Anyone interested in the status of Russian archives should read the NY Times article, “Iron Archives.” However, some of its claims about the shrinking access to Russian archives should be put in context. For example, anything that is located in the infamous Presidential Archive is off limits, except if you have connections. I know a few scholars who’ve gotten special dispensation to work there. The Foreign Policy and Military archives (19th century materials are available) are also closed.
It is also true that the declassification process has been slowed. As the article points out and honest archivists will attest, this is mostly because the process has been formalized. The body in charge of declassification, the Commission on State Secrets, is under funded and understaffed. Add the lack of incentive to make documents open and the process slows to a crawl. But scholars shouldn’t take this as a sign that archival research on “sensitive subjects” is impossible. Sure military and foreign policy are out. Postwar Communist Party materials are also difficult to get your hands on.
Still, each Russian archive has its own rules and culture. State and Provincial Archives like the ones cited in the article fall under the laws and policies of Rosarkhiv, the State Archival Administration. Their rules specifically make statements about researchers’ rights to open materials. If all else fails, embarrassing archivist by citing these rules can sometimes works. Going straight to the director does too. The most difficult archives are the ones that are under city administrations. The Moscow City Archive for Social Movements is notoriously difficult. I think I was able to work there by charm alone.
The real problem with Russian archives is not reclassification or access. It is funding. The Komsomol archive where I work has had a staff reduction from 8 to 4 people. Many archives are housed in crumbling buildings or worse are considered prime real estate. Some, like the State Historical Archive in
Lastly, Russian archives are beginning to suffer from a lack in training. Pay is incredibly low—about $100 a month. Most of the staff is either old, mentally deranged or both. Recent rules have reduced archival training to simply a certificate rather than a degree. The next generation of archivists will be poorly trained, paid, and therefore disinterested.
So put in this perspective the status of Russian archives is direr than the Western historians’ obsession with classification.
All this said, my favorite part of the whole article was the final quote from Robert Conquest. I quote the Times quoting him:
“There’s a drive of sorts toward the truth,” said Robert Conquest, the venerable cold warrior and author of “The Great Terror.” “After all, they didn’t really manage to totally suppress it the whole Soviet period, in spite of destroying the intelligentsia and ruining the country.”
It’s funny for a historian like him to speak about the truth. Especially coming from a guy who once declared that rumor was one of the best sources for understanding the
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I wonder whether you’re maybe being a bit hard on Conquest here. After all, he was working in an era when access to Soviet archives wasn’t even imaginable. If I’m not mistaken, he did make use of Western archival sources such as those at the Hoover Inst. But it’s been a while since I read his work and my copies are back in the states, so I can’t check that…
It also seems that back then, sometimes rumors (and the pecking order atop the Mausoleum) were the only clues scholars had to go on. As such, I’m not sure it’s fair to judge scholars of another era by today’s methodological standards.
Perhaps I am. It comes from the fact that he’s still held up as the authority on the terror when so much has been written even without archives that totally obliterates his book. And now that the archives are open, they’ve only proved Conquest as even more wrong. True he worked when there were no archives, but so did many other people and their books stand up as quality scholarship even now that the archives open. His doesn’t. Plus one should say that Conquest did have access to the Smolensk Archive, but he didn’t use it. Arch Getty did and he got a totally, and I think more correct, view of the Terror. But Arch is also my adviser and so I’m pretty biased.
Besides the Smolensk archive, before 1991 the Hoover didn’t have any materials for the 1930s except published materials which are available in a lot of American libraries. The Hoover archival holdings mostly run from 1917-1921 and contain materials dealing with the Whites, Menshevik and other left parties. I think the Boris Nikolaevsky collection is there. It might be in Harvard.
In terms of rumor. Historians can’t really rely on it as a definitive source. It’s not accepted in any other field of history as even plausible and I never understood why it was acceptable for Russia. Rumor is interesting, but only in and of itself as a phenomena. As evidence it doesn’t fly. BTW here is Conquest’s statement about rumors: “Truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay” and that “basically at best, though not infallible, source is rumor.” Conquest, Terror, 1st edition, 754.
In a somewhat related subject. It would be interesting to study how Conquest’s book shaped Russian views of the terror after it was published in Russia in the 1990s.
Getty is your advisor? You lucky guy.
Personally I don’t think much of anything written on the USSR before the opening of the archives is worth very much, except in a history of thought sense. How can you write when you have so little data?
Oh, BTW in my copy of “Govoryat stalinskie narkomy,” there’s an interview with Kaganovich in which Conquest comes up.
I translated the first page and a half of Kaganovich’s memoirs if you are interested in that sort of thing.
Actually the published materials are quite voluminous. Especially for the period I work on. I could easily write a history of the 1920s based on published materials alone. In fact, many of the published materials I use on my study of the Komsomol say the same things, often times with more color, than the archives do. I think it is a major misconception that Soviet newspapers are simply propaganda. They are but they are hardly platforms of positivity. I am often struck with how negative they are in tone. But like any source they have their limits and need to be rigorously analyzed. In addition, usability of published sources also depends on period and research question. For some periods and for subjects they are more useful than others.
Ironically, since the fabled “Archive Revolution of 1991,” there hasn’t been a single explosive book on the Soviet Union based on archives. Archives have provided a deeper understanding of the Soviet system but strangely they haven’t overturned many previously held views in the historiography. They’ve only allowed a refinement of arguments.
For a good assessment of the impact of archives on Russian historiography I recommend Stephen Kotkin, “1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks,” Journal of Modern History June 1998, 384-425.
Interesting, Sean. I’m certainly not up to date on my historiography of the Terror, nor do I even really rembmeber any specifics from Conquest, so I’m curious what (in your opinion) the major flaws in his analysis are. But only if you have the time and energy, of course!
Speaking of the Smolensk archives, a professor of mine once assigned our Soviet historiography class Fainsod’s Smolensk under Soviet Rule and Schapiro’s Communist Party of the Soviet Union for the same week. And this was the kind of guy who expected you to read all 900 pages and be able to stand up to individual interrogation in class (he once claimed that Stalin was misunderstood…)
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