Harvard's Communist archive goof

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Thu Oct 7 00:18:56 PDT 1999


Harvard acquires bogus Communist archives

Copyright © 1999 Nando Media

Copyright © 1999 Associated Press

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (October 6, 1999 7:01 a.m. EDT

http://www.nandotimes.com) - Harvard University has been one-upped by

Stanford in an embarrassing episode involving Communist Party

documents from the former Soviet Union.

Harvard on Tuesday issued a news release calling the documents it had

just obtained "previously classified," but The Boston Globe reported

Wednesday that the 25 million sheets of material are copies.

The Stanford-affiliated Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and

Peace has had most of the material for the past five years.

"We have more than them," said a Hoover archivist, Lora Soroka. "Of

course we do. It's our project."

When told the Hoover Institute has had the archival material for

years, Marshall Goldman, associate director of Harvard's David Center

for Russian Studies, said: "Oh, brother. That's embarrassing."

The Harvard collection was named in honor of George and Abby O'Neill,

who donated $600,000 to acquire the material.

According to Goldman, the deal was quickly put together in April with

the impression that Harvard was getting material not available outside

of Moscow.

"It was bang, bang, bang, we wrote the letter to the dean and then

went and sought funding," Goldman said.

Three Russian scholars at Harvard wrote a letter to the Arts and

Sciences dean, Jeremy Knowles, on April 7, urging the university to

buy the microfilm collection by April 15, the deadline imposed by the

seller, the London-based firm of Chadwyck-Healey.

The letter said, "Due to the closed nature of the Soviet system, no

North American library has been able to acquire archival materials

relating to the Soviet Union."

The letter mentioned the Hoover Institute only once, saying it "had

financed the microfilming, and will have a complete set."

Goldman said he assumed from the letter that Hoover did not yet have

the information that Harvard wanted.

The collection includes the archives of the Gulag, the system of

Soviet forced labor camps; documents from the organization responsible

for internal purges of the Communist Party; the archives of the Soviet

police; and a variety of records detailing deliberations within

Communist leadership from 1903 through the Gorbachev period of the

1980s.

Copyright © 1999 Nando Media



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