Vasily Soima

The book of the Candidate of Historical Sciences, Colonel of the FSB Reserve, President of the Regional Public Foundation for the Promotion of Social and Legal Support for Veterans and FSB Officers of the Russian Federation Vasily Soima "Forbidden Stalin" is based on documents from the personal archive of I. V. Stalin. The materials cited in it - letters, notes, uncorrected transcripts of speeches - have never been analyzed or generalized either in Soviet or in modern Russian historiography.

V. Soima PROHIBITED STALIN

ABOUT THIS BOOK

After the death of I. V. Stalin, a huge number of documents (letters, notes, uncorrected transcripts of his speeches) remained, which have never been analyzed or generalized either in Soviet or in modern Russian historiography. The reason is simple: they come into conflict with the ideologemes of Khrushchev's and Gorbachev's propaganda and refute them.

One example: about Stalin's unpreparedness for war. In 1939, he carried out a secret operation - even the Ministry of Finance did not know about it - to purchase strategic raw materials from the West, which the USSR did not possess at that time. All four years of the war, these raw materials met the needs of the USSR by 70 percent. But Khrushchev's formula about Stalin's unpreparedness for war sits in the minds of people.

For the first time, the documents collected and commented on turn over the usual ideas about the personality of I.V. Stalin.

Chapter 1 SECRET FOREVER!

The writer Konstantin Simonov was six times a laureate of the Stalin Prize. He is a laureate of the Lenin Prize. Hero of Socialist Labor.

Simonov wrote a letter before the XXIII Congress of the CPSU, which opened on March 29, 1966. On the letter stored in the archive, there are notes from the hand of L. I. Brezhnev’s assistant A. M. Aleksandrov-Agentov: “Reported 23.111. comrade Brezhnev L.I., who on the same day talked with comrade. Simonov. A. M. Alexandrov. And further: “To the archive. A. M. Alexandrov. 16.1.66.

“TO THE FIRST SECRETARY OF THE CPSU CC Comrade L. I. BREZHNEV

Dear Leonid Ilyich!

I am taking up your time with this letter during the tense pre-Congress days because I am alarmed by some speeches, including writers, at the Congress of the Communist Party of Georgia, tending to new reassessments of the activities of JV Stalin.

Now, on the eve of the 23rd Congress, we are all most concerned about the problems of restructuring the economy, the enormous and exciting work ahead of us, which is necessary for the further movement towards communism.

But it seems to me that in that great and sharp struggle between the new and the old, which is already underway and is still ahead of us, everything inert, incapable of working in a new way, will more than once seek political support for itself in the canonization of Stalin and in ahistorical attempts to return to his methods of action.

In my attitude towards Stalin, for many years I was what they now call "Stalinists", and as a communist writer I bear my share of responsibility for this.

But I now bear the greater responsibility for ensuring that the full historical truth is told about Stalin and his cult of infallibility, in the creation of which we ourselves were involved.

I will take only one sphere of historical events, on which I have been working as a writer for ten years now - the past war.

I am convinced that in the course of the war, Stalin did everything he considered necessary for victory, but this cannot make me forget that he is also directly responsible for our defeats at the beginning of the war and all the extra casualties associated with it.

I cannot forget for a moment that before the war, according to official data published by us, as a result of arbitrariness, all commanders of military districts died, all members of military district councils, all corps commanders, almost all division commanders, most of the corps commissars and divisions, about half of the regimental commanders and about a third of the regimental commissars.

Having entered the war after such a defeat of the army personnel, any country would have perished. And the fact that our country did not die after that is a miracle that the people and the party performed, and not Stalin.

In the course of the war, Stalin showed great statesmanship, great firmness and will, and thus made a significant personal contribution to the victory of our country over the enemy. This should not be forgotten or hushed up under one indispensable condition - that along with this, never and under no circumstances should we forget and keep silent about Stalin's pre-war crimes that brought the country to the brink of catastrophe.

We must not forget one more thing: that, having contributed to our victory, after the war, Stalin again took up the beating of cadres (the Leningrad affair and many other things), and by the time of his death, the threat of a repetition of 1937 was growing in the country more and more clearly.

Provided that everything said by the Party at the 20th and 22nd Congresses is reaffirmed with all determination, there is no reason to unfairly keep silent about the merits that Stalin had during the war and in previous periods of history. If, however, his crimes against the party and the people are hushed up (which for some reason is increasingly taking place in our mass press), then all references to his real merits will look like an attempt to rehabilitate this major historical figure as a whole, including the rehabilitation of him direct crimes.

It seems to me that we now need to clearly and publicly separate in the minds of people those profoundly true general conclusions reached by the 20th and 22nd Congresses regarding J.V. said personally by N. S. Khrushchev.

We have no need to either slander or whitewash Stalin. We just need to know all the historical truth about him.

I belong to the number of people who think that acquaintance with all the historical facts connected with Stalin's activities will bring us many more painful discoveries. I know there are people who think otherwise. But if so, if these people are not afraid of facts and believe that the entire sum of historical facts connected with Stalin's activities will speak in his favor, then they should not be afraid to get acquainted with all these facts.

Since disputes around this problem continue in the Party and in the country - and one should not turn a blind eye to this - it seems to me that it would be right to appoint a commission of party leaders and communist historians at the 23rd Party Congress, which would consistently and objectively study all the main facts of Stalin's activity in all its periods and at a certain time would submit its preliminary conclusions for consideration by the Plenum of the Central Committee. I understand that we do not live in an airless space and that some of these facts, perhaps, will have to be kept as party and state secrets for a number of years. But the main conclusions of such a commission, proceeding from an objective study of all the facts, it seems to me that it would be right in one form or another to bring to public attention.

Maybe I'm trying to break through the open door with this letter and only take your time - then forgive me.

Respectfully yours, Konstantin Simonov

APRF. F. 80. Original. Typescript, signature - autograph.

This topic was not raised at the 23rd Congress. And the next ones too. Why was the side of his activity that was unfavorable for Stalin's overthrowers so carefully hidden in the hiding places of special stores? Maybe because the primary sources would shed light on the true background of the events, and they would appear before contemporaries not in a form distorted by numerous interpreters?

Let's take a look at these documents.

Chapter 2 LETTERS TO STALIN. FROM HIS PERSONAL ARCHIVE

A. V. Lunacharsky: "Don't forget me..."

Spring 1925. The discussion continues in the party about L. D. Trotsky's article "Lessons of October". Ordinary illiterate communists from the machine tool, who joined the RCP (b) on the “Lenin call”, have little understanding of what is happening. Not only is much unclear to them, it is difficult to figure it out even for such figures as the People's Commissar of Education A. V. Lunacharsky. And he addresses a letter to I. V. Stalin.

