was disintegrating did the Soviet government begin owning up to some of its earlier misdeeds. No doubt, the same is likely to be true of the Vietnamese regime. This is not to say that attempts to follow up on the POW issue in Hanoi are pointless, but at least for now the chances of obtaining meaningful documentation are far greater in Russia than in Vietnam.

The potential value of materials stored in the Russian archives was demonstrated in September 1993, when a second document was disclosed that suggested the North Vietnamese authorities deliberately under-reported the number of prisoners they were holding in the early 1970s.  This document was a translation of a report presented by a senior North Vietnamese official, Hoang Anh, to a plenum of the North Vietnamese Communist Party's Central Committee in early 1971.85 The official claimed that Hanoi was holding 735 U.S. "pilots," but had published the names of only 368 as a "diplomatic step," adding that these 368 would be released as soon as Washington agreed to withdraw all its forces from Vietnam and started the withdrawal. Once the pullout was completed, the report went on, the remaining 367 captured pilots, whose names had not yet been disclosed, would be freed.

The figure of 368 in the report corresponded precisely to the number of U.S. POWs in a list that was turned over to two U.S. Senators in Paris in December 1970, a list whose accuracy was challenged at the time by the U.S. government.86 The figure of 368 also was identical to the number cited later on by General Quang; and the total number of 735 "captured American pilots" (both acknowledged and unacknowledged) in the earlier report was nearly the same as the figure of 767 pilots that Quang provided. Still, the newly discovered document raised far more questions than it answered: For example, why did the earlier report refer only to "pilots" and not mention other types of POWs, as Quang did later in his report?  Was the figure of 368 chosen simply because it was half the number of U.S. "pilots" who had been captured? Why had the figure of 368 not increased at all, and why had the other figure, of 735, barely increased (to just 767) when Quang delivered his report some 20 months later, by which time more Americans presumably had been captured? The answer to this last question may be connected with the fact that twenty of the prisoners included in the earlier totals were already dead and nine had already been released, but there is no way to be sure.

The answers to all these questions, unfortunately, may be a long time in coming. Only two pages (11 and 18) of the earlier translated report were released by the Russian government, to the American members of the joint POW/MIA commission, and it is not clear whether or when the rest of the document will be turned over. Even if the earlier report is eventually released in full, any hope of determining the accuracy of the two translated documents is going to depend on the availability of a good deal more evidence, including the original Vietnamese versions of the two reports (whether on paper or on tape recording), which are likely to be in the GRU archives. Some of these items may not exist in Moscow any longer, but other documents that bear on the matter are bound to turn up. In any event, the only way to know precisely what is available is to have qualified experts sift methodically through as many of the archives as possible.

Whether that will be practical in the near future is questionable, however. So far, employees of the Russian archives are the only ones who have been permitted to search for additional documentation. Their efforts are obviously crucial, but on a matter such as this, it is essential that outside experts, including experts from the United States, also be permitted to look for new evidence. If the matter is left solely to archival officials, there may be little way of ensuring that their search is as thorough as possible, and that they will release whole documents once they come across them, rather than just handing over scattered pages.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government's apparent failure to request broad archival access at the outset for independent experts and scholars may have been a lost opportunity.87 At this point, any attempts to gain permission for American scholars to investigate the matter further at either TsKhSD or the Presidential Archive, not to mention the GRU archives, are likely to be complicated by the unexpectedly harsh reaction of the Russian archival authorities to the disclosure of Quang's translated report. Rather than welcoming the publication of such a controversial document and encouraging researchers to look for other items that would either corroborate or impugn the accuracy of the translation, Rosarkhiv officials did just the opposite.88 They sealed off all holdings at TsKhSD and rescinded the access they had earlier extended to scholars involved with the Wilson Center's Cold War International History Project and other collaborative ventures. The reading room at TsKhSD was shut for the entire summer of 1993, and even before that a host of nettlesome restrictions were imposed on foreign researchers, many of whom were accused by name of working for nefarious "special services."89 Among other things, foreigners were not permitted to obtain an entry pass ("propusk") to the reading room for more than two weeks at a time, they were prohibited from receiving any document files or microfilm reels, and they were forbidden from using laptop computers for any purpose unless they received explicit permission every day from the archive director.

The clampdown on scholarly access was accompanied by a shakeup of personnel at TsKhSD, most notably the replacement of Usikov by Prokopenko a week after the initial New York Times article appeared. At first, the dismissal was attributed to Usikov's purported failure to "enforce regulations on access to confidential material,"90 but allegations soon followed that he had also been involved in shady financial dealings. Whether or not the latter charges had any merit--and the present author is not in any position to evaluate them--there was no truth at all to the specific allegation that Usikov sold the Vietnam document to Morris. As noted earlier, Morris's request for the document was handled routinely, and Usikov had nothing to do with it. At no point did Morris even meet Usikov, much less buy documents from him.

