Researching Perestroika in the Archive of the TsK KPSS

Abstract

One enters the archive of the former Central Committee of the Soviet Communist party with mixed feelings of trepidation, excitement burgeoning on exaltation, and a sense of history's burden. Here may lie the answers to the greatest questions about Soviet rule and the most closely held secrets of the closing century's most mysterious and terrifying historico-political experience. This thought is constantly reinforced by the stern gazes, emanating from two mammoth portraits, of Karl Marx and Vladimir Il'ich, whose ideas combined to produce the first Communist state. Although the Central Committee Archive once held the biographical material of this party-state, those who wish to conduct research on the perestroika era and other periods of Soviet history would be wise to temper their expectations about its present offerings. The Central Committee Archive is incomplete. The bulk of the archive reportedly was moved from the archive's building on Il'inka Street, near Staraya ploshchad', to the Moscow Kremlin, where the are stored in the as yet closed Archive of the President of Russia (Presidential Archive). Therefore, what remains in the Central Committee Archive, which is now called the Center for the Preservation of Contemporary Documents (TsKhSD) and is under the competence of the Russian Committee for Archives (Roskomarkhiv), are the least sensitive and least revealing party documents. The Central Committee apparat employed three categories of secrecy for its documents, which in descending order of sensitivity were osobaia papka (special folder), sovershenno (top secret) and, finally, sekretno (secret). An official order defined this last category as documents which do not contain information consisting of party and state secrets, but which disclose the methods of work of party committees.' For the most part, I encountered only the latter two categories of documents. The relatively few number of stenographic reports of Politburo meetings which I encountered were probably included in the notorious special folders. The that had been removed from the TsKhSD are probably making their way back from the Presidential Archive, albeit slowly. Rumors that this would occur were extant in Moscow in the spring of 1993.2 Indeed, when I began my dissertation research in the Central Committee Archive in mid-January 1993, there