Owls. secret

Like probably many others, I am in a strange position. Still, I am listed as a member of the Government of the RSFSR, and yet I know nothing about what is happening in the party. Rumors are swirling, heterogeneous and contradictory.

However, it's not that I'm asking you to show me the way to the real information. I want to write to you that I am always ready to fulfill any desk, assignment, and to the best of my ability, modest, but also remarkable. At the same time, I have long been accustomed to consider you, among our leaders, the most infallibly sensitive and believe in your steely "firm flexibility".

I don't impose on the party. She better see who how to use. But in a big deal, one or the other can be forgotten. I remind you - you can have me unconditionally. With comm, hello

A. Lunacharsky.

APRF. F. 45. On. 1. D. 760. L. 150–150 rev. Autograph.

There is no Stalinist resolution on the letter. A typewritten copy certified by the head of the bureau of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) L. 3. Mekhlis has been preserved in the file. Marked in the upper right corner:

"PB. Stalin's archive. Mehlis. 1/III". But this letter probably influenced Stalin's decision to accept a closed letter to local party organizations with an explanation of the essence of disagreements at the top of the party, which was adopted on April 26, 1925 by the Plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), summing up the intra-party discussion.

A. I. Rykov: “Grisha will answer her ...”

At the beginning of February 1926, I. V. Stalin’s work “On the Questions of Leninism” was published as a separate pamphlet, in which he argued with G. E. Zinoviev on the main issues of the theory and practice of construction ...

MOSCOW, June 11 - RIA Novosti. The Federal Archival Agency (Rosarchiv) launched on Tuesday a unique website, Documents of the Soviet Era, which provided electronic access to more than 400,000 materials from the personal fund of Joseph Stalin and the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

The project was based on documents from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, the former Central Party Archive of the CPSU, Andrei Artizov, head of the Russian Archive, said at the presentation of the site on Tuesday.

All materials are divided into two blocks: materials from the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) for 1919-1933 and materials from Stalin's personal fund for all the years of the leader's life.

The total volume is 390 thousand pages or approximately 100 thousand documents. The digitization work took about five years. Documents can not only be read, but also printed, bookmarked in the text. It is also important that users can get a code to quote on social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook.

Artizov pointed out the importance of publishing the documents in light of the preparation of a new history textbook. This issue was discussed the day before at a meeting of the Presidium of the Russian Historical Society.

"The process of self-identification of modern Russia will not be completed until we jointly develop a balanced approach to the Soviet era. An approach that will be based on an objective analysis and will soberly assess both the achievements of that time and the price that society and citizens had to pay for these achievements," Artizov said.

The rector of the Russian State Humanitarian University, historian Yefim Pivovar, agrees with him.

"Both the cognitive and methodological elements of this process are important. We are at the stage of preparing a new generation of history textbooks. These materials, previously inaccessible to a wide range of readers, should be reflected in educational literature for secondary and higher schools," the rector said.

"There are a lot of discussions about these stories and this open access to information will allow us to dismiss some radical positions, will allow us to use a scientific approach to analyze the processes that have taken place and which we do not hush up, but are ready to study, interpret at a new level using all the wealth materials," he added.

March 1953 Farewell to the "father of nations"Sixty years ago, on March 5, 1953, the Soviet party, state and military leader Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin died. During the funeral of the "father of peoples" there was a stampede in the area of ​​Trubnaya Square, in which people died. From a few hundred to two or three thousand people died.

The head of the Russian Archives also said that the English version of the site would eventually become available in other countries of the world, in particular in the United States. "It will be a paid subscription, part of the income from which will go to the Russian budget," he said.

According to Artizov, the Rosarchive plans to publish documents on the activities of the Soviet military administration in Germany, the German trophy fund and documents of the State Defense Committee on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War.

MOSCOW, June 11 - RIA Novosti. The Federal Archival Agency (Rosarchiv) launched on Tuesday a unique website, Documents of the Soviet Era, which provided electronic access to more than 400,000 materials from the personal fund of Joseph Stalin and the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

The project was based on documents from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, the former Central Party Archive of the CPSU, Andrei Artizov, head of the Russian Archive, said at the presentation of the site on Tuesday.

All materials are divided into two blocks: materials from the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) for 1919-1933 and materials from Stalin's personal fund for all the years of the leader's life.

The total volume is 390 thousand pages or approximately 100 thousand documents. The digitization work took about five years. Documents can not only be read, but also printed, bookmarked in the text. It is also important that users can get a code to quote on social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook.

Artizov pointed out the importance of publishing the documents in light of the preparation of a new history textbook. This issue was discussed the day before at a meeting of the Presidium of the Russian Historical Society.

"The process of self-identification of modern Russia will not be completed until we jointly develop a balanced approach to the Soviet era. An approach that will be based on an objective analysis and will soberly assess both the achievements of that time and the price that society and citizens had to pay for these achievements," Artizov said.

The rector of the Russian State Humanitarian University, historian Yefim Pivovar, agrees with him.

"Both the cognitive and methodological elements of this process are important. We are at the stage of preparing a new generation of history textbooks. These materials, previously inaccessible to a wide range of readers, should be reflected in educational literature for secondary and higher schools," the rector said.

"There are a lot of discussions about these stories and this open access to information will allow us to dismiss some radical positions, will allow us to use a scientific approach to analyze the processes that have taken place and which we do not hush up, but are ready to study, interpret at a new level using all the wealth materials," he added.

March 1953 Farewell to the "father of nations"Sixty years ago, on March 5, 1953, the Soviet party, state and military leader Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin died. During the funeral of the "father of peoples" there was a stampede in the area of ​​Trubnaya Square, in which people died. From a few hundred to two or three thousand people died.

The head of the Russian Archives also said that the English version of the site would eventually become available in other countries of the world, in particular in the United States. "It will be a paid subscription, part of the income from which will go to the Russian budget," he said.

According to Artizov, the Rosarchive plans to publish documents on the activities of the Soviet military administration in Germany, the German trophy fund and documents of the State Defense Committee on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War.

2. The “Holy of Holies” of the Stalin Archive

On March 3, 2015, at a press conference of three leaders of the Federal Archival Agency (Rosarchiv), a resonant statement was made that the personal archive Stalin, stored in the federal state institution "Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History" (FKU RGASPI), is open at 95 (ninety-five)%.

The chiefs are the chairman of the Federal Archives, Doctor of Historical Sciences Andrey Artizov, his deputy Ph.D. Oleg Naumov and Director of RGASPI Candidate of Historical Sciences, laureate of the State Prize of the Russian Federation in the field of science and technology Andrey Sorokin(already mentioned in the monitoring).

In 1998-1999, Stalin's personal archive entered the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) from the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation and, theoretically, was initially ready for immediate general use. At the same time, microfiches of documents were handed over, and then additional microfilms of the insurance fund were made.

