Displaced Archives by Lowry James;

Author:Lowry, James;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

9 Pan-European Displaced Archives in the Russian Federation

Still Prisoners of War on the 70th Anniversary of V-E Day

Patricia Kennedy Grimsted

The Second World War – with the National-Socialist regime and accompanying Holocaust – wrought the greatest archival destruction and dislocation in history. When combined with retaliatory seizures by the Soviet regime, post-war boundary changes and the Cold War split between East and West, the catastrophe of archival displacements was magnified. Western Allied post-war archival seizures from Germany were likewise of historic proportions, but their restitution to West Germany in the 1960s for the most part, with detailed description and filming before return, is now more transparent. The account by Astrid Eckert, The Struggle for the Files, or in German Kampf um die Akten, provides a helpful overview of the politics involved.1

The full story of the archival devastation and displacements on the Eastern Front is much less known, and many key sources in Russia remain suppressed to this day. It was only with the opening of Soviet archives in the late 1980s and the end of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in December 1991 that the subject could be openly addressed. The volume Returned from Russia: Nazi Archival Plunder and Recent Restitution Issues (2007) with its ‘Afterword 2013’ could only begin to recount the extent to which the archival heritage of many nations was displaced to the Soviet Union in the wake of the Second World War and many components returned to Eastern Europe before its collapse.2 It was only with the simultaneous emergence of an independent Russian Federation with its own archival administration at the beginning of 1992, that serious negotiations for returns to Western Europe were possible. Having been closely involved with the revelations about the wide range of captured European archives remaining in Russia in October 1991, to be discussed below, I have been following the fate of ‘displaced’ archives in Russia ever since. (Western archivists would usually use the term ‘captured records’, but Russians prefer the less accusatory term ‘displaced’.)

The present account provides an updated summary, with a few examples to reflect some of the perplexing problems in wartime dispersal and remaining hoped-for restitution.3 While emphasis here is on the fate of archives centralised in Moscow’s Central State Special Archive (Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi osobyi arkhiv SSSR, or TsGOA SSSR), it should not be forgotten that the captured archives brought to the USSR were dispersed to archives throughout the country. For example, while significant collections of socialist and revolutionary records were destined for the Central Archive of the Communist Party, materials of Russian émigré or exile provenance, or archival Rossica, as they are often known, were deposited in secret divisions of other central state archives in Moscow and Leningrad; but neither of those categories, even if clearly of foreign provenance or ownership, were – or are today – considered candidates for possible restitution.4

A day after the rest of Europe celebrated the Seventieth Anniversary of V-E Day on the 7 May 2015, Russia celebrated the Seventieth Anniversary of the

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