Documenting Communism: The Hoover Project To Microfilm And Publish The Soviet Archives

>> Lauren Covetta: Well, welcome. Thank you, all those joining us here in the room and also online. And welcome to this Hoover Institution Library and Archives and Hoover History Lab Book Talk on Documenting Communism, the Hoover Project to Microfilm and Publish the Soviet Archives. My name is Lauren Covetta, and I'm the Strategic Communications Manager for the Library and Archives.

And before we kick off today's event, I have just a few, in fact, three brief housekeeping points to share with you all. First, there will be a dedicated Q and A at the conclusion of the discussion. So we will welcome your questions here from the room, but then also online.

So for those of you on Zoom, please use that chat function to put your questions for our consideration. Second, we do have a limited number of books complimentary for signing at the end of the event today. So we do kindly ask that each attendee does only take one.

As exciting as it is of a text. We do have a limited number of those complimentary copies. And I also kindly ask that you take one of the post it notes and write your name so that Charles can address you correctly in that dedication. And we do courtesy of our Hoover Press, have a QR code in the case that those are depleted by the time you get to the table to scan for a special discount, so be sure to get your copy.

And lastly, due to earlier sunset time, the reception to follow the event has now moved just across the courtyard and will take place in the Herbert Hoover Memorial Building staff Lounge. So please join us to continue the discussion and for some light refreshments after the event. And just to flag that someone mentioned that the discussion is two hours, but alas, we have an hour discussion here ahead of us and then have reserved that last hour for that social gathering in the lounge.

So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Eric Wakin, who is the Everett and Jane Hauck Director of the Library and Archives and the Deputy Director of this Hoover Institution. Thank you.

>> Eric Wakin: Thanks, Lauren, welcome, everyone. It's my great pleasure to welcome you to today's talk. We've been hearing about learning about and reading about the book for quite a while.

Let me tell you a bit about the Hoover Institution, and then I'll say a bit about Charles, and then we'll get kicked off. I want to thank the Director of the Hoover Institution, Condoleezza Rice, the overseers and other supporters of the Hoover Institution, without whom nothing we do would be possible.

My colleagues in the library and archives and events and planning, who helped set this up, too. I wanna thank you for what you did. We're here because of the vision of one man, Herbert Hoover, who graduated Stanford first class and endowed what is now the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution in Peace.

But was when he endowed it in 1919, the Hoover War Library. He sent a check for $50,000. His deed of gift was a telegram. The operative words were collect material on war. Boom, we created it. Herbert Hoover always envisioned this to be a separate part of Stanford University.

Right, we're part of Stanford, but we have a lot of independence in, in some of what we do. Since Mr Hoover endowed us and created us, we've had many supporters and we've become the world's largest private organization dedicated to documenting war, revolution, and peace. On the library side we've got about a million books, 6,500 archival collections.

You're going to hear about some of those from 170 countries. But we're also very unusual for libraries and archives. A robust public policy research center. And if you're in the public policy world, you know the public policy side. If you're in the archival world, you know the archive and some people know both.

 

I think we're unique in being the only think tank in America with a really substantive world renowned global library and archive. Mr Hoover said this about our mission. This institution must dynamically point the road to peace, to personal freedom and to the safeguards of the American system. I used to say a slightly different quote, but Charles palm corrected me and he suggested I use this one.

 

By the way, it's one of the many ways Charles has been a mentor to me. What Mr Hoover said originally about the War Library was also its purpose is to build up a great research institution upon the most vital of all human questions, war, revolution and peace. And that's a prescient idea for what we do.

 

Now, I know that our John Kleinheim Senior Fellow Steve Kotkin is gonna speak about the book for which he wrote a wonderful introduction. So I'm gonna give the briefest introduction to Steve, probably the briefest he's ever heard and say a bit more about Charles cuz I really want you to know about Charles impact of this institution.

 

Steve, who's gonna be having a conversation with Charles, is a Senior Fellow, author of the magisterial multi volume biography of Joseph Stalin. He also conceptualized and created the Hoover History Lab which brings together many of Hoover's superb historians in a kind of rubric modeled after a lab, a science laboratory with principal investigators, staff, scientist equivalents, postdocs and other fellows and students.

 

And you see their conferences, their workshops, and courses. This event is, as Lauren said, a joint production, if you will, of the History Lab and the Library and Archives. Now, enough about Steve. Let me say a few words about Charles. First, I'm gonna read the basic Charles Palm biography, but then I'm gonna tell you what it means.

 

Charles is the Deputy Director emeritus of the Hoover institution, retiring in 2002. Two, Charles completed 31 years of service at Hoover, including 18 years directing the Library and Archives, and also served as our deputy director. Charles was appointed by President George H.W Bush to the National Historical Publications and Records Commission and by California Governor George Duekmejian to the California Heritage Preservation Commission.

 

So much for the official biography. It doesn't really tell us what Charles has done during his tenure as the Director of the Library and Archives. Charles oversaw, supported, and personally executed in many cases, acquisitions that will enrich our knowledge of history for centuries. It was with Charles support that curator for Eastern Europe.

 

If you remember Eastern Europe, Maciej Sikorski traveled to Poland in 1989 after the fall of communism and lived there for more than two years, collecting tons and tons of material. Depending on the Source you read two tons, 20 tons, 30 tons of material that helped enrich our archives.

 

Imagine having a boss who says, yeah, it's fine, go live in Poland for a few years and collect. You have to have the foresight to realize that's important. Under Charles's leadership, many, many, many collections came in. Friedrich Hayek, the economist, Milton Friedman, the economist Karl Popper, the Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty Collection, the records and tapes of and intellectual property of which we own William F Buckley's Firing Line program.

