Now that historians have gained free access to Soviet archives for the first time in over seventy years, it may be difficult to remember why the history of the Soviet State is one of the most studied and least understood. Throughout most of its history, the Soviet state was a one-party monolith, led by the Communist Party. The ideological justification for the organisation of this state was entirely based on historical arguments. The Soviet state relied for its legitimisation on a historical construct in which the victory of Communism was to be the inevitable consequence of a process of transformation of human society from tribal formations, through feudalism, capitalism and socialism. More specifically, the transformation of the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union was interpreted as an expression of the will of many nations united in their support for the Revolution and led in the building of a Communist society by the only party in which they could place their trust.
This was a view of history which did not allow for discussion, yet it was contradicted by all the sources. It is not surprising that from the late 1920s the Communist Party leadership used all means at its disposal to ensure that archival information should not fall into the wrong hands: in the words of Stalin 'the Party must be militant and merciless in the struggle against the class enemy on the ideological front, and against rotten liberalism in relation to all perversions of marxism-leninism, and raise vigilance against attempts to smuggle counter-revolutionary Trotskyist contraband in the guise of a study of the past (and especially of the history of our Party)' (Stalin's letter to the editors of Proletarskaia revoliutsiia quoted in the preface to the first issue of Literaturnoe nasledstvo, Leningrad, 1932) . Among the most effective means was the purge of academic institutions teaching history, and the transference of archives into the jurisdiction of the secret police. This meant that even historians of pre-Soviet Russia had difficulty with access to sources. But documents of the twentieth century were kept out of reach of all but the most reliable Party historians. Finding aids were only available to the employees of each archive - foreign researchers were not even allowed to look at card catalogues without supervision.
For Soviet historians the situation was not much better. Archives of the Communist Party, such the Central Party Archive of the Institute of Marx-Engels-Lenin (now RTsKhIDNI) , which contained materials documenting the history of the Communist movement, were accessible primarily to the historians working in the Institute. With a letter of recommendation from their own Central Committee, members of foreign Communist Parties could look at papers originating from their own Party, but only if permission was given by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR. Even during Gorbachev's perestroika little could be done to change the situation against the opposition of Party stalwarts. When the Central Party Archive started to open its doors to researchers, the Party historian V. Naumov warned the Central Committee of the dangers of allowing 'foreign scholars and Soviet institutions access to large numbers of photocopies of documents'. Typically, a collection of essays produced during perestroika with Naumov's participation cited only published works, even while using archival material (Urok daet istoriia, Moscow, 1989).
A proprietorial attitude towards the past was combined with a tradition of paranoid conspiracy, which ensured that even within the Party leadership access to documents was restricted. Already on 8 November 1919 a Politburo minute records Stalin's statement that 'certain information about sessions of the Central Committee, admittedly in corrupt form, somehow reaches our enemies' (RTsKhIDNI, fond 17, opis 3, delo 37). Stalin therefore recommended the establishment of a procedure 'which would allow only a few of the comrades to get to know the protocols'. Until the very end of the Communist Party's monopoly of power access to Politburo protocols was governed by a decree which described them as 'conspiratorial material'. When the Communist Party's current archive, now TsKhSD, was transferred from the jurisdiction of the Central Committee, almost all of its holdings were classified as secret or top secret.
As late as 12 August 1991 a memorandum was sent to one of Gorbachev's deputies in the Central Committee of the Communist Party, stressing that the documents in the Communist Party archives should not be made available to the public, because they are 'the strongest weapon of political struggle'. Less than two weeks later, after the coup attempt which failed to reclaim the Communist Party's monopoly of government, President Boris Yeltsin signed a decree which transferred the archives of the Communist Party of the USSR into the jurisdiction of the state. Now no scholar wanting to study the Soviet State in the twentieth century can do so without reference to primary sources.
As a result of President Yeltsin's decree the formerly secret archives of the Soviet Party and State came under the administration of the Committee for Archives, now the State Archival Service of Russia (Rosarkhiv). The declared aim behind the archival reform was to make the archives accessible to all. In the implementation of this task, Rosarkhiv was faced with several formidable problems.