Why is Stalin’s personal archive (RGASPI, fund No. 558, inventory No. 11, item No. 1-1703) so important for assessing the state of archival publicity and for measuring the effectiveness of the anti-falsification potential of Russian historical science and counteracting other “ideological sabotage” in "Damage to Russia's interests" in the current difficult geopolitical situation?

Because during the Great Patriotic War, Marshal I.V. Stalin was at the same time, "one and indivisible" the supreme commander of the armed forces of the USSR, the chairman of the State Defense Committee (the highest emergency state body that had full power on the territory of the USSR) and the people's commissar (until 1947, the minister) of defense. In addition, he was the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (prime minister) and chairman of its bureau, the de facto general secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks - the ruling and only party, at the same time a member of its Politburo, Secretariat and Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee. Finally, he was listed as a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (collective president in peacetime) and the Executive Committee of the Comintern - this world communist party (until the dissolution of the CI in May 1943).

It is clear that if problems are found with access to the archive of this chief staff officer of the Victory in general and to its perhaps the most important segment of the period of the Great Patriotic War, in particular, then this can be extrapolated to other collections in other archives. Both emergency authorities for governing the country in wartime, and funds of prominent Soviet leaders (on the foreign policy section of the archive Zhdanov said above). The openness of Stalin's personal archive will be a diagnosis for the state of affairs in the entire industry.

By December 29, 1978, 1705 cases were entered into inventory No. 11 of fund No. 558. Plus two letters. (In the archives of the General Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, he had a different code: fund 45, op. 1). Total 170,745. According to the act of March 9, 1999, six cases were returned to the Office of the President of the Russian Federation for State Awards. In total, 14 units of storage "left". We accept the remaining figure 1693 as 100%.

We consider passes in the rooms not known by what censor sealed, and therefore classified cases. In places it is whole pages. The very names of the classified are classified. Let's summarize. 224 articles of names of Stalin's archival goods are not issued to the reading room of the RGASPI.

Does this amount amount to 5%, which the chairman of Rosarihva declares with the tacit approval of two of his colleagues? By no means, no. This is 13.23%. And if we subtract from the total amount of available archival garbage (placer), reprints, copies, newspaper clippings, published in millions of copies of thirteen volumes of Stalin's Works and materials for them, preparatory materials for the "Short Course in the History of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks", brochures, books from his libraries (often having a very indirect relationship to Stalin personally), information about the health and death of the leader (classified) and family (also "private secret"), then the real scale of the figure of 13% grows noticeably.

What is closed on the topic "The Great Patriotic War"? In RGASPI and Rosarkhiv, as before, we have not found an answer to the experience of communicating with officials from these structures and will not find it. I had to use a personal library card, which the author uses by right of being an employee of the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Toronto (Canada) for 10 years. In the fundamental library of the specified university, a complete inventory No. 11 from the Stalinist fund No. 558 of the federal archive of the RGASPI is stored in the public domain. This is part of a legacy acquired by the said university in Russia and brought to Canada as part of the Archives of the Stalinist Period project funded by the Government of Canada (see above about the Tragedy of the Soviet (Russian) Village project). The catalog of Stalin's personal collection has been assigned a code according to the classification of the US Library of Congress (DK268 S8 B55.1978). Pages glued in Moscow are clearly printed in this Canadian inventory.

As a result of a page-by-page continuous verification of two copies of one inventory (from the reading room of the RGASPI and from the collection of the library of the University of Toronto), the following was established.

The cipher telegrams of the General Staff of the Red and Soviet Army, the Air Force, the Navy, the people's commissariats of the aviation industry, weapons, heavy engineering, the headquarters of the air defense forces (RGASPI. F. 558. Op. 11. Item 448-453) are classified in Stalin's personal fund. All ciphers of the Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff are hidden from historians (ibid., item No. 454-455). All this with Stalin's autographs. Copies of military orders of the People's Commissar are not available, and most importantly, materials for them with Stalin's corrections (Nos. 462-464 and 466-477).

From military documents from the eve of the Second World War on September 1, 1939 to the beginning of the Great Patriotic War on June 22, 1941, the remarks and corrections of the theses of the report of the Marshal's People's Commissar of Defense are hidden Semyon Timoshenko at the final meeting of the Military Conference, reports on military equipment and the economy of foreign states, information on the tasks of the German delegation in economic negotiations with the USSR (No. 437)

Notes, information, messages, telegrams of Stalin and the People's Commissariat of Defense headed by him about the technique and tactics of using poisonous substances in the German army, preparing the Germans for an operation in the Smolensk-Vyazemsky direction, the experience of the first three months of the war, the nature of close combat, actions are hidden from historians in Russia aviation, shortcomings in the work of the air defense of Moscow, the creation of defense committees in Sochi, Gagra, Sukhumi and Zugdidi, a raid of the united partisan detachments under the command Sidor Kovpak and Alexandra Saburova. Even Stalin's editing of the text of the ultimatum to the commander of the 6th German Army, the author of the Barbarossa plan, Field Marshal is not available to historians Friedrich Paulus and the entire composition of the encircled German troops near Stalingrad. (Case Nos. 440-441).

Some documents on the Battle of Stalingrad inaccessible to historians during the days of the anniversary surfaced in the publishing house "ROSSPEN" and under the "general editorship" of the director of the RGASPI Sorokin and the dean-organizer of the faculty of political science of Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov Andrey Shutov album "Fatherland in the great war of 1941-1945. Images and texts. Here, for the first time, color images were published with the ciphers of some Stalingrad documents, the existence of which is known from the Canadian code (op. cit., pp. 72-73, 75).

The fact of the legalization of two or three main documents of the Battle of Stalingrad 72 years after its end, 24 years after the historical presidential decrees Yeltsin and 15 years after the transfer of the Stalin fund to the public, it testifies to the following: the documents are declassified, they are artificially hidden from historians and the public, their publication before scientific processing, examination was done selectively, hastily and without context, which gives rise to different interpretations. The limited edition of the album (1,000 copies) and its elite sale price (2,530 rubles) make it inaccessible to the mass of historians and, above all, to Russian students (for example, the amount of the basic state academic scholarship at the Faculty of History of Moscow State University as of May 15, 2015 is 2,400 rubles per month). At the same time, the mention of the existence of these documents and the very name of the archival business continues to be absent on the official free and accessible only in Russia and Belarus website of the Russian Archive "Documents of the Soviet era".

After the publication of the article in the Ogonyok magazine, the Stalingrad memorandum was also presented at the exhibition “At the Headquarters of Victory 1941-1945” organized by the Department of Culture of the City of Moscow, the Federal Archival Agency and RGASPI in the Moscow Small Manege. The organizer of the exhibition (Rosarchiv), as well as the author of the idea and concept of the project, State Prize winner Andrei Sorokin, did not ensure that, unlike the glossy album published by the archive and publishing house, the ciphers of documents were indicated at the exhibition. Not a single exhibit at this exhibition had a document code affixed.