 

Charles edited the book Milton Friedman on Freedom, with selections from the Friedman collection that he helped bring in. He also advised and organized and structured the website we have called the Collected Works of Milton Friedman, generously supported by overseers Roger and Martha Mertz, which publishes online for which we got permission, 1500 articles by Milton Friedman, videos, and cassette tapes.

 

In the words of Roger Mertz, about Charles, for overseers, there is no single person more knowledgeable about the founding of the institution, about President Hoover's initial and evolving mission for the institution, and the values successive generations of overseers have attempted to guide by it over the years. By the way, Charles is also a trustee of the Herbert Hoover Foundation, providing valuable insights.

 

And those of you who know, the foundation approves the appointment of Hoover directors. Is one of the approvers. Charles is a person to whom I've turned again and again to learn about this institution. I have a PhD in history, but I majored in learning about the Hoover Institution at the foot of my Professor Charles palm.

 

Every time I had a question about Hoover history, something I wanted to know, something I was misconstruing, a misunderstanding, I turned to Charles. He clarified information about the famous founding telegram, the mission statement. He talked to me about social needs and stay at Hoover. What actually happened here?

 

He talked very specifically about something, and these are sort of Hoover sainted moments, right, that we celebrate. The gift of the private Trep Doubt telegram to private President Ronald Reagan, how that happened. The origins of a supposed Milton Friedman illustration that Friedman actually borrowed. He talked about the shepherding of Mikhail and Reiza Gorbachev around Hoover Institution.

 

Looking at the ARA records, the American Relief Administration records, and Gorbachev recalling his parents speaking positively about the ARA. Charles, if you wanna pull him aside at some point and talk about the struggle to get the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library to Stanford, which you can visit up on the Hill, you can't.

 

The end of communism, everything else. The origins of this institution as a public policy institution, the Domestic Studies Program, I learned about from Charles. Yeah, I've read the books. But hearing about it from someone who was here or was close enough to it to understand what happened has been enormously helpful to me.

 

The transformation of the Hoover Advisory Board to the Board of Overseers, I learned about from Charles. Anyway, Charles has his version of the most defining moments of the Hoover Institution. Our founding, the appointment of Glen Campbell in 1960 and the arrival of George Shultz in 1989. I'd like to add a fourth, the tenure of Charles Palm as Director of Library and Archives as extremely important and a defining moment to what we did.

 

As one senior fellow said about Charles's work on this book and Charles, great book, great archivism, great Charles. I'm almost done. When I started, before I actually started, I was told that Charles, by many overseers with whom I interviewed, Charles's shoes were the ones I needed to fill.

 

I feel now, after about 11 years, I filled one shoe, and I hope to get there shortly. Another 11 years. I just wanna close with the words of our director, Condoleezza Rice who when I asked her about Charles, she said, please say this. Charles has had an extraordinary career serving as deputy director of the Hoover Institution and director of the Library and Archives at Hoover.

 

And scholars will be reaping the benefits of his leadership and his collecting for generations. Please give a warm Hoover welcome to Steve Kotkin and Charles Palm.

>> Charles G. Palm: Well, let me begin this story about the book. On December 25, 1991, the hammer and central flag came down from the Kremlin Tower.

 

The next day, the Soviet Union was dissolved, and the 74 year dictatorship came to an end. Four months later, and only four months later, the new Russian government under Yeltsin, Boris Yeltsin, signed an agreement with the Hoover Institution to microfilm and publish the Soviet archives, the largest untapped collection of secret documents in the world at that time.

 

That agreement brought together three partners. The Russian State Archives, headed by Rudolph Germanovich Picoya, A British microfilming company, Charles Chadwick Healy Limited, headed by its enterprising president, Charles Chad McKeeley, and the Hoover Institution, represented by me, deputy director. That project involved opportunities seized, obstacles overcome, and a mission accomplished.

 

We had lots of obstacles, beginning with day one, ending with the final day of the project. It really was one damn thing after another. The first one was just getting the shipment of our equipment and supplies flown into Moscow. Unfortunately, it didn't fly into Moscow, our freight company unloaded it in Heathrow and put it on a surface transportation.

 

For a month, we had no idea where it was. $300,000 worth of cameras, processors, duplicators, microfilm readers, computers, printers, 2,000 reels of unexposed microfilm. Finally, it showed up. Then it got stuck in customs. Customs people thought we were gonna sell this equipment, so they were gonna tack on a huge excise tax.

 

Well, I decided at the very beginning, we were not gonna be subjected to extortion, I didn't wanna be nickel and dimmed for the whole project. So I told our partners in the Russian Archives, if you wanna do this project, you've got to free that shipment yourself from customs.

 

Lo and behold, three days later, it was delivered. The next obstacle was getting it installed in the Russian repositories. The spaces they gave us were not up to the quality we needed. There was no plumbing, no water source, the variation in voltage made it impossible for us to use the cameras.

 

Finally, after a whole year with experts coming from Chad McHealy in Cambridge, England, and my sending over my people, we finally got it all installed, ready to go. The next problem was getting the Russian staff to do the work. The old joke, the Russian workers pretend to work, and the state pretends to pay them.

 

Well, for the first two months, productivity was very, very low. So we decided we would give the Russian staff a 20% bonus on top of their salary, but the staff who didn't get assigned to the Hoover Project wouldn't get that bonus. And if you were taken off the Hoover project, you wouldn't get the bonus that worked.

