Russia’s Secret Archives: A Genealogy

A reader even casually acquainted with the study of Soviet history since 1991 will have encountered the “archival revelation” genre, which presents the so-called “secret Soviet archives”—such as the Communist Party collections, unavailable to Western researchers before the fall of the Soviet Union—as the royal road to an accurate understanding of the Soviet social, political, and economic order.¹ The importance of these revelations appears almost self-evident in light of the regime’s manifest obsession with secrecy and of the conspiratorial norms that shaped Bolshevik culture from its earliest days, and there can be no doubt that previously inaccessible documents have fundamentally reshaped the field.² Yet most historians have abandoned the notion that even the resealed KGB archives contain high-level smoking guns that reveal unknown dimensions of the regime; instead they have embraced the new questions that reams of day-to-day documents have opened up. For the wider public, in contrast, rhetoric about archival secrecy remains irresistible. Implications that Vladimir Putin is either on the brink of shutting down all archival access or has already done so out of a desire to suppress evidence of Stalinist crimes surface frequently in the press, even from professional historians.³

In fact, the trope of Russian archival secrecy is not just the product of Bolshevik paranoia but also a long-standing feature of West European and American discourse about Russia, whose roots extend deep into Muscovite history. Its function has been to legitimate outside observers’ interpretations of Russian actions and motives, particularly in their global dimensions, by grounding them in the external authority of real or fabricated high-level sources. Two essential shifts have shaped its deployment since the early modern era. The first was the 18th-century turn to imperial archives as an imagined locus for such documents; the second was the 19th-century transformation of archives into theaters for the performance of public sovereignty. Archival access and openness came to be seen as hallmarks of liberal governance that Russia lacked, while secrecy became evidence of malevolence. In the end, when the Bolsheviks arrived at their world-historical moment at the end of 1917, they would find the trope of secrecy and revelation readymade and easy to adapt to the purposes of the global proletarian revolution.

The formation of administrative bureaucracies in early modern Europe made secrecy and leaks generalized features of the political landscape in both monarchical and republican regimes; as Max Weber put it, “bureaucratic administration always tends to exclude the public, to hide its knowledge and action from criticism as well as it can,” although the nature of the public to be excluded changed greatly over time.⁴ Institutions like the Vatican Secret Archives were created to be storehouses of arcana imperii, above all materials related to foreign affairs; closed to the public in principle, in practice they could be quite porous.⁵ Just as Europeans debated the significance of secrecy internally, they also sought secrets from other states. This “insatiable quest for information” rebuilt diplomacy around the need to procure as much information as possible about one’s rivals and allies, whether by stealing documents or recruiting confidential informants.⁶ The relazioni of Venetian ambassadors about other countries, like similar texts by diplomats elsewhere, were nominally secret yet circulated widely in manuscript and sometimes eventually in print. They offered both an empirical and a normative assessment of a particular state and the ambassador’s experiences there. Disseminating them could be politically advantageous for either the diplomat or his enemies, if done judiciously.⁷

Outside of embassies, secrecy became a lens through which to understand neighboring societies perceived to be culturally alien. European travelers in the Ottoman Empire purported to reveal the “inner workings of the sultan’s harem” and promised that their accounts would make them privy to knowledge hitherto concealed from Europeans. This “language of concealment” was commercially successful to the extent that it met the audience’s expectations about the Ottomans.⁸ Unlike intelligence reports—which were specific in time, place, and application—travel literature turned the revelation of secrets into a generalized trope...