We add that Stalin constantly worked with translations of enemy military documents. For example, with the papers of the 99th mountain rifle regiment of the 1st mountain rifle division of the Wehrmacht. This is also classified.

Is it possible without these basic primary sources, the actual "main documents" of the war, to qualitatively fulfill the order of the President of the Russian Federation No. 806-rp of May 8, 2008 on the publication of the "fundamental multi-volume work" "History of the Great Patriotic War" in 10 volumes? How it was carried out under the former Minister of Defense, Doctor of Economics Anatoly Serdyukov we can now imagine. According to the Soviet tradition, Anatoly Eduardovich was ex officio the chairman of the "main editorial commission" of this "fundamental" undertaking. However, the next eight volumes were published already under the leadership of General of the Army Sergei Shoigu. A significant methodological and conceptual difference between the two stages of this project under two such different ministers was not found.

A selective check of the specific practical use of archival primary sources from Stalin's personal funds in the last three volumes of this fundamental multi-volume book (out of the 10 volumes provided for by the decree, it has grown to 12), which were published on the eve of the anniversary, revealed the following facts. At the same time, we note the democratic nature of universal access to this publication. All of his twelve volumes are exhibited free of charge and with the highest resolution quality on the official website of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.

At the same time, in the tenth volume of "The State, Society and War" there is not a single reference to the following funds from the RGASPI: F. 558 (Stalin's fund), F. 82 (Fund Molotov), F. 77 (Zhdanov fund). From the collections of the GA RF there is only one reference to F. R-5446 (Council of People's Commissars of the USSR).

The annotation of the eleventh volume, which is entitled "Politics and strategy of victory: strategic leadership of the country and the armed forces of the USSR during the war years" declares: "In the eleventh volume, based on an analysis of archival sources (documents and materials of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the USSR, the State Defense Committee, the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command, the General Staff of the Red Army, etc.) reveals the mechanism for the creation and functioning of the system of emergency bodies of strategic leadership and control of the country and the Armed Forces of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War, as well as the process of their organizational and structural development and bringing them in line with the requirements of armed struggle. For a wide range of readers interested in the history of the Fatherland.

However, in the eleventh volume, the picture is approximately the same as in the tenth. When analyzing "strategic leadership" there is not a single reference, note or footnote to the personal funds of the main strategists and leaders: Stalin, Molotov, Zhdanov. According to the Council of People's Commissars - one reference, and there is no reference at all to the Council for the Evacuation of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR (GA RF. F. R-6882). An analysis of the documents of the highest authorities without involving the “human factor” of the heads of these institutions and the personal funds of these figures, and above all Stalin, who personified the Politburo, SNK, GKO, Headquarters, and the Red Army, is an endemic and insurmountable relapse of the Soviet school historiography, when history was written without actors.

Thus, the artificially created archival hunger naturally transforms into defective historiographical practice, including in fundamental publications created by presidential decrees and the work of numerous colleagues from research teams and with multimillion-dollar budget subsidies. It should be noted that a selective check of state orders for only four secondary expenditure items of the last volumes of the publishing project of the fundamental multi-volume book showed that 18 million 708 thousand 600 rubles were allocated for them from the state budget. But this military-historical project did not have time to end, as the next, more local one was announced: "Auction in<электронной форме на выполнение работ по разработке и изданию сборника архивных материалов, посвящённых развитию информационно-пропагандистскому противоборству в годы Великой Отечественной…» (so in the text. - L.M). The price of the contract is 12 million 100 thousand rubles.

Let's return to the secret folders from inventory No. 11, fund No. 558 in RGASPI.

Case No. 493 is closed. This is Stalin's correspondence on military issues with the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (b) of Ukraine, a member of the Military Councils of a number of fronts Nikita Khrushchev. It contains reflections on the situation on the Voronezh, Stalingrad and Southern fronts. We will not learn about the leader's reaction to the suicide of a member of the military council of the Second Guards Army, Major General Illarion Ivanovich Larin, on the plan for the defeat of the enemy troops surrounded near Stalingrad. There are materials about Rodion Malinovsky and his appointment as commander of the Southern Front, promotion of the group Pavel Rotmistrov, on the situation with the supply of ammunition and on the course of the operation to capture Novocherkassk and Rostov-on-Don. The deadlines for the archives: from October 29, 1942 to October 9, 1943. 70 archival pages.

The situation with access to Stalin's correspondence with the first red officer and the first marshal, people's commissar of defense is completely unsatisfactory. Kliment Voroshilov(cases No. 714--715). With Khrushchev, the exchange of messages lasted 12 months, and with Voroshilov thirty-two years, from January 9, 1920 to November 6, 1952. Is it possible to study the military-political history of the Soviet Union in general and the preparation and initial period of the war in particular without this collection of documents?

In the current difficult geopolitical situation, Stalin's thoughts about the Soviet-Polish war from the book "Kyiv Cannes 1920" by the commander could sound relevant Ivan Kutyakova(1897-1938). At the same time, Stalin’s correspondence with Kutyakov himself, who was shot in 1938, and who once received from Chapaeva command of the illustrious 25th Rifle Division (Chapaevskaya) (case No. 108).

How interesting it would be to “introduce into scientific circulation” the complete collection of cipher telegrams hidden from the victorious people between Stalin and Leo Mehlis- Stalin's favorite, and a kind of antipode of the famous Soviet military leaders. Before the war, he was the editor of Pravda, head of the press department of the Central Committee, head of the Glavpur of the Red Army. With the outbreak of war, this People's Commissar of State Control again becomes Deputy People's Commissar of Defense and the head of Glavpur. Since June 14, 1942, he has been a member of the Military-Political Propaganda Council. As a representative of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command, he went down in history as the "architect" of the Kerch catastrophe in the forty-second year. Alas, cases Nos. 500-503 with a total of 574 sheets are also classified.

Such is the archival-historical basis of modern fundamental "political biographies" of "The Master" and "Generalissimo" and the funded activities of various centers on the history, sociology and anthropology of the Second World War, its causes and consequences. Is it possible to say without the listed documents that today we have academic research on the "history of Stalinism" that will be in demand with the next authorized release of a mass of archival primary sources? Will the works created in 1991-2015 survive the new inevitable “ninth wave” of archival glasnost? Will it not be necessary to recycle the book products available in libraries and tons of book products lying unsold and unsold in warehouses?

How many "sensational" collections of documents could be introduced into "scientific circulation" only according to the listed archival storage units? Dozens. Instead, society has been fed for decades cloned Stalins from epics, TV series, sensational investigative documentaries and multi-volume bricks of novels: “Go out and think carefully, Comrade Rokossovsky”, “Stalin got up”, “Stalin lay down”, “Stalin thought”, “Stalin remembered”. The days of the past anniversary were no exception.