 

Productivity went way up and we were off and running. That was their first exposure to the ways of American capitalism. There was one obstacle that we never could overcome, and that was the Russian media, xenophobic to the core, they objected to everything, and accused us of everything. Bribing officials, they accused us of exposing state secrets of stealing their Russian patrimony.

 

It just wouldn't stop. In the first interview I had with a Russian journalist, the first question was, Mr. Palm, how much did you bribe Decoy to get this agreement? So that's what it was like with the Russian medium. But it didn't stop us. It was annoying. We just endured it.

 

There was one thing that almost did stop us, and that was Russian politics. In December of 1995, the New Communist Party, which had emerged, won the Duma elections. Duma was the Russian parliament that threatened the Yeltsin regime and therefore threatened Ikoya. So I was summoned to Moscow to meet with my colleagues there.

 

When I arrived, I was taken not to Piccolo's office, which is my usual practice. We would meet in his office and deal with problems and solve them. Instead, I was taken to a conference room. And there, behind the conference room, was the whole Politburo of the Russian State Archives.

 

So seeing that I knew that Decoy was no longer calling the shots, he and his colleagues were very anxious about this situation. And suddenly all of the anxieties and complaints that had been mounting over the first few years of this project came out. The directors of the three repositories complained that they hadn't been consulted.

 

We hadn't paid them enough. We didn't engage their talents enough. And so they said, we've got to end this project. Moreover, they accused me of violating Russian law by signing this agreement. So that got my attention. I could have responded in the same way and accused them of breach of contract.

 

But I chose the opposite path. I said, look, let's end this, if we have to end the project, let's end it on friendly terms. We'll release a press release saying that it was ended with mutual agreement. And we'll identify all the great things that we've done together over the past three years.

 

If you do that, I will let you keep all the equipment, $250,000 worth of equipment, all the supplies. We will continue paying your royalties. We'll continue refunding any costs that you incurred during the project. If you don't do that, we'll sue you for breach of contact. So they went away to their room and had a conversation, came back, okay, let's do it your way, my way.

 

And that's what we did. The reason I chose that path was I was hopeful that Russian politics would turn around, they did. Six months later, in June, Yeltsin was re elected president. And all the anxiety that I got in that January meeting seemed to disappear within a few months, they had agreed to a new agreement.

 

We filmed for another five years, produced another 5,000 reels of microfilm. Well, after 12 years of this project, which was the duration of the project, 1992-2004, we filmed 10 million pages of Russian archives onto 11,819 reels of microfilm. Now, there were other projects in Moscow at that time by other institutions, but they were all in the range of 200 reels or 300 reels, nothing comparable to the 12,000 reels that we accomplished.

 

If you stack 10 million pages in one vertical stack, it would reach six Washington monuments, 12 Rover Towers. Moreover, when we made this collection available worldwide, of course, one complete set at Hoover, two complete sets in Russia, and six libraries around the world purchased the complete set. So they exist at the Library of Congress, at Yale, at Harvard, at the British Library in London, Bavarian State Library in Munich, and the National Diet Library in Tokyo.

 

So we not only safeguarded and saved, rescued these archives, we made them available worldwide. So what was it that we filmed? We had a capacity to film millions, but these party and government archives in Moscow numbered not millions, but tens of billions of pages. So we had to make a selection.

 

And our method for doing that was to set up an advisory board of distinguished historians. Three on the Hoover side, three on the Russian side. On the Hoover side, we had Bob Conquest, leading historian for many years, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. John Dunlop, distinguished historian, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

 

Terence Emmons, distinguished historian in the Stanford History department. On the Russian side was Pikoya, the archivist, who also was a distinguished historian. He had chosen two others. Dmitry Volkoganov, who was a Soviet general, who during Soviet times was in charge of military history institutions, and who during the Yeltsin period became Yeltsin's chief advisor on archival matters.

 

He also wrote three pretty good biographies. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, yes, you probably knew him. And then he picked a professor from the University of Novosibirsk, Nicholas Pokrovsky. We added a six member, Yana Howlett, a fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge University. I had concluded a consulting agreement with Howlett to advise me on archival matters.

 

She was an expert in that area and to troubleshoot for the project in Moscow, throughout the project. She was a very key member of the whole project. And it was Paulette and Terry Emmons who did most of the legwork in Moscow, looking at the documents, coming up with recommendations to the advisory board.

 

I was not on the advisory board, I'm not a distinguished anything. I'm certainly not a distinguished historian in Russian history. But as an archivist, I had three priorities that I presented to the advisory board, all of which they accepted. The first one was to film the finding aids to the records first.

 

We all knew that there was a chance that this project would end prematurely. So if we got the finding aids out, at least we'd have an accounting of what those archives contain. The second priority I had was to film entire record files, not to make the selection document by document but it was two-fold reason.

 

First, individual documents are best understood in the context of other documents in the same file. Secondly, if we'd filmed document by document, we might have been accused, probably would've been accused, of exercising a political bias one way or the other. I was well aware that our American critics considered Hoover to be a conservative think tank.

 

And so we probably would have been accused of a bias had we followed a document-by-document selection. So that decision muted that possible criticism. The other priority I had was to focus the selection of documents not on individual crimes of party leaders or on sensational revelations. All the other publishers in Moscow were looking for that.

 

What was sensational, what were the great crimes? Who did them? I thought we'd be better focused on studying the Soviet Communism as a system. How did it work? How did it work in the day to day lives of the people? How was the bureaucracy formed, how was control exercised, how did it all work?

 

And everybody pretty much agreed that there were a lot of bad actors and bad leaders in the Soviet system. But there wasn't a lot of agreement on whether the system itself was the problem. So by studying the system, we could maybe answer that question. Now, the Soviet system, Soviet communism is a bifurcated system.

