Trotsky Papers at the Hoover Institution: One Chapter of an Archival Mystery Story

Abstract

SCHOLARS HAVE LONG KNOWN THAT PAPERS OF LEON TROTSKY were held at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, and at the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam. A third major site must now be added. Thirty linear feet of the papers of Trotsky and his son, Lev Sedov, have been discovered in the Boris I. Nicolaevsky Collection in the Archives of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. Nicolaevsky (1887-1966) devoted his life to the accumulation of valuable papers and rare printed items that document the history of European and, especially, Russian socialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After coming to the United States in 1940, he sold his large collection to the Hoover Institution in 1963. He remained as curator of the collection until his death, and his widow, Anna Bourguina, succeeded him as curator. While researchers have used the Nicolaevsky Collection extensively and recognized it as an outstanding source of manuscript materials on modern Russian history, it was only after the death of Bourguina in 1982, and after the acquisition of grant funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities, that the Archives staff could undertake a comprehensive arrangement and description of the materials. This account of the Trotsky-Sedov Papers results from that work. ' Although the Trotsky papers at the Hoover Institution are only one part of a fragmented whole, they nevertheless constitute an exceptionally important new historical source. The Hoover Institution holds papers of Trotsky and Sedov from the period of Trotsky's exile from the Soviet Union (1929-40). They include extensive drafts of over 500 books, articles, and circular letters written by Trotsky, amounting to a substantial manuscript record of most of his major and many of his minor writings from 1929 to 1936. The papers also contain substantial correspondence, reports, photographs, the writings of others, and office files. These papers are richer for