This is what concerns some personal collections. In addition, the arrays of archives of state-forming institutions, people's commissariats, departments, services, entire areas in the study of the Russian state, the history of its armed forces and the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet people have been closed. And not only in the Stalinist archive, but in general. As the Bolsheviks said: "entirely and completely."

In preparation for the anniversary celebrations, Andrei Artizov, chairman of the Russian Archive, reported that classified documents “include documents related to intelligence, to ensuring the country's security, and issues related to the production of weapons. There is also international activity, certain decisions that were made by representatives of the states of the world, and by mutual agreements are closed for a long time.

The words “there is and” do not quite accurately convey the state of affairs in the Stalinist fund of the RGASPI subordinate to the Rosarkhiv and in other archives. Almost everything on the subject of the People's Commissariat for Military and Naval Affairs and the Revolutionary Military Council, the People's Commissariat of Defense and the Ministry of the Armed Forces of the USSR, on the General Staff and the GRU, all the proposals of the military commissions of 1940 are closed. The directives and orders of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command and the State Defense Committee (cases Nos. 478-481 on 594 pages) have been closed.

Stalin was informed about the creation of a military base against Japan in the Far East, about the amnesty of the White Guards living abroad. He researched "a unified method of warfare" (what kind of method is this?), the state of aviation, the creation of "operational chemical compounds" (interesting), "the formation of a chemical corps" (also curious), plans to publish the journal "Modern War" (in the catalog The RSL does not list such a periodical). Already on the eve of the war, Stalin led the placement of military orders in the United States. He kept the pulse on Soviet-German relations.

All the ciphers of Stalin of the war years addressed to local party and Soviet bodies, front commanders, people's commissariats and factories, partisans, individual workers who collected money and valuables for the construction of tanks and aircraft were sealed. It is not clear why, because these answers were published for a long time and tediously on the pages of the Pravda newspaper at the same time.

Leonid MAKSIMENKOV

Ending to be

The illustrations use several of the many hundreds of documents from the Stalinist fund No. 558, inventory 11. They were declassified by the MVK at the end of the last century. However, for almost two decades they have been hidden by archival chiefs and "publishers" from ROSARCHIV in general and from RGASPI in particular.

Why Jews do not like Stalin Rabinovich Yakov Iosifovich

Stalin's personal archive. Secret or liquidated? Facts and hypotheses

Mutual responsibility, which Stalin always cared about, was recorded mainly in documents. The political situation created after Stalin's death, together with the struggle for power between his successors, contributed to the fact that none of them wanted Stalin's personal documents and his archive to become the same objects of "religious" veneration, which was awarded to Lenin's archive. Following the archive of Stalin, the archive of Beria was also partially liquidated, along with himself. The new leaders of the Soviet Union tried to provide themselves with a historical alibi.

The opening of previously secret party and state archives, which began in 1989 and rapidly accelerated after the collapse of the USSR, led to their study and systematization not only by domestic but also by foreign historians. The outbreak of international interest in these archives was determined not only by their transfer from closed to open funds, but also by their political relevance, the hope to find an explanation of events that are still alive in the memory of the modern generation by studying them. Several British and American universities and libraries took an active part in the analysis and systematization of these archives, their microfilming and in the creation of inventories of documents. During several years of this work, specialized funds were created for the most important events and personalities, and the minutes of all meetings of the Politburo from 1919 to 1940 became available to researchers. The archives of the NKVD - the Ministry of Internal Affairs and some other people's commissariats and ministries were declassified and systematized. This work, which will obviously continue for many more years, led to the allocation of materials to independent archival collections and funds of documents on the activities of many key figures of the October Revolution and the Soviet state: L. D. Trotsky, G. K. Ordzhonikidze, M. I. Kalinina, S. M. Kirov, A. A. Zhdanov and many others.

In the form of microfilms that can be bought by libraries and individual researchers, archival funds are currently available for those outstanding figures in Russian history who were not members of the Bolshevik Party: Yu. O. Martov, P. B. Axelrod, Vera Zasulich, G. V. Plekhanov and others.

Archival funds are also being formed for the victims of the Stalinist terror, not only politicians and the military, but also figures of culture, science and literature. Most of these archival collections do not arise as a result of sorting out secret "dossiers" by the employees of the archives themselves, but are purposefully formed by interested researchers and authors of biographies. Small museum-libraries are being created around the newly collected archival funds of individual outstanding people (the P. L. Kapitsa Museum, the A. D. Sakharov Museum, the Mikhail Bulgakov Museum, the N. I. Vavilov Museum and others). There is, in fact, a rethinking of our national history, which in the past was not just distorted, but totally falsified. This is facilitated by the abolition of censorship.

Unfortunately, this restoration of national history cannot be complete for the simple reason that the most important part of the archives and documents of many prominent people, primarily among those who were repressed, was destroyed. The arrests of any politician, writer or scientist were accompanied by the confiscation of their personal archives.

At the end of the investigation, most of the documents not included in the investigation file were not returned to the relatives, but were destroyed on the basis of the rule provided for by Article 69 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR. Documents were usually destroyed by burning them. Burned novels, book manuscripts, diaries, photo albums, letters and already published books with marginal notes. In the case of Academician Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, lieutenant of state security L. Koshelev and his chief senior lieutenant L. Khvat burned 90 notebooks and notebooks in which he recorded observations and details of his botanical and geographical travels to collect cultivated plants from around the world, maps of the distribution of various plants and several manuscripts of unprinted books.

Many other materials of Vavilov went on fire, which the NKVD investigators recognized as "of no value." What was meant was the absolute absence of their value for accusations. The paradoxical thing about this practice of destroying historical documents is that in the end, Stalin himself turned out to be its victim.

From 1934 to 1953, Stalin lived and worked most of the time in his country residence in Kuntsevo, not far from Moscow, which was commonly called the "near" dacha. Built according to a special project, this dacha of Stalin had about twenty rooms, greenhouses, a solarium and many auxiliary premises for security and maintenance personnel. Here, at the dacha, Stalin also transferred most of his library. In the Kremlin office, Stalin began his working day in the evening by reviewing official papers, and then for several hours he talked with people called by him, held meetings and discussed various problems with members of the Politburo. At the dacha, Stalin held more confidential meetings, read the part of the mail that he considered important, wrote the texts of letters, articles and speeches. On the bedside table-shelf he always had several books, which, suffering from insomnia, he read or simply looked through late at night, while making numerous notes in the margins.