 

In one access is the party, the party is the dominant access, it approved all of the policies. The other access is the government or the government agencies which exercise those policies. So you had to film both party records and government records to get an understanding of how the system worked.

 

So on the party side, we filmed the records of the congresses, the Central Committee, and the Party Control Commission. The congresses theoretically were the apex of the Communist Party. They were assemblies of delegates from all over the Soviet Union, party leaders, who would assemble every three years or so and approve the policies that had been set by the Politburo.

 

So by filming the records of the congresses, we got a record of what those policies were and, to some extent, how they were discussed. Then we filmed the records of the Central Committee. The Central Committee was a smaller group of party leaders, 70 to 100. They approved policies when the congresses were not in session.

 

And under the Central Committee were the secretariats and the departments, the whole bureaucracy of the Communist Party. We filmed 2 million pages of the key departments of the Central Committee. Then we filmed the records of the Party Control Commission, which was the agency that managed the party itself.

 

It included the membership records, records on the purges, records on recruiting new members, records on disciplining Party members. It was one of the agencies that Stalin used along with his secret police to control the party and the country, so a key agency. On the government side, we focused on two groups of materials.

 

First group were the records of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the NKVD, which included the state police. And we focused on the first 12 years, first dozen years of the Soviet regime, 1917 to about 1931. That's when the NKVD imposed communism, the system, on the Russian people. So by filming that early period, we saw how it was put together, how it was created, how it was imposed.

 

The second group of government records we filmed were the records of the Gulag, the system of forced labor camps. We focused on this group of material because the Gulag system was run pretty much the way the whole Soviet Union was run. As Anne Appelbaum said in her history of the Gulag, the Gulag was the quintessential expression of Soviet communism.

 

So by studying the gulag records, we got insight into the whole system. Moreover, the Gulag covered practically the whole expanse of the Soviet Union, there were camps everywhere. And the system covered most of the life of the Soviet Union, from 1918 all the way up to about 1960, when Khrushchev started to dissolve the system.

 

So those were the main. That was the main groups of materials that we filmed. There was one group that we did not select but which was offered to us by Picoya. This was found 89 Bond 89 were the records of the 1992 Constitution Court, which was a suit brought by the defunct Communist Party against the Yeltsin government.

 

The Yeltsin government, one of his first acts, was to outlaw the Communist Party and seize their archives. Archives that we, by the way, were filming, and the party didn't like that, they wanted to be reinstated. They wanted their archives back, so they brought suit and the Constitutional Court of Russia agreed to hear the suit.

 

Yeltsin gave to his lawyers defending his government, complete access to the so-called presidential archives, the presidential archives was the most secret archive in Russia at that time. Still is, it was so secret it was outside the purview of Pikhoia and his central administration, it was directly under the control of the President of Russia.

 

It included the papers of all the General Secretaries, papers of President Gorbachev, the records of the Politburo and the so called. Which were special files drawn from all over the archival repositories in Moscow and deposited in the presidential archive because they constituted the most secret records of the government.

 

So these lawyers started digging into the presidential archive and found the most incriminating documents they could find to submit to the case and show the crimes that the party committed and which justified the actions that the Yeltsin government took against them. These records number about 20,000 pages, we filmed all of them.

 

So while we weren't looking for sensational revelations or crimes of the leaders, we got them anyway and we got them in this file. So let me conclude my opening remarks by telling you about my first vision that came to me in November 91 on my first trip to Moscow.

 

They showed me the two key repositories holding in the Communist Party archives. And there I was, all these records, rows and rows of steel shelving. And I said, what would Herbert Hoover say if they could see me now? So I resolved we had to microscope these records, so we did.

 

Having a few slides I selected just to give you kind of a visual represent representation of the story I just told, on the left- Who's that young guy? Okay, on the right yeah, who is that? On the right, that's the historic handshake between Pikhoia on the right and me agreeing to the agreement, April 17, 1992, the fellow in the back was decoyed as a translator.

 

On the left is a picture of the press conference that was held a couple months before that in February of 92, in the headquarters of the old Communist Party. Pikhoia considered this a joke, but he moved his archival headquarters, into the old building that was the headquarters of the Communist Party.

 

And this press conference was the press conference where the Yeltsin government, namely decoy, announced the opening of the Soviet archives. It was an historic event, I was standing just to the left of that podium. The room was full of journalists, cameras, it was a huge event for the Russian people to be there and to see that their archives were being opened for the first time ever.

 

And you can see the portrait up in the left-hand corner is Karl Marx, if he could have rolled in his grave, he would have rolled several times that day. All right, next, okay, wait, we'll go back to that one. I'm on the left, Pikhoia, on the right is Charles Chadwick-Healey.

 

Charles was president of a British microfilming company, Pikhoia and I brought him all in early on as a third partner. The Russians needed to make money off of this program, we didn't really need to, that was not our purpose. But the Russians were broke, they could hardly keep their lights on.

 

When I toured their buildings, they were unheated, emergency lights only. I walked past their cafeteria, what the staff was eating, it was very sad. So they needed to sell this microfilm and to get royalties from it, so we brought in Charles, very enterprising man. I'd done a project with him before, we had microfilmed some records at Radio Free Europe in Munich, very successfully.

 

And his company then marketed the microfilm and sold it. A complete set of the 12,000 reels we sold for a million dollars. So every library that wanted to buy it had to pay, which was a good deal. It cost Hoover $3 million to pay for this project, they got it for a million.

 

But it was very, very beneficial to the Russians, they got 27% royalties on gross sales. So they earned about a million and a half dollars from this project. Now, that doesn't sound like a lot of money to us now, but a million and a half dollars in Russia at that time was a lot.

