Contenu du sommaire : Archives et nouvelles sources de l'histoire soviétique, une réévaluation

Andrea Graziosi. The new Soviet archival sources. Hypotheses for a critical assessment. The essay puts forward a number of hypotheses concerning the value and the weaknesses of the pre-1953 Soviet archival sources. A brief review of the Moscow central archives and of their holdings is followed by a discussion of the documentation pertaining to the people ruling the country. After mapping the territory of the sources that are today available, an attempt is made at evaluating the size and the relevance of the lacunae in this kind of documentation. The biases of the documents and their causes are then analyzed. Particular attention is here devoted to the ideologies, the characteristics, the interests and the cultures of the Soviet bureaucracies. After a specialized treatment of economic data, a final section raises the problem of the huge lacunae in the documentation pertaining to the life and the mentalités of the Soviet people. The abundance of political police reports cannot make up for the dearth of autonomously produced documents and the special features of their surrogates (letters to newspapers, etc.). A brief discussion of the possible remedies to the many problems plaguing the student of Soviet history concludes the essay.

Jonathan Bone. Soviet controls on the circulation of information in the 1920s and 1930s. Historians long have recognized that Stalin and his supporters controlled the circulation of information in order to acquire, exercise, and maintain power. However few historians to date have sought to consider the consequences of this manipulation on the archives that our research depends on. Thus this article begins with some observations apropos the means utilized by the pre-war "apparat" (the Soviet political machine) to control information. These observations are based on the author's research since 1992 in a variety of Russian archives, both in Moscow and in regional centers. Treated in detail are Stalin-era controls based on limited access to information (classification by topic) and some special information- handling procedures. In addition the classification scheme used from 1927 until the outbreak of the Second World War is published for the first time. The article concludes by examining the general implications of these controls as well as their practical importance for historical research on the USSR.

Oleg Khlevniuk. The historian and the document. This article examines some problems related to the opening of archival sources pertaining to Soviet history. It deals mainly with the misuse of archives by historians: falsification of documents, distortion of their contents. It then raises the question of the degree of preservation of documents, their partial destruction in the past, and the completeness of the collections' informational contents. It concludes with the prospects of research based on the archives.

Terry Martin Interpreting the new archival signals: Nationalities policy and the nature of the Soviet bureaucracy. This article surveys the major archival sources available for the study of Soviet nationalities policy in the period from 1923 to 1938. It then articulates a new theory about the nature of the Soviet bureaucracy. This theory states that the Soviet bureaucracy was intentionally divided into soft-line and hard-line bureaucracies. Soft-line institutions dealt openly with the Soviet public and their job was to present the regime's policies in as attractive a light as possible. Typical soft-line tasks were receiving petitions and petitioners, correcting excesses, restoring rights, bestowing awards, providing a forum for mass participation in elections and soviets. Hard-line institutions, on the other hand, specialized in upholding Bolshevik vigilance and insuring the implementation and preservation of core Bolshevik policies and values. Since the central leadership simultaneously promoted contradictory soft and hard-line policies (both in open and secret communication), terror emerged as a signaling device to inform lower-level bureaucrats when the central authorities were serious about having the hard-line policy implemented. The article cautions against two interpretive errors that can emerge if this bureaucratic division of labor is ignored. First, studies that rely exclusively on either soft or hard-line sources will inevitably distort Soviet reality. Second, studies that ignore the functional nature of the hard-line/soft-line dichotomy will tend to exaggerate the level of bureaucratic conflict in the Stalinist years.

Peter A.Blitstein. Researching Stalin 's nationality policy in the archives. Insofar as Soviet party and state archives are organized primarily on the institutional principle, the researcher working on questions which did not fall under the purview of a particular institution or group of institutions encounters difficulties. One such area is nationality policy. The article discusses the problems of researching Soviet nationality policy from the 1930s to 1950s, detailing specific collections and genres of documents in six central archives located in Moscow. The author describes two general kinds of sources: routinized communications between center and periphery, and irregular batches of documents focused on particularly sensational events. Emphasis is placed as much on the kinds of information that is not available, as on what is available in central archives. In concluding, the author cautions that reliance on either routinized or sensational sources alone will skew understanding of nationality policy in the Stalin period.

Matthew E. Lenoe. Letter-writing and the state: Reader correspondence with newspapers as a source for early Soviet history. This article locates major central archives of reader letters to early Soviet newspapers ( 1924-1933), describes the practice of letter-writing to state authorities, and analyses the potential uses of letters to the press as historical sources. The author argues that the practice of writing letters to newspapers and other public institutions in the U.S.S.R. was shaped by state authorities for their own purposes, including gathering intelligence on popular moods, monitoring lower levels of the bureaucracy, and facilitating the distribution of goods and privileges. Because the practice of letter-writing to authority occurred within a framework of state control, letters to the newspaper are excellent sources on the interaction between the Soviet state and its subjects. They do not, however, provide a clear window on the private opinions and beliefs of Soviet subjects.