The first was the lack of appropriate legislation. In the summer of 1993 a law governing access to the archives of the Russian Federation was passed, the first such archival legislation in Russia's history. Legislation defining the concept of 'state secrets' and its application to the archives was also passed. As a result de-classification of materials issued by State and Communist Party institutions could begin. Automatically classified are 1) materials affecting the security of the State, and 2) materials containing confidential information about the lives of private citizens. In practice the former Party archives have de-classified most material not belonging to the above categories for the years up to 1942. Documents from later periods have to be de-classified either by commissions within the archives themselves or by a special government commission.
The second task faced by the Archival Service was practical. As the numbers of scholars wishing to consult the newly accessible documents grew, it became clear that few archives were equipped to cope with such an influx. The most pressing need was for microfilm of documents, which could be issued to readers, so that unique originals could be protected.
The closing down of a great number of USSR ministries and administrative bodies, as well as the privatisation of former state companies has meant that millions of files originating from such organisations are now kept by Rosarkhiv. In the last few years the volume of documents, especially on the history of the USSR, for which Rosarkhiv is responsible has increased almost three times.
The microfilms listed in this catalogue are the result of an unprecedented agreement between Rosarkhiv and the Hoover Institution, with the participation of Chadwyck- Healey. This was Rosarkhiv's first major international agreement.
The Rosarkhiv-Hoover agreement has facilitated the solution of the following problems:
1. Making of microfilm copies of the most important documents for the history of the USSR and its Communist Party. This has necessitated enormous work on the analysis, processing and de-classification of documents. The obtained microfilm copies will become available to researchers in Russia and abroad.
2. The creation of microfilm copies aids the preservation of unique documents, most of which had never been intended for use in research.
As part of the agreement Hoover is donating to Rosarkhiv microfilm copies of its holdings on the history of Russia and the Russian Empire. A considerable part of these materials is being microfilmed specially for Rosarkhiv.
The finding aids and documents filmed under this agreement contain a wealth of new information about all aspects of the life of the Soviet State and Communist Party from 1917 until 1991.
PARTICIPATING ARCHIVES
The three archives represent the key archives of the Soviet State and the Soviet Communist Party.
a) Archives of the Soviet State
The State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) was created in April 1992 from the Archive of the October Revolution (TsGAOR SSSR) and the Central Archive of the RSFSR.
The Central State Archive of the October Revolution, of Organs of Government and of Organs of State Administration, to give it its full name , was the most important archive of the Soviet State. It was initially responsible for gathering collections documenting the formation of this state, which underwent several transformations on the road to the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. From October 1917 until mid- 1918 the Bolsheviks controlled only the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian Socialist Republic. By late 1920 there were eight Socialist Republics, though much of the territory of the former Russian Empire was in the grip of a Civil War. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formed in December 1922, though initially it did not include all the Soviet Republics on former Imperial territory.
The Archive of the October Revolution (TsGAOR) was set up in 1920 in order to collect documents on the history of the October Revolution and the establishment of Soviet power in the RSFSR. The core of the present collection was therefore formed from documents issued by the Military-Revolutionary Councils (MRCts), the first Congresses of the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies (the Soviets, later to include peasant deputies, were technically the supreme legislative authority in the early Soviet state), the Central Executive Committee (VTsIK), the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), the Council for the National Economy (VSNKh), the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) and other government institutions of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic.
After the establishment of the USSR many republic-level institutions were closed down, and by decree their papers were transferred in 1938 to the now-renamed Central State Archive of the October Revolution (TsGAOR). In the same year TsGAOR, together with all other state archives of the USSR, came under the jurisdiction of the NKVD, the ministry which policed the state.
In 1941 TsGAOR became a repository of all Trade Union papers and papers of institutions dealing with the economy and was renamed Central State Archive of the October Revolution and of Socialist Construction. After the war the archive received the papers of Russian 駑igr駸 in Prague and Belgrade. The Prague archive contained papers of opposition parties, of the many governments and military groups which tried to overthrow the Bolsheviks during the tragic years of the Civil War.
Between 1957 and 1992 TsGAOR underwent several more re-organisations. The NKVD/MVD control ceased in 1962 and the archive first lost and then acquired again materials on the RSFSR and USSR economy and its organisation.
In 1992 TsGAOR was merged with the Central State Archive of the RSFSR. The latter had been since the early sixties the repository for the papers of the government of the RSFSR (the largest republic in the USSR) and for materials on the economy and industry of this republic. The new archive was named the State Archive of the Russian Federation.
