New Tools for the Study of
Soviet Russia

ALEXANDER DALLIN
 

T
 

I/" ]f ^HE second World War—so tireless quantifiers inform
us—produced more documentary material than all previ¬
ous human history combined. The complexity of modern
life, even at a time of crisis institutionalized in an orgy of record¬
keeping, has thus created an embarrassment of riches for the
historian, who faces the task of reading his way through thou¬
sands of feet of paper, and for the archivist and librarian, who
confront the mounds of records with an ambivalent sense of
welcome affluence and bewildered inadequacy. For a variety
of reasons—ranging from government policy to lack of manpower
—many of these contemporary Pandora's filing cabinets remain
largely unexplored.

An unexpected by-product of this avalanche of paper has been
the opportunity to gain new tools—and new insights—for the
study of the U.S.S.R. The records, and probably our knowledge,
would have been richer, had it not been our policy in 1945 to
return to the Soviet authorities virtually all Russian-language
materials which the Allied armies ran across in the early days of
the occupation of Germany. One may still encounter officers
who recall watching, frustrated and impotent, crates of docu¬
ments being turned over to the Red Army at Tempelhof airfield
—papers which presumably the Nazis had captured in their short¬
lived advance into Russia. AVhen one American asked a sergeant
why they were surrendering these papers, he was told with a
casual shrug: "It's all in Russian, anyway."

Yet even if the big fish got away—or were given away—the
remaining little ones have proved to be important. This is so to

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