Archives Administration in the Soviet Union Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/20/2/131/2743724/aarc_20_2_m32336mr26014327.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 By FRITZ T. EPSTEIN 1 Library of Congress HAVE never had a chance to visit Russia and work in Soviet archives. In fact, I have never been farther east and nearer to I Russia than the Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Therefore I do not pretend to give infallible judgments on the merits or faults of the ad- ministration of archives in the Soviet Union. In preparing this paper I had to rely on printed materials, which I found more abun- dant than I had expected in the Library of Congress. My approach is not that of an archivist or a record management specialist but that of a historian with special interest in the history of Eastern Europe, in its organization of historical research, and in its docu- mentary sources. A few months ago, the American Philosophical Society published a selection from the correspondence of John Franklin Jameson, who, in the Department of Historical Research of the Carnegie Institu- tion, as editor of the American Historical Review, and as one of the godfathers of the National Archives, served American scholar- ship with great devotion and distinction. In this correspondence there are two letters, of July 19, 1916, and July 16, 1917, addressed to one of the most distinguished historians of Tsarist Russia, Alexander Lappo-Danilevskii.2 Jameson had met his Russian col- league in London in 1913 at the Fourth International Congress of Historians, which had accepted an invitation to convene the next congress in the summer of 1918 in St. Petersburg. Fate, as we know, willed differently; and at the time when the congress was to be held 1 Paper read at the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists in Wash- ington, D. C, October n, 1956. The author received his doctoral degree from the University of Berlin in 1924. Since 1946 he has been successively an American member of the Berlin team of the Inter-Allied German War Documents Project, curator of the German and Slavic collections of the Hoover Library at Stanford University, and Director of Research of the Inter-Departmental War Documentation Project. He is now Central European Specialist at the Library of Congress. In 1930 he published in Archivalische Zeitschrift, vol. 39, a bibliographical article on Soviet archives. 2 John Franklin Jameson, An Historian's World; Selections From the Correspondence . , edited by Elizabeth Donnan and Leo F. Stock (American Philosophical Society, Memoirs, vol. 42; Philadelphia, 1956), p. 198, an. 132 THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST in the Russian capital, Russia was in the throes of defeat and revolu- tion. From Jameson's second letter it appears that Lappo-Danilevskii had asked for advice on the reform of the Russian archives. This, Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/20/2/131/2743724/aarc_20_2_m32336mr26014327.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 like many other issues in the cultural life of his country, had be- come a matter of public discussion under the Provisional Govern- ment of Russia. Here is Jameson's answer, dated July 16, 1917: The National Government of the United States has done practically nothing in the way of concentrating its archives. We stand in the lowest stage of evolution in that respect, — government papers, in almost all cases, still re- maining in the departments and even in the bureaus, in which they originated. Therefore, the American literature of the subject is a literature of agitation for an improvement rather than anything from which the archivists of another country could learn of achievements that would interest them. The matter is in progress, and success is sure to arrive ultimately; and I suppose, the longer it is delayed, the more we shall be able to avail ourselves of European ex- perience. Therefore, it will be a pleasure to learn, by and by, what steps toward concentration have been taken in Russia. Such was the situation nearly 40 years ago, when from American darkness in the field of archival centralization no ray of light could penetrate the even greater Russian darkness. Today a stage has been reached where the United States and the Soviet organization of archives stand side by side as prototypes of the most modern achievements — as, so to speak, the last word in Western and Eastern archives organization. It will accord with the spirit of Dr. Jameson's letter to report to you on the steps taken in Russia toward a reorganization and concentration of archives. I shall deal very summarily with the history of the Russian archives in the pre- revolutionary period, and then I shall discuss in more detail the ef- fect of Marxist ideology in placing an emphasis on the political role of archives that is completely alien to our conception. The introduction to Frank Alfred Golder's Guide to Materials for American History in Russian Archives, published in two parts by the Carnegie Institution in 1913 and 1937, still remains an ex- emplary marshaling of the