Western historians have been struggling for decades to get into the archives of the Stalin period. In the early Eighties, before Gorbachev took office, we were granted very limited access, but were forbidden to see the finding aids and were segregated in a special foreigners' reading-room. The real transformation came after the defeat of the August 1991 coup. The following month, the party archives made available reports of plenary meetings of the Party Central Committee from the Thirties, as well as Politburo minutes of that time, to both of which I had been refused access the previous April.

LRB 28 April 1994 | PDF Download