"Documenting Communism:" The Hoover Project to Microfilm and Publish the Soviet Archives (Part 2)

Used with permission from the Hoover Digest

Charles G. Palm

About half way through the project, we lost him. In December 1995, the parliamentary election threatened to end the Yeltsin administration. Government opposition parties won 53% of the vote, while Yeltsin's supporters won only 38%. In January, Pikhoia, speaking on behalf of his Rosarkhiv collegium, notified me that our agreement was terminated. The Hoover project exposed a conflict in Russian society. On the one hand, many Russians were open to western ideas and collaboration with the West. At the same time, other Russians held xenophobic mistrust and hatred for the West. The election brought out the hatred. Several Yeltsin ministers resigned, and Pikhoia's position was threatened.

In his letter to me, he suggested that I come to Moscow to meet with him and his colleagues to discuss the terms for ending the project. Of course, I agreed to go. I also suggested that he and I meet in advance in Prague, away from the turmoil in Moscow. He agreed. When we met in Prague, Pikhoia told me that the agreement could not be saved, that he was no longer calling the shots. The Rosarkhiv collegium, which until the recent election he had led with complete authority, was now in charge. One of the reasons given in the January letter for ending the agreement was that the Hoover agreement was in violation of Russian law - a clear indication of the attitude of his colleagues, not to mention the threat it represented to Pikhoia.

I went to Moscow with two objectives. First, I wanted to end the project on friendly terms. I did not want Hoover or Pikhoia to be accused of breaking Russian law. Accordingly, I was prepared to offer generous terms in exchange for a mutually agreeable end - one that would be reported to the Russian public in a joint press release. The Russians could keep the equipment and half the supplies, we would continue paying royalties on both past and future sales, and we would send the promised microfilm of Hoover's Russian archives. If they continued to insist that we had broken the law, they would get nothing. Secondly, I hoped to open negotiations for a new agreement, if not then, later in case the political turmoil subsided.

When I arrived at the Rosarkhiv offices in Moscow, I was taken, not to Pikhoia's office as usual, but to a conference room where in addition to Pikhoia sat the entire Rosarkhiv collegium. This scene told me that Pikhoia, had I not already known it, was no longer in charge. I made my pitch, after which they retired to an adjacent room to talk things over. When we reassembled, the Russian side announced its agreement. They would end the agreement on friendly terms and begin discussions for a new agreement. A joint press release was drafted and released.

The crisis ended, but so did Pikhoia's term. He resigned shortly after the meeting. We had to move forward without our strongest supporter. Fortunately, things started going our way. In July, unexpectedly, Boris Yeltsin won reelection in the presidential election. Second, one of the three repositories involved in the first agreement was still headed by a director friendly to Hoover - Sergei Mironenko. Not long after Yeltsin's reelection discussions with Mironenko began, and eventually a new agreement was signed with the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), the repository he headed.

The Soviet archives totaled hundreds of millions of records. We could not possibly film them all. To make the selection, we established an editorial board of six distinguished historians - three picked by Hoover, three picked by Pikhoia. I picked Robert Conquest, a Hoover scholar and noted author of books on Stalin's crimes; John Dunlop, a Hoover scholar who wrote on Russian nationalism and my predecessor as head of the Library and Archives; and Terence Emmons, Stanford professor of Russian history who wrote on many topics of Soviet affairs. Pikhoia picked General Dmitri Volkogonov, a special assistant to Yeltsin with access to the archives and author of biographies of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. The other two members were Nikolai Pokrovskii, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Pikhoia himself. Jana Howlett, a fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, and an expert consultant hired by Hoover, was an ex officio member. The Board was chaired by Pikhoia. The editorial board gave assurance to scholars everywhere that the selection of materials to be filmed would be made in an objective, professional manner.

The board established three priorities:

• The materials to be filmed first would be the finding aids to the records. If the project were cut short, we would at least have a record of what constituted the Soviet archives.

• Selection of materials were made at the record series level, not the document level. Documents are best understood in the context of other documents in the same file. Accordingly, we filmed every document in the record series. Scholars were assured that they would see the entire file, not just single documents that fit our interests or interpretation.

• We focused on the mechanisms of power, by which we meant the decision making, systemic operations of the central organs of the Party and State. We were not primarily interested in sensational revelations, as many others were. While we were not averse to obtaining such materials, our main interest was documenting Soviet communism as a system. How did it function day-to-day? What were its systemic failures?

The Soviet Union was a bifurcated system, governed by parallel bodies. On one body was the Communist Party which set policy. On the other was the Soviet State, which executed policy under the oversight of the Party. We filmed records of both the Party and the State.

At the apex of the Party were the Congresses, which consisted of party representatives throughout the nation and met periodically. As directed by the Politburo (with some exceptions the Politburo records were not opened to us or others), the Congresses approved all policies as well as appointments to the Central Committee. We filmed the records of all but three Congresses. Covering the years 1903 to 1990, these records totaled 220,000 pages. They document internal debate, reveal key information circulated to party members, and record changes in policy.