At the dacha, Stalin had a study, but he also worked in other rooms, even in the dining room, using them for longer conversations as well. In one of these rooms, sometimes called the “small library,” in 1951 Stalin received D. T. Shepilov, then editor of Pravda, to discuss the creation of a textbook on the economics of socialism. Stalin wrote a lot on this topic at that time, but these were mostly critical notes, reviews and articles. He understood that he himself could not create a textbook, and decided to entrust this to a team of authors chosen by him, among which he included Shepilov.

Their conversation lasted for about three hours. During the conversation, Shepilov writes in his memoirs: “Stalin suddenly asked me: “When you write your articles, scientific works, do you use a stenographer?” I answered in the negative. "And why?" Stalin asked. I explained this by the need to frequently correct the text in the course of work. Stalin: “I also never use a stenographer. I can’t work when she sticks out here.”

It was true. Stalin always wrote himself, wrote very competently, in a clear, clear handwriting. However, the fate of all his manuscripts and notes, which were in the working rooms of the “near” dacha, remains unknown to this day.

In the memoirs of Stalin's daughter Svetlana "Twenty Letters to a Friend", which she wrote in 1963, there is an episode that even she could not then understand and evaluate properly:

“The house in Kuntsevo experienced strange events after the death of his father. On the second day after the death of his owner - there had not yet been a funeral - by order of Beria, they called all the servants and guards, the entire staff serving the cottage and announced to them that things should be immediately taken out of here (it is not known where), and everyone should leave this room.

It was impossible to argue with Beria. Completely bewildered, not understanding anything, people with tears collected things, books, dishes, furniture loaded onto trucks - everything was taken away somewhere, to some warehouses ...

Then, when Beria himself “fell”, they began to restore the residence. They brought things back. They invited former commandants, waitresses - they helped to put everything back in its place and return the house to its former appearance. They were preparing to open a museum here, like Lenin's Gorki. But then the 20th Party Congress followed, after which, of course, the idea of ​​a museum could not come to anyone's mind.

Svetlana did not know that Stalin's working desks, various bureaus (Stalin often liked to write standing up), cabinets and other furniture that had returned to Kuntsevo had been emptied of all papers. Stalin's library has been partially preserved, the manuscript, letters and other documents have disappeared.

Dmitry Volkogonov, in a biography of Stalin published in 1989, was the first to suggest that it was Beria who destroyed the papers stored in Stalin's safe in the Kremlin on March 2 and 3, 1953, when Stalin was still alive, but the doctors had already seen that recovery is impossible. According to Volkogonov, “Beria rushed off to the Kremlin for several hours, leaving the political leadership at the leader’s deathbed ... His urgent departure to the Kremlin was possibly due to the desire to seize the dictator’s documents from the Stalin safe, where there could be (which Beria was afraid of) orders, concerning him ... Stalin could probably leave a will, and at a time when his authority was unlimited, there would hardly have been forces that challenged the last will of the deceased.

A few years later, in the process of working on a new, brief biography of Stalin and as a result of acquaintance with the documents of the APRF, Volkogonov somewhat changed this version. Since, in preparation for the evening of March 5, 1953, the Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Bureau of the Presidium of the Central Committee made a proposal to instruct Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchev "bringing Stalin's papers into proper order" (which meant official party sanction to get acquainted with Stalin's archive), Beria decided to do it himself on the afternoon of March 5, before Malenkov and Khrushchev could come to Stalin's office with him.

“Beria again left for the Kremlin. Now he had the opportunity to calmly check Stalin's personal safes. "Get them in order." Without Khrushchev and Malenkov. The state executioner might have had a suspicion about the existence of Stalin's will, he once made it clear that it would be necessary “to write something for the future! And when the “old man” cooled down to him, he could not expect anything good from the last will of the leader ... And in general, Stalin had an old thick notebook in a dark cover, in which he sometimes wrote down something ... Maybe about him? I wrote in a book about Stalin that the dictator apparently thought of making a will to his comrades-in-arms.”

Beria was a fairly experienced politician and understood that no one would connect “succession to the throne” with the study of some “thick notebook” of Stalin. In essence, on March 4, 1953, the Bureau of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU developed detailed proposals for a joint meeting of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, convened for the evening of March 5. This meeting was explained by the fact that Stalin, according to the doctors, was incompetent and urgent measures must be taken to ensure the leadership of the country.

The meeting began on March 5, 1953 at 20:00. Stalin was still alive, but Tretyakov, Minister of Health of the USSR, was the first to report that the patient's condition was recognized as hopeless. Khrushchev presided over the meeting. He did not intend to hold any discussions, but only to approve the proposals made by the Bureau of the Presidium, which consisted in the fact that power was concentrated in the hands of Malenkov, who headed the government, Beria, who took control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of State Security, and Khrushchev, who became the head of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the CPSU . Voroshilov became Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Other old associates of Stalin - Molotov, Kaganovich and Bulganin - received the posts of First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers. The meeting lasted only forty minutes and during that time seventeen important decisions were made. At the very end of the meeting, Malenkov reported that “The Bureau of the Presidium of the Central Committee instructed Comrades. Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchev to take measures to ensure that the documents and papers of Comrade Stalin, both current and archival, are put in proper order.

After the adoption of this decision, Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchev received a legitimate party-state mandate to familiarize themselves with all the papers and documents of Stalin and with his personal archive. They could open Stalin's safes (how many there were at various dachas remains unknown) and do whatever they wanted with his papers. The expression about bringing papers and archives "in proper order" is so vague that it certainly concealed the permission to liquidate those papers that, in the opinion of the party leadership, there was no need to bring to the attention of posterity.

On March 7, 1953, an unknown "special group" of the Ministry of Internal Affairs removed all the furniture from Stalin's dacha in Kuntsevo. But in addition to papers and documents, Stalin always had a lot of bags of money in his desk drawers and cabinets. Stalin did not consider it necessary to keep money in safes, he did not need them. For each of Stalin's ten official positions (Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, member of the Politburo, deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the RSFSR, deputy of the Moscow City Council, member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the SSR, Supreme Commander, member of the Central Committee of the CPSU, and until 1947 also Minister of Defense) was entitled to a salary. These salaries, as was customary then in the USSR, were paid in cash twice a month. Stalin did not need cash, and he put aside the envelopes with banknotes regularly brought to him, without even opening them, in various tables and cabinets. On occasion, he gave large sums of money to his daughter Svetlana and other relatives who sometimes visited him at the dacha, and also sent money to the wife of his eldest son Yakov, who died in captivity, who lived with her daughter, born in 1938, Stalin's first granddaughter. They tell about cases of Stalin's cash gifts to childhood friends who lived in Georgia. All these bags of money, for which there were heirs even under Soviet laws of that time, disappeared along with the papers. There is only circumstantial information about the fate of the Kremlin papers and Stalin's archive in safes.

