Over the last two years Yale University Press and the Russian State Archive for Social and Political History have been quietly digitizing Stalin’s personal archive, consisting of thousands of documents, letters, and books, that passed through the Soviet leader’s hands. Vadim
Staklo, the editor overseeing the project appeared earlier this month
on the BEA panel “Stepping into the Digital Future with Russia” to talk
about this and other initiatives. Regular Publishing Perspectives
contributor Daniel Kalder caught up with him to discuss some of the
intriguing “Secrets from the Russian Archive.”
Vadim
Staklo graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in the
History of Latin America in 1988. After working in the USSR, he traveled
to the University of Pittsburgh in 1993, where he first earned a
Masters and then PhD in Latin American and Soviet history. Since 1997 he
has worked for Yale University Press, and is currently editor for a
broad list of titles, ranging from books on Johnson, Boswell and
Benjamin Franklin to projects on Russian, Soviet and Eastern European
history, from the Annals of Communism series to Eurasia Past and Present and beyond.
“The digitization of the Stalin archive project is not something
standalone, not just a bunch of documents being scanned in,” says
Staklo. “It grew out of a research and publishing program, and has its
roots in the Annals of Communism series which Yale started in
the early ’90s, more or less as soon as the USSR collapsed and scholars
suddenly had the opportunity to see documents in the Communist Party
archives. The founder of the series Jonathan Brent travelled to Russia,
George Soros provided some seed money, and very soon the project to
discover, annotate, and publish some important historical records was up
and running.”
The first fruit of this chaotic period of openness in Russian history was the 1995 study The Secret World of American Communism,
which was a huge success. Says Staklo: “It made public previously
unknown documents from the Communist Party archive, showing in
particular how the US Communist Party was heavily subsidized by the
Soviet Union and that it maintained an espionage apparatus with direct
ties to the Soviet intelligence. The book was an important revelation;
it sold many copies and generated a huge response and heated discussions
among scholars and in the media.”
Letter from Stalin thanking Hitler for signing the non-aggression pact
Twenty-four more books have followed since, including Arch Getty’s influential The Road to Terror, Matthew Lenoe’s The Kirov Murder and Anne Applebaum’s Gulag Voices.
Staklo describes the format as “documentary monographs” — translated
source materials appear in their original form, but accompanied by an
author narrative setting context. Perhaps the most unusual of all these
monographs is the collection of doodles by Bolshevik leaders Piggy Foxy and the Sword of Revolution.
“The popular perception of Soviet leaders mainly comes from the
movies- you know, sclerotic stodgy men with thick eyebrows and golden
stars on the lapel,” says Staklo. “In real life however many early
Bolshevik leaders were very active, lively unorthodox people from very
different walks of life. Some were refined intellectuals, others came
from humbler origins, some were good writers… and some knew how to draw.
These are the images people drew in the margins during the long hours
of party meetings. There are caricatures, and also satirical depictions
of current events and issues. They went unseen for decades as most of
the artists fell victim to repression. They’re not just pictures
however- they tell a story about early soviet politics and personal
relations on the Bolshevik Olympus, and the problems they had to deal
with on the daily basis.”
Meanwhile the idea of finding scholarly treasure in the margins of
old soviet documents would take a new twist in the early 2000s as much
of Stalin’s personal archive was being opened to scholars.
“At that time the Stalin materials hidden in the presidential archive
started the declassification process, and they were moved to the public
archive. Yale had already been cooperating with the archive and Russian
scholars on other projects, and it did not take long for the idea to
jointly digitize and publish the collection to develop.”
Yale secured a grant from the Mellon foundation to digitize the
documents and create a hosting platform complete with advanced search
and collaboration tools. The project has been going on for several
years, but now says Staklo, the scanning is almost complete: “Last
November we launched the beta version of the archive, and in summer we
hope to have an official public launch.”
Vadim Staklo leads the digitization of program for Yale University Press
Even so, not everything in the Stalin archive has been digitized.
