Smolensk Archives

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Smolensk Archive is the name of the archive of the Soviet Union Communist Party of Smolensk Oblast comprising 1917-1938, which intact through the years Wehrmacht was captured when she on July 15, 1941, the city of Smolensk conquered. The archive was then brought to Germany.

No other such extensive and complete archives have been captured because the Soviet Union authorities made great efforts during the 1941 and 1942 retreat to get the state and party archives to safety in good time. The Germans used the archive for propaganda purposes by publishing details of the information it contained about the Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union.

The archive was then located in Germany for evaluation, from May 1943 in Vilnius , then in Poland , where parts were discovered by Soviet troops at the Pszczyna train station in February 1945 and brought back to the Soviet Union.

In 1945, shortly after the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht , the archives were taken to the USA by the OSS , the CIA's predecessor agency , and stored there in an underground aircraft hangar. It was sighted by a group of American Sovietologists who concluded that it contained very valuable information. The archive then became accessible for scientific research.

The political scientist Merle Fainsod (1907–1972) helped set up the Russia Research Center at Harvard in 1948 , of which he was director from 1950 to 1964. There he evaluated the archive and published his research as the book Smolensk under Soviet Rule 1958. Thereupon the Foreign Ministry of the Soviet Union claimed that the Smolensk archive was a forgery by the CIA. Robert Conquest ( The Great Terror ) and Richard Pipes ( Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime ) also made extensive use of material from the Smolensk Archives for their publications on the Soviet Union under Stalin .

Since 1963, the Soviet Union has repeatedly demanded the return of the archive despite the allegations of forgery. In 1991 Russia acknowledged the authenticity of the documents and has since negotiated a return, which took place in March 2003. The archive is now located in the Documentation Center for Recent History of Smolensk Oblast. A complete film adaptation on microfilm rolls remained in the Davis Center of Harvard University, a copy is also in the Bavarian State Library in Munich (sign: Film R 786-rn).

Web links

literature