D'Ann R.Penner. Ports of access into the mental and social worlds of Don villagers in the 1920s and 1930s. This article is a critical analysis of archival sources available to historians of popular mentalities during the first decades of Soviet power. The author argues that the most generous, frank, and least problematic veins of popular sources are amongst the documents generated in the townships (sel 'sovety) or counties (raiony), wherever they may be housed today. In particular, she examines OGPU svodki and conference interventions (the short, impromptu commentary, rebuttal, or query after the orations of state or Party representatives). County-originated OGPU incidents, preferably compiled by a county, district or territorial agent, hold unparalleled potential for both vertical and horizontal comparison. The descriptions of conversations and incidents in OGPU svodki are inevitably more complete at the county level, where even crowd responses to "inflammatory" speeches are included. The conference interventions offers a potentially invaluable port of entry into the minds and thought processes of people who, on the whole, when they were able to write, did so laboriously. She concludes by describing the wealth of seemingly ordinary sources available in remote provincial archives that supply the building materials for a database of village histories. The article concludes with a demonstration of the widened possibilities for exegesis of popular letters when examined in the context of the writer's social, revolutionary, and historical context.

Golfo Alexopoulos. Voices beyond the Urals: The discovery of a central state archive. The Center for Preservation of a Reserve Record is an enormous warehouse of state documents located in the western Siberian town of Ialutorovsk. It was built after the death of Stalin as a repository and not an archive, and was closed to researchers until 1992. The Center's primary and unique function is the maintenance and storage of microfilms or back-up copies (strakhovye fondy) of important archival documents from both the Tsarist and Soviet periods. In addition to the microfilms, however, the Center stores a vast collection of original documents, printed material, sound recordings and films which were moved to this remote site from their original storage in various central state archives in Moscow. This study is the first to list the contents of the Center's vast collection, but also seeks to illustrate the importance of the Center's holdings by focusing on a group of documents stored there, the case files and individual petitions of the lishentsy or the disenfranchised from the 1920s and 1930s. A systematic sampling of these petitions can help historians to explore a variety of new questions, such as the victim's response to repression and the ways in which political membership was contested and constructed in the new Soviet state.

Lesley A. Rimmel. Svodki and popular opinion in Stalinist Leningrad. This essay examines the use of Communist Party svodki on the popular mood in Leningrad as a means ofdetermining popular opinion in the USSR of the 1930s. The advantage of svodki over other kinds of sources, such as memoirs, diaries, and interviews, is that the quantity and variety of their subjects allow the researcher to make certain demographic generalizations. While svodki tend to be more reliable as sources of "negative," anti-regime opinion, they can, when used with care and in certain circumstances, be valuable sources of pro-regime opinion as well. They are also useful in showing how difficult was the job of propagandist during this time, and how poorly organized were the propaganda campaigns around "enemies."

Silvio Tons. The papers on foreign and international policy in the Russian archives: The Stalin years. This article reports a research experience in the Russian archives on several aspects of Stalin's foreign policy in the 1930s and 1940s. The opening of the Russian archives has been particularly selective in the field of foreign policy. Though an impressive process of declassification of archival materials has been undertaken, this not always results in the availability of documents and in the possibility to use finding aids. In particular, the Arkhiv Vneshnei Politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii, which is the main archive for the analysis of Soviet foreign policy , does not offer, on very relevant topics, the chance to carry out a complete research. The situation in the CPSU archives and the archives of Communist international organizations was more favourable for some time, but it has been increasingly worsening over the last two- three years. Quite probably, in the opening of archival documentation on Soviet Foreign Policy an extremely favourable cycle has developed and exhausted itself approximately in the years 1992-1996. However, the impact of archives on foreign policy history should not be underestimated. Though the documentation available does not always shed enough light onto the decision-making processes, the complexity and subtlety of our views become greater. The new materials greatly enrich our understanding of the connection between the Cold War and pre-war Soviet foreign policy, thus challenging the division traced by pre-1991 historical analysis. They also lead us to a more balanced picture of the external dimension of Stalinism in the post-war years. While the predominant image of Stalin's firm control of the political process is by and large confirmed, a complex and even contradictory character of Soviet politics can be seen. For example, the archival documents on the Cominform provide us with evidence of a deceptive political process, which shows a significant degree of ambiguity in policy-making.

Anna M.Cienciala. Detective work: Researching Soviet World War II policy on Poland in Russian archives (Moscow, 1994). After providing a background on information available before the opening of Russian archives, as well as published documents available before 1991 and up to spring 1994. the author describes her research on the topic (for the period Jan. 1939-Dec. 1941 ) in the following archives: ( 1 ) The Russian Center for Preservation and Study of Records of Modern History, formerly the Central Party Archives; (2) The Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation; ( 3 ) The Center for Preservation of Contemporary Documentation, which contains the Archives of the President of the Russian Federation. Although documents dealing with foreign policy are still absent from the files of the Po1itbiuro and Central Committee, the author found much interesting material in the Comintern/Dimitrov collections in the first archive mentioned above. Again, though most of the declassified documents in the second archive are of secondary importance, she found some interesting materials there as well. The third archive yielded few documents of interest. In conclusion, historians still await the declassification of key Soviet documents dealing with Soviet foreign policy not only for the World War II period, but also for the interwar period.

Mark Kramer. Declassified materials from CPSU Central Committee plenums. The recent declassification of transcripts and other materials from CPSU Central Committee plenums has provided a rich new source of information about the whole Soviet period, particularly the post-Stalin period. Under Stalin, the Central Committee almost never met (especially after the 1930s), but in the post-Stalin period it convened more frequently and at times discussed highly controversial issues. Although all key decisions in the post-Stalin era were made by the CPSU Presidium (Politbiuro) and Secretariat, the Central Committee did play an important supplementary role. Moreover, the declassified proceedings of the Central Committee plenums, and the newly released documents prepared for or submitted to the plenums, often shed light on the motives behind the Presidium's and Secretariat's decisions. These materials provide valuable evidence for scholars interested in Soviet domestic politics, leadership struggles, and foreign policy.