 

The average salary of a mid level archivist at that time was about $185 a month. You can buy a lot of archivists for a million and half, I calculated that those Royalties alone paid for 89 full time archives for ten years. That's above and beyond the staff that we employed to do the project.

 

So with this one project, they were able to fund practically half their agency for a full decade. All right, this is the scene I described In January of 1996 when we had the crisis and the Communists won the Duma election. And on the right are the leaders of the Russian State Archives.

 

Piccolo is in the middle, and then the other people are directors of the three repositories that participated in the project, and one or two of the courtyard's deputies. And on the left was my team. You can see my head sticking out. The gentleman with the silver hair was Pete Hoover, Herbert Hoover President Hoover's grandson.

 

He was not an employee, obviously, he was a Board of Overseers member. And he asked me if he could come with me on this important trip. And so I was glad to have him along. When we were competing for this project, every competitor Hoover has ever had was after it.

 

And so the question was, how did we win? Our chief competitor was the Library of Congress, which was aligned with a microfilm publisher named Research Publications International, which was a subsidiary of the giant media corporation, Thomson Reuters. So we were up against our national library allied with a giant media company, little old Hoover.

 

How did we win? Well, first of all, it was fortunate that I knew Piccolo before all this broke. I had invited him out to Hoover in May of 91. This was three months before the coup that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. He came out, he was part of Yeltsin's inner circle at that time.

 

Yeltsin represented the democratic forces in Russia. So we were interested in the Yeltsin people and Piccolo was his archivist. Now, at that time, he didn't control any interesting archives, but he was close to Yeltsin and he was an archivist and a historian. So he came out to Hoover, we made friends instantly.

 

He was unlike any of the other Soviet officials that had come to Hoover, who we had interacted with. He was expansive in his thinking, he had a sense of humor. Of course, Russians love political jokes, and he had a lot of good ones to tell me. And I remember one, Pravda put on a contest for the best political joke.

 

First prize was ten years in the Gulag. So anyway, getting back to my story, so we had this friendship with Victoria. And when he suddenly became in charge of all our archives, we had an in right away. The other advantage of him coming to Hoover is he could see who we were.

 

Hoover has had the same mission for 100 years, collecting special materials and archives on revolutionary change. It's a mission that unites us, gives us our esprit de corps, gives us our dedication. When people come here and see that. They see that we are reliable, we are gonna stick with it and get the job done.

 

I think he sensed that when he met us. The second advantage was that we have very generous donors. And when you have a good project and go to our donors, you get support right away. And Jim Billington, who ran the Library at Congress, very distinguished historian, written great books, dynamic person, he couldn't get that kinda money like that.

 

He had to go to Appropriations and wait for a year. The other key advantage was our own archival collection. When I was negotiating this with decoy, I had finished all of the key issues in the negotiation and saved one element for the last. And at the end, I said to Piccolo, we're gonna make this project, we're gonna transform this project into one of exploitation of rich Americans coming and painting for your archives into one of EPO's.

 

Because we're gonna give you microfilm of our Hoover archives in exchange for microfilm of your archive. So every reel you give us, we're gonna give you a reel from our archives. That turned that project into one of collaboration between peoples. And when I made that, he reached across the table.

 

That's when I knew we had won. This is a picture in stauffer right here, 1994, I think, in which I make the presentation of the first installment of our microfilm of our collection to Piccolo. It was an eventful day. Margaret Thatcher was in attendance, and we had the Board of Overseers here.

 

Jordan Schultz gave a little talk. It was a great day for Hoover. That's me and Judith Fortson. Judith was my key deputy during all of this. I could not have done it without her. She was a national expert on microfilming, and at that time, the head librarian. She went to Moscow many times, helped put the machinery together, helped set up the workstations, helped me deal with all administrative problems that we had throughout the 12 years.

 

And that stack of microfilm is the first shipment of microfilm from Russia. This is a typical work area in Moscow at one of the repositories. You can see the stacks of documents piled up ready to be filmed. See the camera, camera lights. You can see a stool in the middle of the room, there's an interesting story about that.

 

In addition to giving the Russian staff the bonus that turned them into productive workers, the other thing that we noticed was, and they complained about was that we hadn't given them anything to sit down on while they were working at the campus. I said, why aren't you sitting down on anything?

 

Well, you've never sent us stools. So that's one of the stools we sent. Sent them ease their work. This is a Russian staff member, comparing the documents for filming in our country documents in state archives are not bound. The Russians archivists, bound their documents. So to film them, you had to unbind them and get them ready for the camera.

 

And then after they were filmed, they had to be rebound. So it was rather an expensive, time consuming operation. This is one of our Kodak cameras in operation. Where there were 11 of them. Three repositories, three in two repositories and two in the other one. Those cameras are still in Russia.

 

I hope they're still using them. This is a person inspecting the microfilm every frame of the microfilm had to be inspected to make sure the exposure was right, that you could read it properly. Wasn't overexposed, was centered on the frame. Every single frame of these 12,000 reels was looked at by a staff member.

 

If there were mistakes, they had to be redone. And then the corrected film had to be spliced in. So microfilm is very tedious and very time consuming. These are some of the stack areas of the Russian archives. One of the things that struck me when I first visited the archives was how well they were preserved.

 

They were all under proper temperature and humidity control. All the fire protections are in. The collections were well organized. There were finding aids to everything. And they were properly stored in these shelving units. Okay, I mentioned fond 89, the one with the sensational documents. See, these are two documents.

