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