Guide To The Records Of The Smolensk Oblast Of The All Union Communist Party Of The Soviet Union 1917 41

"This guide describes and indexes the Smolensk regional records of the All-Union Communist Party (Vsesoiuznaia Kommunisticheskaia Partiia) of the Soviet Union, covering the period 1917 to 1941 ... The Smolensk Archive reached the United States as war booty, after the records seized in 1941 by German military forces in Russia fell into the hands of the U.S. Army in the course of military operations in Germany in 1945"--p. iii.

The Stalin era has been less accessible to researchers than either the preceding decade or the postwar era. The basic problem is that during the Stalin years censorship restricted the collection and dissemination of information (and introduced bias and distortion into the statistics that were published), while in the post-Stalin years access to archives and libraries remained tightly controlled. Thus it is not surprising that one of the main manifestations of glasnost has been the effort to open up records of the 1930s. In this volume Western and Soviet specialists detail the untapped potential of sources on this period of Soviet social history and also the hidden traps that abound. The full range of sources is covered, from memoirs to official documents, from city directories to computerized data bases.

These essays by scholars from six nations offers contributions to the understanding of Stalinist terror in the 1930s. The essays explore in depth the background of the terror and patterns of persecution, while providing more empirically founded estimates of the numbers of Stalin's victims.