 

The one on the right, 1937. And that is a bold bureau document confirming the execution of 23,000 citizens in one day. Joseph Stalin's purge. The one on the left, dated 1941, that's Stalin's signature scribbled across that is the order to execute 14,000 Polish officers that were held captive in Belarus.

 

In 1939 the Germans invaded Poland from one side, the Russians from the other side. The Russians captured these Polish officers, the elite of their society, and kill them all. Stalin did not want to have any elite Polish officers running around Poland after the war. So he killed them all for a very long time.

 

The Russians had accused the Germans of doing that. And they didn't finally admit it until Gorbachev. And the record of it didn't finally come to the surface until this document was exposed during that Constitutional Court case.

>> Stephen Kotkin: The Stalin signature is the top line in pen. You see the Russian S, which looks like a C, and then the T.

 

So it's the evidence, it's the proof.

>> Charles G. Palm: Okay, that's it. Let's talk about it.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you, Charles. So, just so people understand, it was never inevitable that the Communist Party archives would end up here. It's like a Hollywood quest, right? The book reads, it's beautifully written, and it reads like a quest where the hero is looking for the Holy Grail.

 

And the narrator has thrown all of these obstacles in the way of the hero. The monsters at the gates and the etc, the things that could go wrong. And they do go wrong. The Americans who are trying to sabotage you, let alone the Russians, it seems obvious now because they're here, but as if you were alive back then.

 

And if you read the book, you understand what a remarkable achievement it was to get all that here. You saw some of the tenacity, the shrewdness, just in the presentation of the story here. So the first point I'd like to make here is that this is a remarkable accomplishment, the odds of which were not that high.

 

But because of Charles and his team, the odds just grew and grew and grew until it happened. And the book tells the story so well, so that you can feel that uncertainty in the process of whether this. You could never do anything like this now. And so now we understand better what an achievement it might have been, but for a long time, people took it for granted.

 

That's the first point I'd like to make. The second point is just how much stuff there is. The Communists wrote down everything. Everything they did, from the banal to the super banal. Every crime they kept, the paperwork indicting themselves. All the horrible things they did, they documented. And for the most part, they didn't destroy it.

 

So this is astonishing in many ways. And so their own records, which they kept and preserved, as Charles showed, which nowadays you're not so sure if these kinds of regimes would preserve, would even write it down in the first place. And then preserve it so that someone could poke their nose into it many years later to tell the truth, as opposed to the lies about what they did.

 

So you have to understand just astonishment of the scale of the materials that they themselves produced and the unlikelihood that somebody on a small team with what sounds like a giant budget. But is a limited budget, given the historical patrimony we're talking about here. And so that somehow ended up here through thick and thin.

 

It wasn't just that the equipment got unloaded in the wrong place and then disappeared for a while, with a lot more things in the quest that could have gone wrong. And there were Americans in the field doing things which didn't necessarily show the Americans in the best light.

 

There was some skullduggery. There was some backstabbing. There was, in fact, some bribery going on. There were things that were worthy of criticism on our side, and Charles never crossed any of those lines. No shortcuts, no resort to incentives beyond those, like paying workers for their time, right?

 

And so the temptation was maybe to cut some corners, other people are cutting corners, they might get their hands on this stuff. We might never see it, even though we had the deal on paper in legal terms. So it's very important to understand all of that, and that's really well situated in the book.

 

I'd like to ask you, Charles, if you would maybe briefly read a passage to humanize a little bit some of the people you're interacting with. You showed us their photographs, but maybe if you could take a moment and then we'll go to the audience. I'm sorry to put you on the spot here, I never find anything in my own books either.

 

 

>> Charles G. Palm: Okay, my first trip to Moscow was In November of 1991, just after the couple was just in charge, put in charge of all these archives. And I'd never been to Russia before, of course, I met Russians, but I didn't really understand Russian character very well. I had to very quickly try to understand, because if I didn't, you wouldn't be making the right calls, the right decisions.

 

So I was watchful, I was watching them trying to figure out, who are these people. I was given tours of the Russian repositories which I was finding. Then offered me a non archival tour to show me around Moscow. And he assigned a young man to me, must have been cut no more than 19.

 

So let me read you my recollection of that little walk around tour. Rail offered me a third tour, not of the archives, but of central Moscow. He assigned an English speaking staff person to escort me around town. My young guide walked me through the open markets on Old Arbat street, passed by some government ministries, showed me the Memorial Museum, which housed a collection of memorabilia prisoners.

 

Took me shopping at the Goom department store, where I purchased a few souvenirs. At Gum, I encountered the queues, the inseparable feature of socialism, as Bertram Wolff had described them in his account of his visits to Moscow 70 years ago in the 1920s. In the first queue, you found out the price of the item you wanted, in the second queue you got the paper receipt, and in the third queue you exchanged the receipt for your purchase.

 

I thought to myself, would we encounter such inefficiencies left over from the Soviet past? Once we began filming the archives, the answer to that question was yes. At the end of the walking tour, we returned to The Metropol Hotel, where I stayed, since we finished the tour before my scheduled meeting with Picoya, I invited my guide to lunch in the hotel's upscale dining room.

 

There we enjoyed a full menu of lunch, easy conversation until near the end, as we finished our dessert. When I pointed out to my young friend that Decoya had arrived in the hotel lobby, his boss, and was waiting for us, he answered, quote, he can wait. His remarks startled me, was this nothing more than a young man expressing his independence, or did it reflect something more serious in general?

 

Other visitors to Russia had noted the visceral contempt usually suppressed until accidentally, or sometimes explosively revealed, with which ordinary Russians often hold those in authority. If the latter, how would such an attitude affect our project? It was another question I filed away for later. It was also a reminder that among all the other challenges we faced, I was an outsider navigating a foreign culture.