Furthermore, even if the new authorities at TsKhSD sincerely believed that the Quang document had been sold -- and initially they may have -- it would still be hard to explain why their reaction to the "Morris affair" was so much harsher than the brief periods of retrenchment that had followed previous scandals at the archives. After all, the controversy surrounding the POW document was hardly unique. Several incidents in 1992 had caused a comparable degree of embarrassment for the Russian government: the publication in Italy of an unauthenticated 1943 letter from the Italian Communist Party leader, Palmiro Togliatti, showing seeming indifference over the fate of Soviet-held Italian POWs; reports in Great Britain about "secret" contacts between Labour Party leaders and Soviet diplomats (which turned out to be perfectly routine and above-board); and the unauthorized and misattributed publication in London of extracts from diaries by Josef Goebbels that had been stored in the Moscow archives.91 After each of these episodes, Russian archival officials briefly enforced stricter regulations, but they did not abandon the general trend toward greater openness. The reaction to the "Morris affair" was very different insofar as it severely disrupted and reversed almost all the positive steps that had been implemented. Although the clampdown is not likely to be permanent, it was a disheartening step backward that threatened to inhibit the development of a sound archival policy in Russia.

The reimposition of a "strict regime" (strogii rezhim) at TsKhSD may also hinder any further clarification of the two translated documents, at least for some time to come. This is unfortunate for both scholarly and practical reasons. Western commentators have focused almost exclusively on the statistics in the translated reports or on the position that General Quang may have occupied in September 1972, but other aspects of the Quang document, particularly Ivashutin's introductory memorandum, are far more tantalizing. We may never know whether there was an authentic report in Vietnamese by General Quang, but we already know that Ivashutin's memorandum is authentic and that he regarded the figure of 1,205 U.S. POWs to be accurate. We need to find out why. Similarly, Ivashutin's memorandum has a handwritten notation on it from Konstantin Katushev, the CPSU Secretary responsible for ties with other ruling Communist parties, to Igor Ognetov, the head of the sector for North Vietnam.92 Katushev instructed Ognetov to "prepare, on an urgent basis, a short note for the CPSU CC Politburo about the prisoners of war." The fact that Katushev, as the most senior official in Moscow with day-to-day responsibility for Vietnam, recognized the importance of Quang's remarks about the POWs should give pause to anyone who is tempted to dismiss the figures out of hand.

Another aspect of the Quang document that needs to be clarified is the brief cover sheet from Ognetov, which apparently is in response to Katushev's handwritten note.93 Ivashutin's memorandum was prepared in late November 1972, and Katushev's notation was made on or about 1 December. Ognetov's typed message, dated 6 February 1973, merely observes that "the instruction [presumably a reference to Katushev's handwritten instruction] has been overtaken by events" and that "comrade K. F. Katushev has been informed."94 This simple, two-line message raises a host of intriguing questions: Why did Ognetov wait more than two months before responding to Katushev's "urgent" order? Did Ognetov prepare a "short note" for the Politburo in the interim, as he was instructed? If so, what did it say and what happened to it? What were the "events" that Ognetov believed had "overtaken" the instruction from Katushev?  Among the possible answers to this last question are: (1) the signing of the Paris peace accords on 27 January 1973, which provided for the release of all American POWs; (2) the issuance of lists that same day by the U.S. State Department and the North Vietnamese government of the 591 American prisoners who were eventually set free under Operation Homecoming; and (3) a top-level meeting of the Soviet and North Vietnamese Communist parties in Moscow on 30 January 1973, which involved both Katushev and one of his closest aides, Oleg Rakhmanin, along with all the members of the CPSU Politburo.95 Are these the "events" that Ognetov had in mind, and if so, what bearing did they have on the much higher number of prisoners cited in the translated report? (The list of 591 POWs represented the 368 whose capture had been publicly acknowledged before September 1972, plus the 223 Americans who were taken prisoner after that date, mainly during the Christmas bombings of North Vietnam.) How much credibility did Ognetov attach to the higher figures?

Until these sorts of questions are answered, it will be impossible to arrive at any firm conclusions about the data cited in the two translations. Even if the figures of 735 and 1,205 turn out to be much too high, a smaller discrepancy would still be worth exploring, on the off chance that some of the POWs are still alive. Nevertheless, it will be extremely difficult to further investigate the matter so long as the clampdown at TsKhSD continues. One would need free access to such things as the "short note" to the CPSU Politburo that Ognetov was ordered to "prepare on an urgent basis," the Politburo's deliberations about the Paris peace accords, and the secret transcripts from the Soviet-North Vietnamese meetings of 30 January 1973. These and other documents must exist at either TsKhSD or the Presidential Archive. But rather than allowing outside experts and scholars to find materials that would shed greater light on the issue, Russian archival officials have taken the counterproductive and irrational step of trying to prevent researchers from doing their work. Unfortunately, the whole episode suggests we may have to wait years before a genuine archival system emerges in Russia. In a country where democracy is still so rudimentary and tenuous, the status of the archives is bound to remain problematic.

Methodological Pitfalls

Having been denied access to archival materials in Moscow for so long, scholars who are now finally being permitted to examine Soviet documents may be tempted to draw sweeping conclusions from what they find. In some cases these conclusions are likely to be justified, but a good deal of caution is in order. Part of the problem, as E. H. Carr noted more than 30 years ago, is the tendency of historians to be overly impressed by what they find on paper:

The nineteenth-century fetishism of facts was completed and justified by a fetishism of documents. The documents were the Ark of the Covenant in the temple of facts. The reverent historian approached them with bowed head and spoke of them in awed tones. If you find it in the documents, it is so. But what, when we get down to it, do these documents -- the decrees, the treaties, the rent-rolls, the blue books, the official correspondence, the private letters and diaries -- actually tell us? No document can tell us more than what the author of the document thought -- what he thought had happened, what he thought ought to happen or would happen, or perhaps only what he wanted others to think he thought, or even only what he himself thought he thought.96 There is a danger that scholars will become so engrossed by what they come across in documents marked with the "strogo sekretno" (strictly secret) or "sovershenno sekretno" (top secret) stamp that they will not approach these materials with the same degree of detachment they would exercise when considering most other forms of historical evidence. The novelty of looking through the Soviet documents does quickly fade, but even the most seasoned of researchers cannot help but be struck, at least momentarily, when a highly classified report or memorandum turns up with a handwritten notation by the CPSU General Secretary or some other leading member of the Soviet Politburo.