As the list of the collections of this archive in the opisi section shows, the result is an immense wealth of political, economic, statistical and other information about the highest echelons of State administrations together with a fascinating collection of personal archives belonging to figures as disparate as General Denikin, leader of the White Armies in South Russia during the Civil War, and Aleksei Gastev, poet of the proletarian revolution and a passionate believer in the creation of a new society, who perished during Stalin's purges.
In 1995 a decree from President Yeltsin gave GARF the status of an 'exceptional monument of culture'.
b) The former Soviet Communist Party Archives
The Russian Centre for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Most Recent History (RTsKhIDNI) and the Centre for the Preservation of Contemporary Documentation (TsKhSD) are the two main Communist Party archives which came under the jurisdiction of Rosarkhiv in 1991.
The Centre for the Preservation of Contemporary Documentation came into being in the autumn of 1991. The core of the archive's collections consists of the working papers of the current archive of the General Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. It contains the documents of the Secretariat, departments and apparat of the Central Committee from 1953 onwards (from the XXth Party Congress). It also includes the more than 200 archives which were kept by the Central Committee in its many departments and buildings. TsKhSD is therefore a unique collection of documents on the activities of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR during the last four decades.
The organisation of the Central Committee, and the importance of its institutions, varied throughout its existence, but fig.1 represents the theoretical system of relationships between main Communist Party organisations as laid down by the Ustav or Rule Book of the Party.
fig.1
In actual fact the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party was at the apex of all decision making in the Soviet party, as seen from fig.2.
fig.2
The Russian Centre for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Most Recent History - formerly the Central Party Archive of the Institute of Marx-Engels-Lenin attached to the Central Committee of the Communist Party - is well known to all Sovietologists. It was created in 1928 from two archives as a repository for documents tracing the history of communism as a world movement. The Archive for the History of the Communist Party (ISTPART) was formed in 1918 as an archive for documents of the October Revolution and the Civil War, as a department under the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). The Lenin Institute and the Institute of Marx and Engels were separately founded soon after the Revolution. In 1928 the two were merged as the Institute of Marx-Engels-Lenin (IMEL) and the collections of the ISTPART were transferred to IMEL.
The IMEL Archive was initially concentrated on personal papers rather than official papers. For example the Molotov papers were donated by his widow, the Inez Armand papers were received from one of Armand's French relatives. The Institute also purchased papers associated with the key figures of the world communist movement in auctions and private sales outside Russia and received confiscated papers of purged Party leaders.
In 1978 it was decided to transfer Central Committee papers for the years up to and including the XIXth Party Congress (1952) from the working archive General Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. It has been a research archive for some decades, though until 1991 it was accessible only to senior members of the Communist Party pursuing approved research. In addition to the personal papers of all the major figures of Soviet history (e.g. Lenin, Stalin, Molotov, Kalinin, Lunacharskii, Kollontai) the documents on the history of the Soviet Party fall into the following groups:
1. Working papers of the Central Committee and its subordinate departments,
sections
and commissions before 1952, from Politburo level down to specialist
departments
and
commissions.
2. Papers of Party conferences and congresses and membership censuses.
3. Papers of various socialist parties and factions.
4. Papers of the editorial boards of Central Committee newspapers and
journals.
5. Papers of state organs under the direct jurisdiction of the Central
Committee and
of
Party organisations within state organs.
Since the Communist Party played a leading role in all aspects of political, economic and social organisation, the Politburo was also at the apex of decision making of the Soviet State. Heads of major state institutions were also members of the Politburo. For example M. I. Kalinin was both a candidate member and member of the Politburo as well as chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR (1923-1938) and of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (1938-1946); all the chairmen of the Council of People's Commissars (later Council of Ministers) of the USSR (1923-1991) were also Politburo members. That is one of the reasons why the materials in RTsKhIDNI and TsKhSD relate closely to material in GARF.
ORGANISATION OF MATERIAL IN RUSSIAN ARCHIVES
Russian archives subdivide their holdings into fondy, opisi and dela according to the following scheme:
fig.3
The term fond roughly corresponds to the term collection or record group. Each fond is divided into opisi (opis=singular, opisi=plural) or records series. The material in each opis is linked by date or subject or both. Each opis contains between one and several thousand dela (delo=singular, dela=plural) or files, with 150 dela being the average. It should be noted, however, that there is an important difference between the classification of Central Committee material in RTsKhIDNI and TsKhSD. RTsKhIDNI unites all Party bodies controlled directly by the Central Committee in a single fond (no. 17), whereas TsKhSD assigns a separate fond number to each. Thus in RTsKhIDNI the Secretariat of the Central Committee is classed as fond 17, opisi nos. 4, 112-119, whereas in TsKhSD the Secretariat papers are catalogued under fond 4; the papers of the General Department of the Central Committee are held in fond 5 in TsKhSD, whereas in RTsKhIDNI they can be found in opis nos. 65, 66 and 96 of fond 17.