A second key organ of the Party was the Central Committee, a smaller group of key party members. The Central Committee was responsible for policy when the Congress was not in session. Also directed by the Politburo, the Central Committee oversaw party and state agencies and by extension the entire political and economic life of the nation. It elected members of the Secretariat which included the administrative departments responsible for putting policies into effect. More than 2 million pages of Central Committee records were filmed, including those of party plenums and key departments of the Secretariat - finance and budget, defense, propaganda and ideology, statistics, and party organization.

The third organ of the Party was the Party Control Commission, which supervised the lives of party members. It oversaw local party organizations and enforced party discipline and in the 1930s was instrumental in conducting party purges. We filmed 825,000 pages of Party Control Commission records covering the period 1934 to 1966.

The other side of the bifurcated system was the State, consisting of the government agencies that implement the policies set by the Party. Like any federal government, the Soviet State produced hundreds of millions of records. Ambitious as our project was, we could hope to film only a fraction of these records. Moreover, many parts of the State archives were closed off to us, including with some exceptions the records of the KGB and the defense and foreign ministries.

We decided to focus on two groups of State records: the records of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (NKVD) for the period 1917 to 1931 and the records of the Gulag and related agencies. We chose the NKVD records because they covered the formative years of the Soviet Union, and because the NKVD was the key instrument that imposed communism on the Russian people. The NKVD reached into every corner of the lives of ordinary people. 3.6 million pages of NKVD records were filmed.

The other group of State records we filmed were those relating to the Gulag. We filmed 3 million pages covering the years 1918 to 1960. We chose the Gulag records for two reasons. First, they covered a long period of Soviet history - 1918 to 1960. And most importantly the Gulag was, as Anne Applebaum said in her book, "Gulag, A History," "the quintessential expression of the Soviet system." By documenting the Gulag we were documenting the essence of the Soviet system itself.

One record group we filmed was proposed by Pikhoia, not one initially selected by the editorial board. That was Fond 89, the records of the 1992 Constitutional trial of the Communist Party. The trial was brought on by a lawsuit filed by former members of the Party against the Yeltsin decrees of August and November 1991 that dissolved the Party and seized its records. Fond 89 numbers about 20,000 pages, including more than 2,000 declassified secret documents from the records of the Politburo, Central Committee, KGB, and ministries of defense and foreign affairs. Fond 89 exposes many crimes of the Party and its leaders and contain the most noteworthy set of revelations to come out of Russia.

As the largest project involving Soviet archives, we drew the most attention and the most criticism. It began early. When Pikhoia and I met with the Russian press to announce the project, the first question I got was "How much did you have to bribe Pikhoia to get this deal?" It rarely got any better. Here were some of the headlines in the Russian press: "Archival Piracy," "Goats in the Garden," and "How Much is our History Worth." An especially toxic article expressed the depth of anger:

"The Hoover project...is an act of betrayal of Russia's fundamental national interest by the Yeltsinites, unconditional capitulation of this regime in the face of victorious America which, as a victor country, is taking materials and spiritual values of the vanquished country in amounts and of a quality sufficient...to preclude any possibility of national resurgence. As soon as these archives arrive in America, hordes of historians, military, intelligence agents, and social engineering specialists will converge on them to extract the precious ferments and to use them for the good of America and as poison against Russia.

We countered every argument:

• The Russian critics said we were stealing their national treasure. We were not. We took out only microfilm copies.

• They said we were undermining control over their archives. We were not. The Russian archivists maintained physical control at all times.

• They said we violated Russian law. We did not. There was no law against making copies and sending them out of the country.

• They said their side got little in return. Not true. They got $250,000 in equipment, $630,00 for labor costs that nearly doubled their actual labor costs, and $1.35 million in royalty payments. The total cash payments to the Russians totaled $2 million - by my estimate, enough to pay the salaries of 89 full-time, professional-level employees for 10 years. In other words, as one of our critics later admitted, this single microfilming project enabled three Russian repositories to weather a decade of economic turmoil.

• Finally, they got free copies of all the microfilm we produced - one set to reside in Moscow and a second set in Novosibirsk - as well as microfilm of Hoover's entire Russian archival holdings.

The Hoover Institution, of course, benefitted as well. The total cost of the project was $3.16 million, a good investment for a priceless collection. We also had the satisfaction of knowing that had we not done the project, it may not have been done at all, certainly not with the voluminous result we achieved.

In November 1991, when I first laid my eyes on the rows of metal shelving housing the massive archives of the Soviet Communist Party, I saw a chance to realize one of Herbert Hoover's most intensely felt aspirations and one of the founding missions of the Hoover Institution - documenting an ideology that produced nearly a century of tyranny over the Russian people and that menaced liberal and democratic values everywhere. I think it would not be too much to claim for the Hoover Institution, mission accomplished.