Hence, the need for circumspection in dealing with materials from the ex-Soviet archives can hardly be overemphasized. Among other things worth bearing in mind is that, as TsKhSD's former director acknowledged, "far from all the documents that flowed into the Central Committee departments from elsewhere or that were prepared within the CC's own apparatus are accurate, complete, and 100 percent reliable."97 As illuminating as the use of archival sources may be, it can be counterproductive if researchers fail to take account of the possibility that certain documents are either deliberately or inadvertently misleading or inaccurate. Ideally, information contained in archival materials should be cross-checked and verified (or refuted) by comparing it with information in other sources (both closed and open), but unfortunately in many instances the process of verification may prove extremely difficult, especially if key materials are missing. Such is the case, for example, with the two documents about American POWs in Vietnam that came to light in 1993. The evidence from other sources suggests that the numbers in both of the translated reports are too high; but, as noted in the previous section, the introductory memorandum from General Ivashutin on the first document, the questions raised by the cover sheet on that document from Igor Ognetov, and the numerical parallels between the first document and the second document are enough to prevent one from simply dismissing either report as fraudulent or inaccurate. Skepticism about the documents' accuracy is in order, but any final judgment will have to await the release of much more evidence from the archives.

In some cases, fortunately, attempts to check the authenticity and accuracy of documentation are more straightforward. Yet even then, the evidence may be incomplete or may somehow have been tampered with. This problem can be seen, for example, in the Czechoslovak transcript of negotiations between top Soviet and Czechoslovak officials at Cierna nad Tisou in late July 1968.98 It has long been known that those talks broke down at a certain point and were resumed only after a tense interregnum of several hours. By all accounts, the disruption occurred mainly because one of the Soviet participants -- either the prime minister, Aleksei Kosygin, or another Politburo member, Pyotr Shelest -- used anti-Semitic slurs and ad hominem attacks when addressing one of the Czechoslovak officials, Frantisek Kriegel.99 The lengthy Czech transcript of the talks is clearly authentic and its accuracy seems beyond doubt when cross-checked against other notes and first-hand accounts; but the transcript, unfortunately, is missing a critical passage that would have shed light on who caused the breakdown of the negotiations. This gap may have come about because the stenographer was somehow remiss, but it seems more likely that a senior official who had access to the safe in which the transcript was stored removed an entire page.100 Whatever the precise motivation may have been for excising the passage, the main lesson to be drawn from the episode is that even well-verified evidence can yield incomplete or misleading findings. It so happens that in this particular instance, what was omitted from the document was known from other sources; but that is not likely to be true most of the time. Moreover, even in this case, the question remains of whether it was Kosygin or Shelest, or perhaps both, who uttered the slurs.

Further pitfalls can arise from the very process of cross-checking and verifying documents, especially if it involves comparisons predominantly or exclusively with memoirs and oral histories, rather than with other documentation. Memoirs and shorter first-hand accounts can be invaluable when used with caution, and in some cases (e.g., when documents have been destroyed or never existed at all) they are the only sources available about key events. Nevertheless, the drawbacks to using memoirs and oral histories are well known.101 Even though what Mary McCarthy once said about Lillian Hellman -- that "every word she writes is a lie, including a, an, and the" -- does not apply to most diplomats and ex-officials, the veracity of many who worked for Communist regimes is far from unassailable.102 Although cases of systematic prevarication may be relatively uncommon, memoirs as a genre almost always enhance and put an undue gloss on the authors' roles in history. Moreover, even when former Soviet and East European leaders do their best to record events faithfully, some discrepancies are bound to crop up from ordinary failings of memory. These problems can be mitigated if scholars draw on memoirs and oral histories from several participants who have very different viewpoints, and then correlate each account with the archival documents in question. This method, however, is by no means foolproof, and there may not always be a sufficient number of memoirs available.103 In a few extreme cases the process of attempting to corroborate archival materials may itself lead to even greater confusion than before.

Other problems from working in the Soviet and East European archives can ensue if scholars fail to take account of the context and impact of the documents they examine. As in almost every country, many officials in the Soviet Union sought to inflate their own role in the historical record. They were inclined, at least occasionally, to write their memoranda and reports with an "eye on the archives," that is, with the aim of making their influence on policy appear greater than it actually was. Among those engaging in this sort of practice was the long-time director of the USA and Canada Institute, Georgii Arbatov, who regularly depicted himself as a key aide to members of the CPSU Politburo. Although it is true that Arbatov was often consulted by top officials about developments in the United States, he was hardly the indispensable adviser that he made himself out to be. No doubt, Arbatov's exaggeration of his own role was intended in part to bolster his credibility among Westerners who came to visit the USA/Canada Institute, but it was also designed to ensure a proper spot for himself in MID's own histories of Soviet foreign policy. Arbatov and many other officials would write (or lend their names to) analyses and reports that, while ostensibly channeled to the Soviet Politburo, usually went unread.104 Even when these documents were ignored, they ended up in the archives, where they could serve as fecund material for historians. The general point to be made, then, is that when examining "inputs" into the Soviet decision-making process, scholars must be aware that some -- perhaps many -- of these alleged inputs were of no influence at all at top levels.

