Washington Post - 12.14.2002

 

 

The Washington Post

Russia's Collective History

U.S. Returns Files Bearing Witness To Soviet Horrors

By Ken Ringle

In a small but significant ceremony in Moscow yesterday, the United States returned to Russia 28 linear feet of archival files that gave the free world its first fully documented look at the horrors of collectivization, forced famine and mass murder in the earliest decades of the Soviet Union.

The documents, contained in 73 unprepossessing cardboard boxes, are a historic and well-traveled fragment of the famous Smolensk archive, first captured by the German army during its World War II invasion of Russia in 1941 and later discovered by U.S. Army intelligence amid the wreckage of the Third Reich. Brought to Washington in 1947 to be perused by scholars, the papers were immensely influential, Sovietologists say, in shaping American attitudes and policy toward Russia during the Cold War.

They were returned to the Russian government, State Department officials say, as a good faith effort aimed at encouraging the renationalization of great masses of archives and art treasures seized as booty during World War II.

The letters, account books, orders, proclamations and other bureaucratic papers are part of the raw communist history of Smolensk, a major regional city halfway between Minsk and Moscow, which today has a population of about 350,000. In the early 1950s Harvard professor Merle Fainsod used the documents returned yesterday as the basis for writing "Smolensk Under Soviet Rule" and "How Russia Is Ruled," two books that gave a far grimmer and more accurate view of Soviet life than had often prevailed among some Americans in the 1930s.

The books documented fierce repressions, mass arrests, mass exiles, the prison camps known as the gulag and other horrors ordered by Moscow as Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and his Bolshevik predecessors sought to bring Smolensk and its surrounding region under collectivist doctrine and rigid administrative control after Russia's 1917 Communist Revolution.

"Fainsod's books were immensely influential," said Angela Stent of Georgetown University, a specialist on the history of the former Soviet Union. "They gave us great insight into the machinery of collectivization. All sorts of future public officials here subsequently made their own studies of the Smolensk archives and had their views shaped by them."

One such official was Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser during the Carter administration and now counselor to the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. As a graduate student at Harvard he "spent quite a bit of time" as Fainsod's research assistant and remembers how the Smolensk archive "gave us a truly authentic worm's-eye view of the social and institutional ugliness" of life at the local level under Soviet communism.

"We had shelves and shelves of this stuff," he remembers: "Yellowing paper with poor typing and handwritten notes scrawled in the margins. Minutes of meetings where neighbors were encouraged to denounce each other as 'enemies of the people.' Judgments of the 'troika' of local NKVD officials who would order arrests and executions and shipments to the gulag, particularly during the great purge years of 1935-1940."

If America's view of the Soviet Union in the 1940s was no longer as starry-eyed as it had been at times in the 1930s, Brzezinski says, "there was still a great deal of naivete" and "no pervasive sense of how similar it was to Hitlerism and vice versa."

The Smolensk archive, he says, changed that by demonstrating how the Soviet bureaucracy and its witch hunts "encouraged, administered and fed off the worst weaknesses of human nature until they acquired a life of their own. There was no redeeming social feature."

Perhaps the most intriguing feature of the archive is how much was learned from what was really a fraction of the Smolensk record.

Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, a Harvard professor who has written widely on the curious odyssey of the materials, says the Germans removed five freight car loads of archival documents from Smolensk in early 1943 and shipped them to Vilnius, Lithuania, for a year before finally housing them in the Castle of Pless in what is now Polish Silesia.

The vast majority of those records were abandoned by the retreating Wehrmacht in 1945 and reclaimed by the advancing Soviet army. But the boxes returned yesterday were apparently extracted and removed to Bavaria, where the Americans eventually found them.

Grimsted says she has urged for years that the Smolensk archive be returned to Russia, partially because the Russian government has used continued U.S. possession of the records as an excuse for continuing to hold thousands of trainloads of art and archives removed from Germany during the war as "reparations" for Nazi atrocities on its soil.

"What happened today removes that argument," she said.

But she noted that the United States tried to give the archive back during the 1960s and the Soviet government refused to accept them. By then the contents had been widely published, she said, and to accept them would have placed the Kremlin in the embarrassing position of admitting the documents were not just "Western imperialist propaganda."

Brzezinski said yesterday this reporter's query was the first he'd heard about the return, but "I don't care one way or another . . . since we have it on microfilm. I hope President Putin enjoys reading it all," he said. "You know, his grandfather was one of Stalin's security guards. And Putin was very close to his grandfather."