 

I did see that contempt revealed later in the project, when we faced this crisis In January of 96, when the Duma was won by the Communists and I went in and met the Politburo Russian State Archives. Those deputies of Decoya and those directors of those repositories were submissive all the way until it was became clear that Decoya himself was threatened.

 

And then they exploded on him, complained to him, they wanted to get rid of him. They went to the Russian media and complained about Decoya. So I saw that repressed contempt and affect both Decoya and subsequently our project. But there was another side of the Russian character that was just as important.

 

And I'll read one more paragraph about that, before we departed Moscow, the Marinesko. This was Sergey Marinesko, who was one of the repository directors and who was very reliable person, Marinesko, and his wife hosted a dinner party at their apartment. It was a lovely and warmly felt occasion.

 

In addition to Marinesko, his wife, his young son and his mother in law, who by the way had been head of the Manuscript division at the Lennon Library, herself a distinguished archivist. Those present included Fortson, this was my team, Van Camp, Dwyer, Tucker, Kozlock, who was Decoy's chief deputy and one of our critics, and me.

 

Their apartment was small, but we all fit snugly in their living room, which also served as the dining room and apparently in one corner as the mother in law's sleeping area. The baked chicken dinner was delicious and the conversation expensive. The contrast between the public spaces outside and the inside spaces of Mere Nichols apartment was striking.

 

The former were cold, dirty, broken down and unloved, the latter were. Clean, comfortable and homey, with evidence of a rich family life and history. It was the difference between despair and hope. The evening spent in Marinenko's family home, as much as any other experience in Russia, convinced me that given its new burst of freedom, Russia would recover.

 

So there you have the two contrasting attitudes.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you, Charles. Thank you. We'll have the book signing, we have the reception just across the way. But first let's take a few questions and we'll call up the leadership.

>> Audience 1: Thank you for an extremely interesting talk. Do you have any sense of how the average Russian Muscovite perhaps, felt about what you were doing?

 

Or is it not possible for anyone to have an accurate sense of that?

>> Charles G. Palm: Very, very good question. Thank you. I don't think they care. I really don't think they cared whether we were filming their archives or not. But the Russian media did care and they were critical of our coming in there.

 

Well, who wouldn't be? American? They were defeated, a defeated nation. Pride was hurt. And here we were, Americans coming in to film their history. They were very proud of their history, obvious reasons. And we were taking their archives out, and exposing it to our interpretation of their history.

 

So it didn't surprise me that we got opposition from the media, but I didn't sense that they were making much traction with the general public. Now there was traction with Russian historians. They felt that the center of study of Russian history was gonna be moved from Moscow to the Hoover Institute.

>> Stephen Kotkin: They were right.

>> Charles G. Palm: So we did get opposition from them, including from historian Afanasieff.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Afanasieff, yes.

>> Charles G. Palm: He was a liberal reformer during the Gorbachev times. So I knew who he was, well known person, and I thought he might be one of our allies. But no, he wasn't, he did not like seeing all these archives leaving Russia.

 

He thought, as I say, that the center of study would be moved and that his colleagues would not get the first chance to see these secret archives and interpret them from their Russian point of view. I could see his point now. We made friends with him in the second half of our project.

 

This was a lesson learned on my part. I hadn't done enough to engage the interest of these Russian historians. It didn't occur to me, it was a mistake, but I learned. And in the second half we brought him into the project. We established an editorial board to do a seven volume documentary history of the Gulag, where we selected key documents and published them in this seven volume edition.

 

And we hired Russian historians for each volume. And this man was on our editorial board. So when we did that, his allegiance changed and we won him over. So I didn't know everything going in, but we made corrections as we proceeded. That was one of the corrections remained.

 

>> Eric Wakin: Other questions.

>> David Walker: Thank you very much, Mr Palm, for your presentation and for your outstanding achievement in microfilming these most critical records in world history. My name is David Walker, and I'm personally researching the origins of the Pacific War through the papers of Stanley Hornbeck and the Hoover archives.

I have two questions for you, please. First,

>> Eric Wakin: One question to a person.

>> David Walker: Sorry.

>> Eric Wakin: One question.

>> David Walker: Okay, I'll read the second one then. Do any of the papers that you are able to microfilm, for example, Joseph Stalin's personal files, shed light on the condition of the Soviet Union in October and November 1941, when the state seemed to be on the verge of collapse under the onslaught of Operation Barbarossa?

 

Specifically, did Stalin at that time consider making a second treaty of Brest Litovsk with Hitler?

>> Charles G. Palm: I'm not qualified to answer that question, but I'm sitting right next to the man who is qualified. You wanna take that?

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you. It's a very important episode when the Nazis were just outside Moscow.

 

And it so happens that I've written that episode up in volume three of the Stalin work, which is not yet published, but is on its way. And the short answer is not in that moment, but in other moments, he did contemplate trying to make a peace deal to save his regime.

 

And at that moment, as the archives show, the Communist Party's rule in Moscow and also Leningrad, which was disintegrating. It was a moment in which nothing was left but the secret police. And it was a moment that the Germans failed to capitalize on. And it was, in part, one of the turning points, not the only.

 

But what's fabulous about his question, Charles, is that you enabled people like me, as well as other scholars in the audience, to answer that question on a documentary basis. And if people in the future don't like the answers that I or other colleagues come up with, they can come look at the same materials and come to their own conclusions in the future.

 

That's the achievement that we owe to you. Anyway, back to the leadership.

>> Eric Wakin: Johann.