The problem of sorting out real inputs from artificial ones is even trickier than it may seem because of the difficulty of telling who read what and how much impact it had. Even when we can ascertain that a particular document did go up to the CPSU Politburo -- perhaps by seeing annotations in the margins, or by finding a routing list with initials appended -- there may still be little way of determining what role the item played. This point was well illustrated by a document that was transmitted to the Soviet Politburo in late December 1974 concerning the situation in Vietnam. The document was a draft response from Leonid Brezhnev to the North Vietnamese Communist party first secretary, Le Duan; and it was passed to the head of the CPSU General Department, Konstantin Chernenko, by one of Brezhnev's top aides, Andrei Aleksandrov-Agentov, with the following message attached: "To Comrade Chernenko. Leonid Il'ich asked for a vote on this proposal (He has not read the text.)."105 How common this sort of practice was is unclear, but it is safe to assume that Brezhnev and other members of the CPSU Politburo, especially those who were elderly and infirm, would frequently sign off on documents that they had not read.106 That raises serious problems for scholars who hope to trace the decision-making process on specific issues and events.

In some instances this matter can be handled by searching for connections between presumed inputs and the subsequent evolution of Soviet policy. In the case of the Vietnam War, for example, Soviet leaders usually paid relatively little attention except when the conflict directly affected U.S.-Soviet relations. Instead, they tended to rely heavily on middle-ranking officials to lay out policy guidelines and recommend decisions on all but the most important matters.107 Thus, when we come across proposals from the Central Committee apparatus or the Foreign Ministry that were subsequently incorporated with few or no changes in the Politburo's decisions about Vietnam, we can deduce that these inputs were of key importance at top levels.

Unfortunately, though, the nature of inputs for most issues is not as clear-cut. Moreover, even when documents produced at middle and lower levels of the bureaucracy correspond precisely with the decisions that were made by the Politburo, researchers must beware of inferring too much about those documents. It was a common practice among Soviet bureaucrats -- a practice by no means unique to the Soviet Union, of course -- to ingratiate themselves with top officials by writing elaborate policy "recommendations" for decisions that had already been made. The "recommendations," not surprisingly, would coincide with and strongly reinforce the preferences of CPSU leaders. This could often be seen, for example, in dispatches from Soviet ambassadors, who would set out recommendations for policies that they knew or suspected had already been, or were about to be, adopted. These dispatches can be interpreted in one of two ways: either (1) the ambassador was so far "out of the loop" on key decisions that he did not know what policies had already been adopted by the Politburo; or (2) the ambassador was putting himself on record as having "recommended" the decisions that were already made.108 In either case, the practice is bound to cause problems for scholars who are seeking to weigh the significance of particular inputs. Checking the date of the inputs may occasionally be enough to sift out phony or insignificant "recommendations" from genuine ones (e.g., proposals that come well after decisions have been made are automatically suspect), but in most instances the situation is at best indeterminate.

Yet another pitfall of archival research in Russia and other ex-Communist states -- and in Western countries as well -- is the difficulty of balancing published documents against unpublished materials. On the one hand, it is true that published collections of documents can cause a myriad of problems when the editors have an agenda of their own. A classic example of this phenomenon, cited by E. H. Carr, occurred in 1935 when an English publisher brought out an abridged edition of documents and papers from the long-time foreign minister of Weimar Germany, Gustav Stresemann.109 The publisher conveniently omitted all documents that would have detracted from Stresemann's reputation, a pattern of omission that might never have come to light had the full set of documents not fallen by chance into British and American hands at the end of World War II. Similar problems are likely to arise with at least a few of the collections now being put together of  documents from the former Soviet archives.110

On the other hand, it would be a serious mistake for scholars to disregard or place less emphasis on documents and other materials in Moscow that have already been published. Archival access in Russia is still so erratic, and so many of the key archives are still sealed off, that documents chosen for publication by the government can often be far more valuable and revealing than all the unpublished materials that researchers come across on their own in the Central Committee or Foreign Ministry archives. This is the case, for example, with documents about the Polish crisis of 1980-81 that were released from the Presidential Archive in December 1992 and August 1993 and then published in full in the Polish press.111 These items, including selected transcripts of CPSU Politburo meetings and documents from a commission set up by the Politburo to deal with the crisis, have done more than all the materials at TsKhSD to shed light on Soviet decision-making at the time.

