I can't say that I am disappointed to hear about
Russia's decision to put a cap on access to
historical archives from the Soviet era, since
they have been used more often than not to
convict ex post facto the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss,
et al. The article mentions Jonathan Brent, the
head of Yale University Press that has been
exploiting these archives in the interest of
keeping the Cold War alive. Brent, a total
scumbag if there ever was one, was named Alger
Hiss professor at Bard College a few years ago, a
post that ecosocialist Joel Kovel once occupied.
Brent has made a career out of accusing Hiss, the
Rosenbergs and other American leftists of being
Soviet spies. Naming him Alger Hiss professor is
like naming Daniel Pipes Edward Said professor at Columbia.
---
NY Times Book Review, April 22, 2007
Essay
The Iron Archives
By RACHEL DONADIO
Since the end of the cold war, historians have
mined the Russian archives for insights into the
nature of the Soviet empire and its global reach.
New documents have shed light on such matters as
the Alger Hiss and Rosenberg spy cases and also
illuminated the relationships between Moscow and
revolutionary movements in other countries
sometimes fueling old debates more than settling
them. But after a golden age in the early 1990s,
archival access eroded. Today, conversations with
nearly two dozen historians point to a worrisome
tightening that has kept key archives closed and
subjected others to unpredictable re-secretization.
Freighted with symbolic import and subject to
political pressures, access to archives is a
barometer of any governments commitment to
transparency. (In the United States, the House
and Senate passed bills last month to counter
what Democrats and Repbulicans alike see as an
erosion of the Freedom of Information Act.) But
the political changes in post-Soviet Russia make
it a particularly fraught issue. Boris Yeltsin
threw open some archives to help discredit the
just-toppled Communist regime. But by the
mid-1990s many of those archives had closed,
while others including the foreign and military
intelligence archives and the defense ministry
archive were never open to most researchers in
the first place. Todays uncertainty seems to
bear out the old joke: In Russia, how can anyone
predict the future when its so hard to predict the past?
Under Vladimir Putin a former K.G.B. agent who
has been consolidating power since becoming
president in 2000 the preoccupation with
secrecy only increased, Ilya Gaiduk, a fellow of
the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and an
expert on Soviet policy in Asia, said in an
e-mail message. Every archival official knows
that he or she would be safer erring on the side
of denying access to documents. The problems
are both bureaucratic and political. The
slow-moving federal committee in charge of
declassifiying state archive material has been
renamed the Commission on State Secrets, and it
sees its mandate as protecting them, scholars
say. And it has little jurisdiction over some key
agencies or ministries, which operate according to their own rules.
Kyrill Anderson, the director of the Russian
State Archive of Social and Political History
(formerly the Communist Party archive),
acknowledged in a telephone interview that
declassification is not going as quickly as many
would like. But the picture isnt entirely
negative. Last year, Anderson said, his archive
declassified 20,000 documents, while the archive
of the Communist International is partly
available on the Internet. In the past five
years, other scholars say, significant new
material has become available, including
documents about Stalin-era Politburo meetings,
Khrushchev-era Presidium meetings, Central
Committee plenum transcripts and associated
documents from 1967 through 1990, and the
complete Communist Party Congress records.
This spring, Yale University Press and the Hoover
Institution at Stanford hope to finalize an
arrangement to digitize and publish rarely seen
material from Stalins personal archive,
including correspondence about the purges of the
30s and the immediate postwar period. Its like
the Dead Sea Scrolls for the Stalin period, said
Jonathan Brent, the editorial director of Yale
University Press, who is negotiating the
arrangement, as he has many others for Yales
Annals of American Communism series, which has
published some of the most important recent books
drawing on Russian archives. The new material,
Brent says, provides a sense of Stalin the
individual, his psychology, his growth as a leader.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/books/review/Donadio.t.html