>> Johann: Yeah, how stark was the gap in living conditions? You talked about seeing people eating food that was terrible, only emergency lights being on. And then you said you went to someone's house and you had delicious baked chicken.

 

And so your time there. How shocking was the gap in income, wealth, and living conditions?

>> Charles G. Palm: Well, that's a good question. I was in and out of Moscow about 10 or 12 times, but I was busy the whole time, so I didn't get a lot of exposure to everyday life of Russians, only what I could.

 

See and I was watchful. So when I would walk past the cafeteria line, I would look to see what are they eating, are they being served. I would notice the roads they were driving, cars, they were driving, the lines they were in, get whatever they need. During the first two years, clearly Russia was in a sorry state.

 

When we drove in from the, well, number one, when we flew in to Moscow at night, I was expecting to see an expanse of light. It was, city of what, 10 million people? And no, they were just specks of light here and there, like little villages. So it wasn't like flying into la, and then the airport was unheated, emergency lighting.

 

We drove in to Moscow Center. I noticed that the cars approaching our car, would turn their lights on only when they got close. I said, why is that? Well, they have no way of replacing those bulbs when they burn out. And the roads were full of potholes and there weren't any European cars.

 

Then three or four years later, things had changed, there are all kinds of European cars. Streets were paved. People seemed to be happier. Their restaurants opened. So, the transition from soviet economy to a more free market economy was quite apparent. Was apparent, pretty quickly. You could see that the living standards had improved, not for everybody, but certainly with people who were in Moscow and had jobs.

 

I can't really give you a very definitive answer there, but that's what I saw. There are Russians, other people here in this room who could probably answer that question better than I do.

>> Catherine: Hi, thank you. So I was struck by Professor Kotkin's remark on the extent to which the Soviet state documented its activities and then, by extension, its crimes.

 

And I'd be curious if you think that since this project, there's been either an increased hostility, potentially, by foreign governments, nations, Russia included, towards opening its archives up to American institutions. Or just less of an inclination to record what could end up being incriminating events.

>> Eric Wakin: Could I just add something to that?

 

Because we got a question online that's quite similar, Charles, do you know what happened in terms of any persecution to the people who helped you to the archives in Russia?

>> Charles G. Palm: Okay, I'm going to answer that question first.

>> Eric Wakin: Sorry.

>> Charles G. Palm: I don't think anybody was persecuted, resigned after this crisis in early 96.

 

He had lost the support of his own staff, and the Russian media really went after him. So we lost him, but he was not punished, he was not put in jail. I think he was the first archivist who successfully retired Russian archives. When you're a Russian archivist, you have access to all these secrets.

 

Pretty uneasy position to be in, but no, he's still there, I sent him a copy of my book through his son who lives down in Los Angeles, so he's fine. Sergey Lukianenko, the other person we work with most closely now, retired. I don't hear from him as much, I think he's a little cautious about being in touch with us, so that's a sign he has to be careful.

 

But no, I don't think anybody was hurt by us. Now, you have to keep in mind that in the 90s, Yeltsin people were opening up to the West. They wanted to be part of the west, they wanted to interact with us. They valued our values, and so being a part of this project was in no way a threat to them.

 

It was all part of this wonderful expansive opening of Russian society. And everybody felt, at least in Moscow, was exhilarated by it, unless you were an online communist, then you were kind of sullen and unhappy. But it was an exciting time to be there, to see this awakening of new life in Russia.

 

Unfortunately, it got snuffed out. Where it goes from here, I do think eventually, just. I'm not an expert, but just from having seen it happen once in Russia, it's still there, and eventually it will come back.

>> Eric Wakin: The question of archival access now? What was the question about archival access right, it was access.

 

 

>> Charles G. Palm: Okay, that's a good question. Access was open to the Russian people almost immediately. In July of 93, the government passed the first archival law of Russia ever. Never been a law on Russian archives until July of 93. And in it was the guarantee that there would be open access.

 

Now it also said that records of the 30 years and younger couldn't be open, 30 year rule, which is pretty common among European governments. And records relating to individuals were closed for 75 years, also pretty common in European. So access was open to all Russians as well as to all foreigners.

Now, there was some hanky panky in some of the reading rooms. American foreign scholars, in order to get.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Not that kind of hanky panky,

>> Charles G. Palm: They wanted to file on it quickly, they'd bring in a bag of cookies to bribe the archivists or even flip them a dollar or something.

So there was that kind of thing going, they didn't quite adopt all of our standard methodologies. So there was some loose ends there, but I never offered a single bribe and I was never asked for one.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Catherine, just.

>> Charles G. Palm: That's true of all projects there, I'll just say that.

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: Catherine, just a quick answer to your question, the world changes, life changes, archivists, people who collect and preserve material, they adapt and change with the world. Also, there's not only state archives, there's the archives of the society or the individuals who are trying with their phones or with other means to record things that are happening.

 

And you must collect that as well. Authoritarian regimes, don't write and collect their own materials in order to get indicted by somebody later on. And when they see what happens, of course they adjust too, so it's this iterative process of adjusting. The Hoover Institution continues to collect, in the most difficult circumstances.

 

Still to this day, all sorts of materials across 100 plus countries, not all of which are state materials. Some of which, of course are, but are materials that preserve some version, some moments, some aspects that can open up the large, even when they don't want you to see it.

 

And so that's what Charles did, that's what Eric and his team do now, and all of us in this room are the beneficiaries. And our children and our children's children, your children and their children are all gonna be beneficiaries of that amazing work. And it's just stunning to see the probity, the empathy, the curiosity, but above all, the tenacity to make this happen.

 

And Charles, we all owe you a debt of gratitude that we just can never repay.