Another event for which published Soviet documents have been much more valuable than the available unpublished holdings, is the Cuban missile crisis. Scholars have not yet been granted free access to any of the relevant holdings in the Presidential Archive, the military archives, or the KGB archives, which will be crucial in helping to resolve some of the lingering mysteries about the Soviet Union's role in the crisis. The only archival materials that have been available up to now, at TsKhSD and the AVPRF, add little or nothing to what is known about the crisis. As a result, the use of newly published documents about the Cuban missile crisis has been the only way to make up for the continued lack of access to the most important Russian archives.112

One additional area in which the publication of Soviet documents has been of great importance is the question of nuclear weapons development and nuclear arms control policy. Access to the most important archival holdings on this topic is still non-existent, and the unpublished items that are available at TsKhSD (and to a lesser extent at MID) are of relatively little interest. Hence, the publication of key materials and the appearance of new first-hand accounts have been the only real sources of fresh evidence about topics such as the early Soviet nuclear bomb program, the problems experienced by Soviet nuclear-missile submarines, and the bargaining positions adopted by Soviet officials in strategic arms negotiations. Of particular interest in recent months has been the serialized publication of the transcripts of the U.S.-Soviet negotiations at the Reykjavik summit in October 1986, which reveal how close the two sides came to achieving an agreement far more ambitious than either had anticipated or even wanted.113

Ideally, if free access to the most important archives in Moscow is eventually granted to scholars, the publication of documents will no longer be so essential. Until that time, however, the use of published documents will be a crucial supplement to on-site archival research.

The reliance on published documentation is only one of the methodological problems caused by the continued unavailability of materials in the Presidential Archive, the postwar military archives, and the KGB and GRU archives. Another obvious pitfall is the temptation to "look for one's keys where the streetlight is," i.e., to ascribe excessive importance to the documents that are available. Not only are the items stored at TsKhSD and the AVPRF merely "inputs" into the decision-making process; they are not necessarily even the most important inputs. Unfortunately, researchers have not been able to examine all the relevant inputs, much less observe how (or whether) those inputs were used when decisions were actually made. Without access to the KGB and GRU archives, for example, scholars rarely get to see documents produced by either of the ex-Soviet intelligence organs, particularly the highly sensitive reports that might have had a crucial bearing on certain decisions. Much the same is true of vital inputs generated by the Soviet High Command and General Staff in the form of contingency plans, threat assessments, and recommendations for military options. Needless to say, this deficiency creates serious gaps in accounts of particular events and decisions.

Equally important, the unavailability of materials produced by certain agencies in Moscow can lead researchers to exaggerate the policy-making role of other agencies whose documents they do get a chance to examine.  This already applies, in some cases, to the Soviet Foreign Ministry, whose documents are available not only at the AVPRF but also in abundance at TsKhSD.

By emphasizing the Foreign Ministry's inputs into particular decisions, and by necessarily having much less to say about inputs from the KGB and GRU, scholars may end up offering highly skewed depictions of what went on. It is important to bear in mind, therefore, that in many cases the Foreign Ministry's role was actually quite limited. This was especially true on matters concerning relations with other Communist countries (Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Vietnam, North Korea, etc.), where party-to-party ties tended to be far more important than state-to-state interactions. On certain other issues, such as U.S.-Soviet relations and policy toward Africa, the Foreign Ministry did play a significant role, but even in these instances it is essential that the ministry's influence not be overstated.

One final pitfall for scholars working in the Russian archives is the occasional tendency either to reinvent the wheel or to attack straw men. Some of the participants in the CWIHP's conference in January 1993 seemed to find it remarkable that Soviet allies and clients in Eastern Europe and the Third World often tried to influence Soviet policy. Why this came as such a startling revelation is unclear. Should it really have been surprising to find that the "tail occasionally tried to wag the dog"? 114 Surely archival research was not a prerequisite for arriving at such an obvious conclusion. As far back as the early 1960s Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a whole book about the "desatellitization" of Eastern Europe, noting how the increased heterogeneity among the Warsaw Pact states in the post-Stalin era had led to fissures in the bloc.115 Other scholars offered similar analyses of the unexpected challenges that arose from one-time Soviet allies and clients such as Yugoslavia, China, Albania, and Egypt. No archival research was needed to see that the "tail" and the "dog" were frequently at odds.

Furthermore, by focusing so single-mindedly on instances in which the tail tried to wag the dog, researchers may gloss over or underestimate how successful the dog often was in wagging its tail. A distinguished British scholar recently noted that "research involves the shedding, not the confirmation, of our preconceptions. If historians go to the archives expecting certain answers to their questions, careful study of the evidence will almost invariably change their minds. It will alter not merely their answers but their questions."116 Scholars who go to the archives in Moscow expecting to find evidence of conflict and bargaining between the Soviet Union and its allies will no doubt succeed in their task. It is not difficult to come across evidence of such phenomena. But these scholars must also be able to explain why unity and conformity so often prevailed, and why it was the Soviet Union that usually ended up "calling the shots." During the 1968 crisis in Czechoslovakia, for example, Polish and East German leaders wanted to resort to armed intervention as early as March, and they did what they could to bring about a military solution. But all their efforts would have mattered little if the Soviet Politburo had not finally decided, in August, that an invasion was indeed necessary.

Even in cases such as the Korean war, for which it has long been thought that the tail took much of the initiative, the situation may not be as straightforward as it seems. Although a recent study based on extensive archival research has supported the view of an "active tail" (i.e., the view that Kim Il-sung was the driving force behind the plan to invade South Korea in June 1950, even though Stalin had to give final approval to the invasion), other evidence that has recently emerged leaves the picture a good deal murkier.117 Documents unearthed by Gavril Korotkov, a former GRU officer who is now a senior fellow at the Russian Defense Ministry's Institute for Military History, suggest that Stalin's role in initiating and encouraging the plans for an invasion was much greater than previously assumed.118 Even if, as some Western scholars suspect, Korotkov is understating the importance of Kim's own actions, the new evidence confirms how difficult it often can be to tell when the tail was wagging the dog and when the dog was wagging its tail. Certainly researchers must approach the matter with an open mind, not only in this specific instance but in general.

