Perestroika in the Archives? Further Efforts at Soviet Archival Reform

The new openness in Soviet society in recent years has led to dramatic changes in Soviet archives. There has been tremendous progress in normalization of access and working conditions, along with an increase in foreign projects and collaborative ventures, although some archives still retain the characteristics of a closed society. Captured Nazi records and other foreign archival materials brought back to Moscow at the end of World War II remain sealed in the "Special Archive," but their existence has finally been admitted. Significant problems continue to affect archival research, and other serious archival problems remain in the areas of appraisal and acquisition of records, and a lack of adequate archival security, storage, and reproduction facilities, many of them related to the country's economic and political crisis. Reduced budgets have forced archives to assume more financial responsibility by moving toward a fee-for-service basis, even as they have been given more autonomy from centralized control. The author discusses efforts through the end of 1990 to provide a legal structure for archival reform through attempts to draft a new law governing archives and resulting conflicts within the archival community. She concludes that archival perestroika must ultimately await resolution of political and economic structural issues and of the nature and extent of the federal union.