The active participation of Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchev in the repressions, often on their own initiative and in connection with their own struggle for power, was, of course, widely reflected in many documents of the NKVD-MVD archive, the secret archives of the Politburo, in the archives of the Ukrainian Politburo and in many closed regional archives. But all these archives could not seriously disturb Stalin's associates, since no one offered to declassify them. Their fate was not an urgent matter tied to the death of Stalin. The super-hot problem at the beginning of March 1953 was only the fate of Stalin's personal archive. Complete impunity for decisions on the possible liquidation of at least part of Stalin's personal archive was ensured by the fact that by this time none of the branches of power, and above all the Prosecutor General's Office, the Ministry of State Security, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Defense, was not interested in making public and studying those documents that could be in it.

Only the broad masses of the people, hypnotized by Stalin's personality cult, were sure that Stalin's cause should develop according to some plans he himself created, that Stalin had left some "precepts" or "political testament". The decision to add Stalin's department to the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute was made precisely with these sentiments in mind.

After the end of the war, and especially in 1946-1947, a not very well-known conflict between Stalin and the top generals arose, which is most often explained by the jealousy of Stalin, who wanted to appropriate all the laurels of military victories and the immortal glory of the “greatest commander”. At the same time, the main attention is paid to the fact that Marshal G.K. Zhukov, appointed after returning from Germany in April 1946 to the post of Commander-in-Chief of the USSR Ground Forces, was in 1947 transferred to command the Odessa Military District. Great dissatisfaction among the marshals and generals was caused by the appointment of N. A. Bulganin, a civilian who worked mainly in party and Soviet posts, to the post of Minister of Defense of the USSR. In the pre-war period, in 1938–1940, Bulganin worked as chairman of the board of the State Bank of the USSR. Bulganin never enjoyed the respect of the military.

However, Stalin's conflict with the generals, and not only with Zhukov, was covered incorrectly. Several famous marshals and generals suffered much more than Zhukov. Stalin's favorite, Air Chief Marshal A.E. Golovanov, was dismissed from the army in 1947 and received a small post at Vnukovo Airport. The commander of the cavalry-tank corps, Lieutenant General Vladimir Kryukov, who distinguished himself in the offensives of the last phase of the war in Poland and Germany, was arrested in 1946 and sentenced to 25 years in prison along with his wife, a country-famous singer and people's artist Ruslanova. No one then knew why the famous singer ended up in the Gulag. The list of generals and marshals sent to various military districts in more modest positions could be continued.

This conflict was connected not so much with Stalin's jealousy in the division of military glory, but with the general's hobbies for the export of trophy property from Germany to personal property, mainly paintings by famous masters and other valuables that were not handed over to the State storage (Gokhran), but were appropriated in personal property. Marshal Golovanov removed from Germany in parts the entire country house-villa of Goebbels, and this was done with the help of long-range aviation under his command. General V. V. Kryukov and his wife Ruslanova took 132 original paintings and a huge number of other valuables from Germany. Marshal Zhukov, who was in 1945-1946. commander of all Soviet occupation forces in Germany, also did not turn out to be immune to the general enthusiasm for the export of German trophies into the property.

The MGB agents, who carried out a secret search of Zhukov’s apartment and dacha on Stalin’s personal order, found there not only a warehouse of trophy carpets, furs, gold watches and other “little things”, but also “55 valuable paintings of classical painting in artistic frames”, some of which, as was determined to have been "taken out of Potsdam and other palaces and houses in Germany." A copy of the report on this search, presented to Stalin in January 1948 by MGB Minister Viktor Abakumov, was found in the KGB archives by the historian Pavel Knyshevsky, who studied the problem of German reparations and trophies. Findings of this kind continued for many years after Stalin's death.

In 1945, General Ivan Serov, head of Smersh counterintelligence, was also responsible in Germany for the fate of captured property. Serov was "Khrushchev's man", not Beria's. From 1938 until the start of the war, Serov was the head of the NKVD of Ukraine. In 1954, Khrushchev appointed I. A. Serov chairman of the newly created KGB.

In 1958, it was discovered that the crown of the Belgian queen, which disappeared among the trophy property, was appropriated in 1945 by Serov along with many other valuables. Serov's apartment was searched with the approval of the Prosecutor General. After that, Serov was transferred from the post of chairman of the KGB to the post of head of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU). There is no doubt that not only army generals, but also the generals of the NKVD and Smersh were fond of trophy free "imports". Even soldiers and junior officers were not forbidden to take out and send parcels with all sorts of things from occupied Germany. There were certain secret instructions on this score. But there were no rules for generals. Therefore, for Stalin, who decorated the walls of the rooms in the dacha in Kuntsevo with photographs-reproductions of paintings that he cut out from the Ogonyok magazine, this trophy robbery was unexpected. It also spread to the party-state elite. A considerable number of party and state officials replaced official furniture in their apartments and dachas with luxurious German suites. Only extreme manifestations of this robbery were seriously punished. In moderation, he said goodbye. Paintings by famous masters, of course, had to be handed over to various secret collections of galleries. On an even larger scale, German property was confiscated without any registration into the reserves of the state treasury, and this was done with the consent of Stalin.

Stalin's personal archive also contained his many years of correspondence with his closest associates. The characteristic leadership style of both Lenin and Stalin consisted, in part, of writing a large number of letters and instruction notes. Such notes were written by hand in one copy and sent to the addressee with a courier, and often with two, for complete safety.

The courier service was created back in the Extraordinary Commission, expanded in the GPU and the NKVD, where a special courier department was created. Among all the publications about Stalin in the last ten years, the most valuable for any biographer of Stalin is the book “Letters from I.V. , in those autumn months when Stalin left for the south to rest and be treated by waters, leaving Molotov in Moscow for the leadership of the Politburo. These letters, written by Stalin's hand, were kept by Molotov in a home safe.

In December 1969, when Molotov was already 79 years old, he himself handed over the originals of these letters to the Central Party Archive. Then, in connection with the 90th anniversary of the birth of Stalin, on the initiative of Mikhail Suslov, a partial rehabilitation of Stalin and a series of articles about him in the central press were being prepared. Molotov believed that some extracts from these letters could be published. But full rehabilitation did not happen, and Stalin's letters to Molotov, unknown to researchers, lay in secret archives for another 25 years. They were handed over to the "Special Folder", from where they moved in 1992 to RTSKhIDNI. The assumption made by the compilers of the collection that Molotov handed over to the party archive only Stalin's letters before 1936, because he did not save the letters of 1937, 1938 and subsequent years, in which the events of terror were reflected, is unfounded. From the beginning of 1937 until the autumn of 1946, Stalin worked without holidays, and therefore he simply did not need to communicate with Molotov in this way. By the nature of the letters, it is clear that many of them are Stalin's answers to letters from Molotov himself, who informed him about party and state events in Moscow, which were not reflected in the press. Some of Stalin's letters were written to Molotov when he was on vacation and Stalin was in Moscow.

