Smolensk Archive

The Smolensk Archive is the name of the archive of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of Smolensk Oblast, comprising the years 1917-1938, which was captured intact by the Wehrmacht, as they captured the city of Smolensk on 15 July 1941. The archive was then brought to Germany.

There have been looted, as the authorities of the Soviet Union undertook during the retreat in 1941 and 1942 a major effort to bring the state and party archives to safety in time no further so extensive and complete archive. The Germans used the archive for propaganda purposes by publishing details of the information it contains about the Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union.

The archive was then for evaluation in Germany, from May 1943 in Vilnius, then in Poland, where parts were discovered in February 1945 by Soviet troops at the Pszczyna station and returned to the Soviet Union.

Even in 1945, shortly after the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht, the Archives of the OSS, the predecessor agency of the CIA, was spent in the USA and stored there in an underground aircraft hangar. It was spotted by a group of American Sovietologists who came to the conclusion that it contains very valuable information. After the archive for scientific research became available.

The political scientist Merle Fainsod (1907-1972) helped to establish in 1948 the Russian Research Center at Harvard, whose director he was from 1950 to 1964. There he evaluated the archive and published his research in a book Smolensk under Soviet Rule 1958. Thereupon claimed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union, the Smolensk Archive is a forgery of the CIA. Robert Conquest ( The Great Terror ) and Richard Pipes (Russia Under the Bolshevik regime ) is also used on a large scale of the Smolensk archive material for their publications through the system of the Soviet Union under Stalin.

Since 1963, the Soviet Union demanded despite the standing room in the forgery allegation again the return of the archive. 1991 granted Russia the authenticity of the documents and negotiated since a return, which took place in March 2003. The archive is now in the Documentation Centre for Contemporary History of the Smolensk Oblast. In the Davis Center at Harvard University remained a complete film on rolls of microfilm, a copy is also in the Bavarian State Library in Munich ( Signed: Film R 786- rn).