However this is not down to reasons of secrecy but rather questions of
sheer practicality:
“There are close to 40,000 items in Stalin’s archive. Many of them
are not documents but objects — gifts to Stalin. Then there are lots of
telegrams of condolence on his death, and also telegrams of
congratulation on his 70th birthday. We haven’t scanned those. However
we have scanned all the documents that he wrote, read, or touched,
including those that he annotated or initialed: basically, everything
that went through his secretariat. We are also scanning all the books in
his library in which he wrote margin notes, which is between 300 and
400 titles. The total number of documents to be digitized is about
28,000, or over 400,000 pages. The archive also has all the maps that
were used by Stalin, but we’re not scanning those right now- maps
require special equipment and procedures.”
So what kind of comments did Stalin mark in the books he read? A wide
range, says Staklo. While annotating a book by his ideological nemesis
Karl Kautsky the dictator might explode with rage and scrawl “A
traitor!” next to a particularly objectionable section, but Stalin also
made copious and detailed notes and insightful comments, revealing a
firm grip of Marxist theory:
“The common perception is that Stalin was brutal, paranoiac and
senseless. But if you read the notes he was making you can see that, yes
he may have been brutal and paranoiac- but he was not stupid. For
example, he was very keen on the arts as the most important vehicle for
propaganda and he read every important play or screenplay offered by a
theater or screenwriter. He read them carefully, and wrote long letters
to the authors or producers with his comments. He also personally
supervised and heavily revised the Short Course In The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
This was one of the most important books in the USSR, and you can see
that it went through many drafts and that Stalin essentially rewrote the
entire volume completely.”
Perhaps surprisingly-given his stupendous personality cult — Stalin
frequently cut out laudatory comments referring to him, preferring
instead to emphasize his role as a pure agent of history — an attitude
much more in line with Marxist theory. Not only that, “He had a very
clear understanding of what he wanted. He simplified the text for the
not so sophisticated readers — he was a great populariser. Next year
Yale will publish a facsimile text of the Short Course, edited
by David Brandenberger, showing the original text and the one with his
comments, explaining exactly what he changed and why. This will be
followed by a similar edition of Stalin’s Biography.”
Of course, a document without context is of limited use, and as with the Annals of Communism series, prominent scholars of USSR history have been invited to participate in the digital project.
“To make sense out of this eclectic collection of documents, some
major subjects will be curated by specialists in that particular field —
for instance, Arch Getty will help us organize the materials on the
terror. Lynne Viola will do the same for peasantry and collectivization,
Tim Naftali — on the beginning of the Cold War, etc. They will identify
the most significant documents pertaining to the subject, tag them and
write an introduction and annotations, and mark the most important ones
for transcription and translation. Once it is done, non-specialist users
can easily browse the relevant materials, learn more about a particular
subject, and even create course packs for teaching. Transcribed and
translated documents will allow users to perform full-text searches
whereas right now the archive can only be searched by metadata.”
“So far a dozen prominent experts have committed to research these
thematic modules,” says Staklo, “So that in future non-specialists will
be able to browse and read the archive. We want to create something
educated, ordinary people can use without special preparation in
archival work. The plan is to offer it by subscription, not only to
research institutions and libraries but possibly also to schools and
individual subscribers”.
Perhaps it’s difficult to grasp the scale of what Yale is about to
put online. The idea that casual visitors in a public library in Utah
might soon be able to pore over Stalin’s personal marginalia via their
computer screens would have been absolutely unimaginable two decades
ago. Indeed, says Staklo, the sudden mass of information available to
scholars has completely revolutionized the world of soviet studies, and
the ramifications are still being digested:
“In the past so little information was available that every single
released document was scrutinized intensely; the problem now is
different — today there are many thousands of documents being published
or made available in different forms and formats, and what are scholars
to do with this mass? A new kind of information technology might offer
an answer — we now have tools to slice and dice the data, so the
research can be extensive as well as intensive. We are just beginning to
grasp the challenges and learning from experience of how to deal with
such a huge amount of information in the humanities. It’s a different
paradigm.”