essential facts of archival history and legislation in imperial Russia. It is important to realize that the re- form work of Peter the Great extended to the archives and that it was he who in 1724 set up the first Russian historical archives in a modern sense by concentrating in the Kremlin the documents of the Muscovite foreign ministry, the Office of Ambassadors (Posol'skii prikaz). Under Catherine the Great, in the 1780's, archives were set up in St. Petersburg and Moscow for the extant documentation ARCHIVES ADMINISTRATION IN SOVIET UNION 133 of the Muscovite central administration before Peter's reforms and for administrative files created since. During the 19th century, besides the St. Petersburg ministerial archives for different branches of the administration, several territorial archives, for instance those Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/20/2/131/2743724/aarc_20_2_m32336mr26014327.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 in Kiev and Kharkov for the Ukraine, were established. Two directors of the Archives of the Ministry of Justice in St. Peters- burg, N. V. Kalachov and D. la. Samokvasov, gave much thought to their calling and favored radical reforms, suggesting a central administration for all Russian archives, one central archives for all branches of the central administration, and better training for archi- vists. None of these proposals materialized, however, except that certain courses in the auxiliary sciences of history were introduced at the archeological institutes of St. Petersburg and Moscow, and archival commissions were established in the provinces. The com- missions remained to the end of the Tsarist era as rather powerless organs with limited advisory functions. The Bolshevik revolution swept away all that hitherto had ex- isted in the field of archives administration. The Soviet reform went further in centralization than had ever before been envisioned and added something new — a totalitarian unification. In the July 1940 issue of the American Archivist Dr. Posner, in his stimulating dis- cussion of some aspects of archival development since the French Revolution, wrote the following: The years since the end of the First World War have seen some entirely new developments. The Russian archives legislation has created the concept of the unity of governmental archives, according to which all records that are kept in government offices or have been transferred to archives depositories constitute one undivided and unique fonds. The decree of January 30, 1922, empowered the Russian archives administration to examine the files of all government offices of its own accord and, if necessary, to apply to the Central Executive Committee for remedy of conditions. The American National Archives Act has made similar, although less radical, provisions.3 These remarks clearly show that the Bolshevik revolution had become a dividing line not only in the history of Russian archives but in the theory and practice of archival organization of both Western and Eastern Europe. Incidentally, most of Dr. Posner's paper was translated into Russian and was published in 1941 in Arkhivnoe Delo (Archival Matters), the Soviet professional journal. The reform of the Russian Archives after the October Revolution might be regarded as a late step in the series of great reforms which 3 American Archivist, 3:171 (July 1940). 134 THE AMERICAN ARCHIVIST began in 1861 with the liberation of the peasants and which were strongly influenced by Western — Prussian, French, and English — ideas and experiences. It brought about in Russia a delayed victory for the ideas of the French Revolution in the archival field. Downloaded from http://meridian.allenpress.com/american-archivist/article-pdf/20/2/131/2743724/aarc_20_2_m32336mr26014327.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 The French laws of 1794 and 1796 had a direct influence on the drafting of early Soviet archives legislation in 1918 and 1919. The undivided, unique, unified State Archives fonds — comprising both existing historical archives up to January 1, 1917, and current records from which the postrevolutionary historical archives are be- ing built up — is the important Soviet innovation in the field of ar- chival science and practice. As far as documentary materials are con- cerned, Soviet archives, libraries, and museums form a unit, since the Main Administration of Archives exercises authority also over the manuscript collections of libraries and museums.4 Likewise, the authority vested in the Main Administration in its dealings with government agencies and other public institutions regarding the filing systems of their current materials and the destruction of files or their disposition in archives is without precedent in the history of European archives. There are two outstanding facts in the history of the organization of the Main Administration of the Soviet archives — a long period, between 1922 and 1938, of being directly under the highest politi- cal organs of the Soviet power, the central executive committees; and periods of subordination to ministries, before 1922 and again since 1938.