The Hoover Institution Library & Archives has acquired the Fall of Communism Oral Histories with Polish and European Leaders from a former French journalist and filmmaker who intended to produce a documentary on the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe. The film, however, was never produced, and the recorded video interviews have not yet been put to use.
This unique collection includes videotaped interviews with 14 political leaders, dissidents, and historians from Poland, Russia, Germany, and Great Britain. Among the protagonists are the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, the former member of the Politburo and Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Alexander Yakovlev, the last leader of the Polish People’s Republic, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the prime minister of communist Poland, Mieczysław Rakowski, and the former chancellor of West Germany, Helmut Schmidt.
Above image: Mikhail Gorbachev with Wojciech Jaruzelski, Warsaw, 1988.
Hoover’s existing collections on the communism and post-communism period in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, such as the Jane Curry Leftwich collection, Andrew Nagorski interview recordings, and other personal papers of the former communist leader, especially from Poland (e.g. Wojciech Jaruzelski, Mieczyslaw F. Rakowski, or Czeslaw Kiszczak) are enriched by the addition of these oral histories to our holdings.
This extraordinary collection will attract journalists, scholars, and the general public interested in the political and economic changes in the Eastern Bloc countries of the 1980s, the collapse of communism, and the political transformation to democracy. These videotapes will soon be digitized and made available online via our website.