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The lingering ambiguity about the inception of the Korean War is one of countless issues that remain to be explored in greater depth in the Russian archives. Although it may be difficult to avoid all the pitfalls discussed above, careful scholarship and open-mindedness will ensure that as more of the holdings in Moscow become available, they will continue to enrich our historical understanding and clear up at least some of the mysteries left by the pervasive secrecy of the Soviet regime.

1. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning - Florence Nightingale - Dr. Arnold - General Gordon(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1933), v.

2. Statement by Natal'ya Krivova, press spokeswoman for the Russian Center for Storage of Contemporary Documentation, 22 April 1993, carried by Inter-TASS. For further explanation of the action against Usikov, see page 31 and endnote 70.

3. See his "Chto takoe TsKhSD?" Kentavr (Moscow), 4 (July-August 1992), 132-37, esp. 136.

4. Conversation with the author, 13 May 1993, in Prokopenko's office in Moscow.

5. "Poka net zakona, vedomstva budut zashchishchat' svoi 'tainy' do poslednego, -- schitaet zamestitel' predsedatelya Roskomarkhiva A. Prokopenko," Izvestiya, 5 August 1992, 3. See also Prokopenko's article, "Dom osobogo naznacheniya (Otkrytie arkhivov)," Rodina 3 (1992), 50-51.

6. Interview with Prokopenko in "Proshchanie s Osobym arkhivom," Novoe vremya 11 (March 1991), 46-47. The "Special Archive" (Osobyi arkhiv) was renamed the "Center for Storage of Historical-Documentary Collections" (Tsentr khraneniya istoriko-dokumental'nykh kollektsii) in June 1992. Under the new archival law (discussed below), the formation of secret archives is forbidden.

7. This is not to say that Western archives always attain standards of perfection, either. See, e.g., Seymour M. Hersh, "Nixon's Last Cover-Up: The Tapes He Wants the Archives to Suppress," The New Yorker, 14 December 1992, 76-95. Nevertheless, anyone who has worked in the Russian archives can attest that the situation there is fundamentally different.

8. The law, "Osnovy zakonodatel'stva Rossiiskoi Federatsii ob Arkhivnom fonde Rossiiskoi Federatsii i arkhivakh," was adopted and signed by Yeltsin on 7 July 1993; its text was published in Rossiiskaya gazeta, 14 August 1993, 5. The Russian government's Decree No. 838 of 23 August 1993, entitled "O realizatsii gosudarstvennoi politiki v arkhivnom dele," which implemented the new archival law, was signed by Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. It appears, therefore, that the law's status was not affected by Yeltsin's subsequent disbanding of parliament in September.

9. This applies, for example, to the formal "30-year rule" included in the new law. In principle, such a rule had already been in effect under a "decree" approved by the Supreme Soviet in June 1992, but archival officials had generally been flexible in considering requests for more recent items. The inclusion of such a rule in the new law, and the emphasis placed on it in Point 2 of the Russian government's Decree No. 838, might lead to routine denials of access to documents less than 30 years old.

10. Elena Afanas'eva, "Parlament odobryaet zasekrechivanie Rossii," Segodnya (Moscow), 18 May 1993, 2. On the final passage of the law, see Oleg Glushakov, "Teper' my deistvitel'no tochno znaem, chto takoe taina: Verkhovnyi sovet Rossii vo vtorom chtenii prinyal Zakon 'o gosudarstvennoi taine'," Krasnaya zvezda (Moscow), 23 July 1993, 1.

11. Vladimir Kartashkov, "Rossiiskie spetssluzhby pytayutsya prevratit' v amerikanskie," Moskovskii komsomolets, 14 October 1993, 1. The new Minister for Security, Nikolai Golushko, announced in mid-October that the ministry would be "overhauled" and that the "staff and administrative apparatus of the Security Ministry are being dissolved." See Aleksandr Mukomolov, "Reformiruetsya Ministerstvo bezopasnosti," Krasnaya zvezda, 15 October 1993, 1.

12. These restrictions remained in place even in the last few years of the Gorbachev period; see, for example, E. A. Skripilev, "Arkhivnoe delo v SSSR: Proshloe i nastoyashchee," Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo 4 (April 1990), 38-46; Yu. M. Baturin, M. A. Fedotov, and V. L. Entin, "Glasnost' v arkhivy: Variant zakonodatel'nogo resheniya," Vestnik Akademii nauk SSSR 10 (October 1989), 75-87; and S. Kuleshov, "Ot kogo zhe sekrety u partiinykh i vedomstvennykh arkhivov," Izvestiya, 29 July 1991, 3. For excellent surveys of the impact of the Gorbachev era, see three works by Patricia Kennedy Grimsted: "Perestroika in the Archives? Further Efforts at Soviet Archival Reform," American Archivist 54:1 (Winter 1991), 70-95; "Glasnost' in the Archives? Recent Developments on the Soviet Archival Scene," American Archivist 52:2 (Spring 1989), 214-36; and A Handbook for Archival Research in the USSR (Washington, D.C.: Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, 1989).