MATERIALS SELECTED FOR THE COLLECTION
The selection of material for filming is based on two criteria. Priority is given to the records of the highest policy-making organs of the Communist Party. Secondly, the project is filming record series or fondy in their entirety, without selecting documents from different fondy on the basis of the documents' content.
None of the archives described above has, as yet, detailed printed guides to their collections. Both GARF and RTsKhIDNI have now produced printed guides, but they describe materials only at the fondy or opisi level. TsKhSD does not yet have a full catalogue of its collections. Moreover, no printed catalogue could contain the wealth of detail that the opisi contain. The Editorial Board felt that scholars should receive as soon as possible a comprehensive overview of the holdings. Eleven finding aids of de-classified holdings documenting the activities of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet State have been selected for filming.
a) Finding aids
The Russian term for finding aids - opisi - is, somewhat confusingly, identical to the term describing the first subdivision level of a fond.
The finding aids are usually introduced by information about the organisation or person which is the subject of a given collection. The information in the opisi themselves depends on the nature of the material contained in the collection. Opisi for working documents of central organisations, such as the protocols of the Politburo, contain only information about dates of sessions and numbers of pages in each protocol. In the case of protocols of subdivisions, such as subcommissions, the opisi are more informative, giving a general idea of the questions discussed.
Opisi for all other types of collections are far more detailed, providing information about the date and provenance of the material in a given collection, together with an abstract of the documents filed. For example fond 558 is a collection of documents written by or about Stalin and gathered as part of the preparations for a celebratory edition of his works. The catalogue entry for delo 3162 in opis 1 is a letter from Stalin to Georgii Dimitrov, then General Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. The opis tells us that the document was transferred to the fond in December 1945 from the papers of the secretariat (office) of G. M. Dmitrov, that it is an autograph in red ink dated 25 October 1934, and that it has 3 folios. The contents are summarised as follows: 'Letter to G. M. Dimitrov informing him of Stalin's ideas about a review of Comintern's working methods and organisation, with address on envelope'.
b) Documents
The NKVD fond in GARF contains nearly 5 million pages on the work of this organisation from 1917 to 1930. The NKVD is known primarily as 'Stalin's secret police', but such a description does not do justice to the extraordinary scope of the organisation's jurisdiction. The NKVD papers provide information about virtually every aspect of the life of Soviet society. The NKVD oversaw the work of local Soviets, and therefore the fond contains protocols of these organisations. Through its registration bureaux the NKVD collected materials on the issuing of passports for travel abroad, permissions for marriages between Soviet and foreign nationals, applications for Soviet citizenship, changes of name and marital status. Its policing duties including supervision of prisons, labour camps, constructions sites using forced labour, as well as the better-known counter-revolutionary and counter-intelligence duties.
The reasons for the selection of materials from the Party archives will be evident from figures 1 and 2 above. It should be noted that the materials show not only the decision- making process from above, whether through the work of the Congresses or the Central Committee, but also from below, in the reports that were received by the Central Committee as well as in the materials of the Central Control Commission, which supervised the lives of Party members in minute detail, from their political convictions to their private lives.
CLASSIFIED MATERIAL
All the material microfilmed under the present project has been de-classified in accordance with the laws of the Russian Federation. Where a fond or opis contains material that has not yet been de-classified, this is stated in the list of microfilms and in a target on the microfilm itself. Material de-classified at a later date will be added to the series as it becomes available.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Editor owes a debt of gratitude not only to Rosarkhiv and the directors of the three archives, but also to the archivists who have generously provided the information on which this catalogue is based. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Mrs Liudmilla Kosheleva and Mrs Larissa Rogovaia of RTsKhIDNI, Mr. Ivan Shevchuk of TsKhSD and Mr. Evgenii Lunacharskii and Mr. Oleg Nitseevskii of GARF. I would also like to thank Mrs Natalia Volkova, who provided the original translations of most of the 2,800 titles listed in this catalogue.
Dr Jana Howlett
Jesus College
Cambridge
March 1995