Smolensk Archive

SMOLENSK ARCHIVE

The Smolensk Archive comprises the Smolensk regional records of the All-Union Communist Party from the October Revolution in 1917 to the German invasion of the USSR in 1941. The German Army captured the Smolensk Archive when it invaded Russia in 1941 and in 1943 moved the contents to Vilnius. They were subsequently recovered by the Soviet authorities in Silesia in March 1946. American intelligence officers removed the files to a restitution center near Frankfurt am Main in 1946.

The archive contains the incomplete and fragmentary records of the Smolensk and Western Oblast (regional) committees (obkom ). These include the minutes of meetings, resolutions, decisions, and directives made by Communist Party officials, as well as details on Party work relating to agriculture, especially collectivization policy, machine tractor stations, trade unions, industry, armed forces, censorship, education, women, the control commission, and the purges. The archive also contains secret police, procuracy, court, and militia reports as well as private and personal files and the miscellaneous records of the city (gorkom ) and district (raikom ) committees. Between 5 and 10 percent of the archive does not pertain to Smolensk, but comprises material seized by the Germans in other parts of the USSR. The originals of these documents were presented to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Pursuant to an agreement made at the 1998 Washington Conference on Holocaust Era assets, the United States returned most of the archive to Russia on in December 2002. The archives were especially important to Western scholars because they provided an insider's perspective on many historical developments that would otherwise have been unavailable in the era before Mikhail Gorbachev raised the restrictions on access to Soviet archival materials.

See also: archives; communist party of the soviet union

bibliography

Fainsod, Merle. (1958). Smolensk under Soviet Rule. London: Macmillan.

Getty, J. Arch. (1999). Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–38. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Grimsted, Patricia Kennedy. (1995). "The Odyssey of the 'Smolensk Archive': Plundered Communist Records for the Service of Communism." In Carl Beck Occasional Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 1201. Pittsburgh: Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh.

National Archives and Records Service. (1980). Guide to the Records of the Smolensk Oblast of the All-Union Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1917–41. Washington, DC: Author.

Christopher Williams