13. See the interview with General Dmitrii Volkogonov, then director of the Soviet Defense Ministry's Institute of Military History, in "My obyazany napisat' chestnye knigi," Krasnaya zvezda, 26 July 1988, 2. See also Kuleshov, "Ot kogo zhe sekrety u partiinikh i vedomstvennykh arkhivov," 3.

14. A good example of this occurred when documents were found in late 1991 that exposed the KGB's systematic penetration of the Russian Orthodox Church. The evidence was contained in annual reports compiled by the Fourth Department of the KGB's Fifth Directorate, the branch of the agency that was responsible for matters pertaining to the Church. When the Fourth Department was abolished in 1991, most of its documents in the KGB archives were destroyed. However, investigators from the Russian parliament discovered copies of the Department's annual reports in the CPSU Central Committee archives, and learned from these that many top Church officials had been working for the KGB. On this matter, see the interview with Gleb Yakunin, the priest and former political dissident who sat on the parliamentary commission that uncovered the documents, in "Tserkvi nuzhno pokayat'sya: Iz pervykh ruk," Nevskoe vremya (St. Petersburg), 8 February 1992, 3. See also the interview with Yakunin in "'Abbat' vykhodit na svyaz'," Argumenty i fakty 1 (January 1992), 5, where he first cited the documents at length.

15. These three examples are listed here mainly because they have gained wide publicity. Many other documents that have been less publicized might also have been adduced, such as the order that Lenin issued in 1917 for campaigns of mass "secret terror" in Latvia and Estonia, with a reward of 100,000 rubles for every "kulak, priest, and landowner who is hanged." He added that "we'll make the hangings look like the work of the 'Greens,' and then afterwards we'll put the blame on them." See the text of the order as cited in an interview with Pikhoya "'Ya protivnik politicheskoi arkheologii'," Nezavisimaya gazeta (Moscow), 31 March 1993, 5.

16. David Irving, Hitler's War (New York:  Viking, 1977).

17. Among the best rebuttals to Irving's thesis is Gerald Fleming, Hitler und die Endlosung: "Es ist des Fuehrers Wunsch . . ." (Wiesbaden:  Limes Verlag, 1982). See also Martin Broszat, "Hitler und die Genesis der 'Endlosung'," Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte 25:4 (October 1977), 739-88.

18. See Robert Conquest, Stalin and the Kirov Murder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), and Mikhail Roslyakov, Ubiistvo Kirova: Politicheskie i ugolovnye prestupleniya v 1930-kh godakh (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1991).

19. No doubt, the decision was motivated by a combination of several factors, and most likely was not the result of a profoundly rational decision-making process. The official Soviet explanation -- that deterrence of a U.S. invasion of Cuba was uppermost in Khrushchev's mind -- has not yet been revised by the Russian government. This argument, however, is highly questionable on several grounds. For one thing, the missile deployment's size was far in excess of what would have been needed just to deter a U.S. attack; moreover, there was no reason to deploy longer-range SS-5s as well as SS-4s if deterrence was the only (or main) goal; and finally, there were much less risky ways to deter a U.S. invasion, such as extending formal bilateral security commitments to Cuba or admitting Cuba into the Warsaw Pact. For a review of alternative explanations of Khrushchev's decision to install the missiles, see Raymond L. Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1989), 20-24; Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision:  Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1971), 230-44; and James G. Blight and David A. Welch, On the Brink: Americans and Soviets Reexamine the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York:  Hill and Wang, 1989), 116-20, 293-305.

20. Bruce J. Allyn, James G. Blight, and David A. Welch, "Essence of Revision: Moscow, Havana, and the Cuban Missile Crisis," International Security 14:3 (Winter 1989/90), 171.

21. John Lewis Gaddis, "Expanding the Data Base: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Enrichment of Security Studies," International Security 12:1 (Summer 1987), 7-8.

22. For an excellent critical review of the implicit and explicit assumptions that Western scholars made when using the Soviet press, see Lilita Dzirkals, Thane Gustafson, and A. Ross Johnson, The Media and Intra-Elite Communication in the USSR, R-2869 (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, September 1982).

23. Ilana Dimant-Kass, "The Soviet Military and Soviet Policy in the Middle East, 1970-73," Soviet Studies 26:4 (October 1974), 504.

24. To cite but one of countless examples, the public statements that Soviet officials made in September 1983 about the downing of a Korean airliner were at striking variance with what they actually knew, as revealed in top-secret KGB reports, Defense Ministry analyses, and transcripts of the CPSU Politburo's deliberations at the time. See the documents collected under the rubric "Dokumenty o tragedii koreiskogo Boinga," Izvestiya, 15 October 1992, 1, 3.

25. See Vojtech Mastny, Russia's Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941-1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); and William Taubman, Stalin's American Policy: From Entente to Detente to Cold War (New York:  W. W. Norton, 1982).

