A new window was thrown open Friday on key historical
turning points in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The National Security Archive at George
Washington University in Washington D.C. published a large new collection of digitized
fascimiles of original documents, making them available to Russians online for
the first time.
The materials include a rare complete series of the historic
dissident journal "Problems of Eastern Europe." The journal is accompanied by
an introduction from its longtime editors, Larisa and Frantisek Silnicky.
Published throughout the 1980s, the journal contained "a wide range of Soviet,
Eastern European, and ultimately even Western reformist thinking, in order to
make connections between those various publics and overcome the information
barriers that especially hindered the development of dissident and
oppositionist ideas," the archive said.
The documents on new Russian-language web pages also include
declassified Soviet-era documents on topics such as the Cuban Missile Crisis,
the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Mikhail Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War,
and dissident movements in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the archive
said.
Here's more from the announcement after the break:
The new Russian-language Web pages,
compiled and edited by the Archive's director of Russia Programs, Svetlana
Savranskaya, together with technical editor Rinat Bikineyev, also include the
most sought-after primary sources in Russian from the Archive's extensive
collections, ranging from the diary of top Gorbachev aide and long-time Central
Committee official Anatoly Chernyaev, to the scholarly collection compiled by
the late Sergo Mikoyan based on his father Anastas Mikoyan's experience as a
leading Soviet Politburo member, to the specialized collections developed by
Archive staff on such topics as the Soviet side of the Cuban Missile Crisis,
the Soviet invasion and occupation and withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the
surveillance and repression of dissidents such as the Moscow Helsinki Group.
The site also features a new
"document of the month," the original "sovershenno sekretno" (top secret)
transcript of the Soviet Politburo discussion 30 years ago of the Afghanistan
war, which reads in parts as if lifted from current international debates over
progress or the lack thereof in the current U.S. and NATO intervention in
Afghanistan.
Today's publication of primary
sources in their original Russian fulfills one of the major goals of the
Archive's Russia and Eurasia Programs, which is to increase public and
scholarly access to original sources especially to younger scholars throughout
the former Soviet space. In recent
weeks, the Russian government has posted online the declassified archive of
Soviet documents related to the Katyn massacre of Polish officers by Stalin's
NKVD, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has endorsed the opening of archives
from the Soviet period, and noted Russian expert Dmitri Trenin has called for
archival openings as part of a new Russian foreign policy emphasis on
cooperative security.
English-language publications of
the Archive's Russia and Eurasia Programs include more than two dozen
Electronic Briefing Books of key U.S. and Soviet documents (in translation)
covering major Cold war topics and events such as the series of superpower
summits featuring Presidents Reagan and Bush with Soviet general secretary
Gorbachev, as well as the new book from Central European University Press, Masterpieces of History: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe,
1989, edited by Svetlana Savranskaya, Thomas Blanton and Vladislav Zubok.
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