26. For preliminary but cogent reviews of the new evidence, see Walter Laqueur, Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990); and Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Evidence that has emerged since these books were published provides even stronger corroboration of the authors' contentions. See, e.g., the well-documented and generally well-argued study by O. V. Khlevnyuk, 1937-i: Stalin, NKVD i sovetskoe obshchestvo (Moscow: Respublika, 1992), which draws extensively on the Central Party Archive (now RTsKhIDNI).
See also Aleksei Khorev, "Kak sudili Tukhachevskogo," Krasnaya zvezda, 17 April 1991, 4; N. F. Bugai, ed., Iosif Stalin, Lavrentii Beriya: "Ikh nado deportirovat'" (Moscow: Druzhba narodov, 1992); and the documentary series published under the rubric "O masshtabakh repressii v Krasnoi Armii v predvoennye gody," Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal (Moscow), 1, 2, 3, and 5 (January, February, March, and May 1993), 56-63, 71-80, 25-32, and 59-65, respectively.


27. See, for example, Valerii Kovalev, "Kto zhe rasstrelival v Kuropatakh?" Krasnaya zvezda, 20 May 1993, 1; Vera Tolz, "Ministry of Security Official Gives New Figures for Stalin's Victims," RFE/RL Research Report 1:18 (1 May 1992), 8-10; and E. V. Tsaplin, "Arkhivnye materialy o chisle zaklyuchennykh v kontse 30-kh godov," Voprosy istorii 4-5 (April-May 1991), 157-63.

28. See, for example, "Vypiska iz protokola No. 149 zasedaniya Politbyuro TsK KPSS ot 12 aprelya 1979 goda: O nashei dal'neishei linii v svyazi s polozheniem v Afganistane," No. P149/XIV (TOP SECRET -- SPECIAL DOSSIER), 12 April 1979, in TsKhSD, Fond 89, Perechen' 14, Dokument 27; "Vypiska iz protokola No. 150 zasedaniya Politbyuro TsK KPSS ot 21 aprelya 1979 goda: O netselesoobraznosti uchastiya sovetskikh ekipazhei boevykh vertoletov v podavlenii kontrrevolyutsionnykh vystuplenii v Demokraticheskoi Respublike Afganistan," No. P150/93 (TOP SECRET -- SPECIAL DOSSIER), 21 April 1979, in TsKhSD, F. 89, Per. 14, Dok. 28; and "Vypiska iz protokola No. 177 zasedaniya Politbyuro TsK KPSS ot 27 dekabrya 1979 goda: O nashikh shagakh v svyazi s razvitiem obstanovki vokrug Afganistana," No. P177/151 (WORD OF MOUTH ONLY -- TOP SECRET -- SPECIAL DOSSIER), 27 December 1979, in TsKhSD, F. 89, Per. 14, Dok. 32. For one of many recent first-hand accounts of the decision, see G.M. Kornienko, "Kak prinimalis' resheniya o vvode sovetskikh voisk v Afganistan i ikh vyvode," Novaya i noveishaya istoriya, 3 (May-June 1993), 107-18.

29. This paragraph's figures come from R. G. Pikhoya, "Sovremennoe sostoyanie arkhivov Rossii," Novaya i noveishaya istoriya 2 (March-April 1993), 3-10.

30. "Postanovlenie pravitel'stva Rossiiskoi Federatsii o Gosudarstvennoi arkhivnoi sluzhbe Rossii," 22 December 1992. Two earlier decrees that provided for a similar restructuring of Roskomarkhiv -- "Ukaz Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii: O sisteme tsentral'nykh organov federal'noi ispolnitel'noi vlasti" and "Ukaz Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii: O strukture tsentral'nykh organov federal'noi ispolnitel'noi vlasti," both in Otechestvennye arkhivy (Moscow), 70:6 (November-December 1992), 3 -- were held up by the Russian parliament because of the broader provisions in the decrees on the reorganization of the government. As a result, until the end of 1992 the archival service's activities were governed by the basic rules laid out in "Postanovlenie pravitel'stva Rossiiskoi Federatsii: Ob utverzhdenii Polozheniya o Komitete po delam arkhivov pri Pravitel'stve Rossiiskoi Federatsii i seti federal'nykh gosudarstvennykh arkhivov i tsentrov khraneniya dokumentatsii," Otechestvennye arkhivy 70:4 (July-August 1992), 3-9, including supplements.

31. Anyone who doubts Pikhoya's willingness to enter the political fray should see his acerbic comments about Gorbachev in "'Ya protivnik politicheskoi arkheologii'," 5. In addition to releasing documents that make Yeltsin's opponents look bad, Pikhoya has been careful to withhold documents that would be embarrassing to Yeltsin himself. See "'Poshel protsess' po delu KPSS: Kogo na etot raz zhdat' v Razlive?" Argumenty i fakty 20 (May 1992), 1, and Vladimir Orlov, "KPSS: Umerla tak umerla?" Moskovskie novosti 21 (24 May 1992), 6.


32. In Russian these are "Tsentr khraneniya i izucheniya dokumentov noveishei istorii," which is located at Pushkinskaya No. 15; and "Tsentr khraneniya sovremennoi dokumentatsii," which is located at Il'inka No. 12 in Staraya Ploshchad', diagonally across from the Russian Constitutional Court.  For information about the way these centers were formed, see V. P. Kozlov, "Rossiiskii tsentr khraneniya i izucheniya dokumentov noveishei istorii i ego perspektivy" and R. A. Usikov, "K sozdaniyu TsKhSD," both in Novaya i noveishaya istoriya 2 (March-April 1992), 192-97 and 198-202, respectively.

33. For an overview of the archive's collections, see V. V. Sokol