In one of these letters, Stalin even joked: “Greetings to the Hammerman! Why the hell did you climb into the den like a bear and be silent? How are you, is it good or bad? Write…”

The published collection, which its compilers consider "unique and the first not indirect, but direct, original collection of primary sources ... about the nature and mechanism of the party-state leadership of the country in the 20-30s. and about the personality of Stalin himself, would certainly be much more valuable if the correspondence in it were two-way, and not one-way. Molotov's letters to Stalin could be found in Stalin's personal archive. But no one has ever found them. They were destroyed. It is unlikely that Stalin himself destroyed the letters of his comrades-in-arms, which he received through a courier connection.

To date, in the archives of other party leaders - Kalinin, Ordzhonikidze, Kirov, Mikoyan, Kuibyshev, Kaganovich, Voroshilov - letters from Stalin have also been found, as well as letters that members of the Politburo wrote to each other. Three letters were found in Ordzhonikidze's archive, which he sent to Stalin in 1930 and 1931. But these are reports. Two of them are addressed to Stalin in Moscow and SV Kosior in Kharkov. Only one letter was sent personally to Stalin and written by Ordzhonikidze. It is kept in the Ordzhonikidze fund in RTSKHIDNI.

In addition to the courier connection, which was used only for secret correspondence, which was part of Stalin's party and state activities, millions of letters were received in his name by regular mail or through the expedition of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks for thirty years. The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks had a special department in which the instructors of the Central Committee conducted a preliminary sorting and analysis of letters and made decisions on them. Letters were forwarded to various authorities: to local authorities, etc., and sometimes a general answer was given to them. There was a huge stream of letters to Stalin from the relatives of the arrested and from the arrested themselves, complaining about the groundlessness of the accusations and asking for a review of the cases. Such letters, of course, did not reach Stalin, and in most cases remained even without formal answers. However, business letters with serious proposals or from well-known representatives of the Soviet intelligentsia often found their way to Stalin's desk. Occasionally he answered such letters, in these cases his answers could be published in the press. Most of the time he answered by phone. Sometimes he invited the authors of letters to his place in the Kremlin or to his dacha for a conversation. It is well known that Stalin read the letters of Gorky, Mikhail Sholokhov, Konstantin Fedin, Ilya Ehrenburg, Alexander Fadeev and some other famous Soviet writers.

Mikhail Bulgakov wrote protest letters to Stalin several times, and these letters, as can be judged by their results and even Stalin's phone call to the writer, also ended up on his desk. Stalin received and read letters from well-known film directors, especially since he closely followed their work. Yevgeny Gromov, who studied Stalin's relationship with artists, writes that in the 30s. “Letters from creative figures, not even the most prominent ones, were put to Stalin at that time on his desk without delay. In the war and post-war years, the situation will change significantly. Stalin is now less interested in such letters, they often end up in the apparatus. In 1945-1951, when the role of science in the development of new branches of military technology increased dramatically, Stalin read the letters of scientists more often than before.

Academician Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa regularly wrote letters to Stalin. In the period from 1937 to 1950, Kapitsa sent 42 detailed letters to Stalin, some of which were included in P. L. Kapitsa's book Letters on Science, published in 1989. But all these letters were published from copies preserved in Kapitsa's personal archive. Not a single original of Kapitsa's letters has been found in any other archive containing Stalin's funds, although it is known that Stalin received and read them. Once Stalin answered and confirmed that he had received Kapitsa's letters, and Malenkov confirmed this in 1949 in a telephone conversation with Kapitsa. The original of only one letter from Kapitsa to Stalin, dated April 28, 1938, was found, but not in Stalin's archive, but in the NKVD archive. Despite his 29 years, he, along with Fock, are the largest theoretical physicists in our Union. Stalin handed over this letter from Kapitsa to the NKVD without a resolution, but, apparently, with a verbal recommendation to "deal with it properly." Landau was eventually released, but without rehabilitation, but simply in the form of "parole to Professor Kapitza". By this time, Landau had already quickly "confessed" to his non-existent "crimes", and the NKVD also had to somehow save its face.

Most of the letters from artists and scientists to Stalin that he received and read have been preserved and sometimes reproduced on the basis of copies kept by their authors. Some were found in the archives of the Politburo with Stalin's resolution "To acquaint the members of the PB". These resolutions referred to Poskrebyshev, who prepared the agenda for Politburo meetings. If the letter was discussed at the Politburo, then it went to the archives of the Politburo.

In the 30s. Stalin read a considerable number of denunciation letters, made notes and resolutions in them about familiarizing the members of the Politburo. Several such letters of denunciation against Academician Nikolai Vavilov were found in the archives of the Politburo, which were subsequently transferred to the APRF. These were letters from the 1930s, but there were no decisions to arrest Vavilov then. Denunciations against Academician Vavilov were also sent to the NKVD, Yezhov, and then to Beria.

It is highly unlikely that Stalin could destroy any of the letters that passed through his personal office. The head of the party and state could not be spontaneous in the fate of incoming and outgoing papers. Letters and documents that were registered in his personal secretariat fell on Stalin's desk. If, with Stalin's resolution, these materials were sent to this or that department or put up for discussion by the Politburo or the Secretariat of the Central Committee, then this movement was also inevitably registered. In those cases when Stalin no longer needed the materials, he himself put a resolution for Poskrebyshev to send the document to one or another archive of the Ministry of Defense, the party archive, the Politburo archive, the “Special Folder”. It is possible that some documents were destroyed, but this could concern some papers related to "special actions", such as the preparations for the assassination of Trotsky.

Letters, for example, from Academician Kapitsa, by their nature, could not be sent to any archive, and there were no grounds for their liquidation. Along with the letters of Gorky, Sholokhov, Romm, Fadeev and other prominent intellectuals of the USSR, these letters, preserved in the personal archive of Stalin himself, created a positive image for him if he thought about what historians would say about him in the future. There is no doubt that Stalin took care to be remembered by future generations of people. During his lifetime he put himself on a par with Marx, Engels and Lenin.

Stalin was a creative person, in the sense that he wrote his articles or speeches himself, with his own hand at his desk. He wrote slowly, often redoing what he had written. Manuscripts of his works were certainly preserved in his safes or in his desk. But most of these manuscripts are now not in any archive. They disappeared somewhere.

Preserved, as we have already mentioned, the registration logs of visitors to the Kremlin office of Stalin. These journals were kept by secretaries on duty who sat in Stalin's reception room in the Kremlin. They were technical secretaries. There was no common style of keeping these journals.

Often records were kept in school notebooks, in different inks, different handwriting. Sometimes the surname was preceded by "tov", sometimes just "t." There were errors in the spelling of surnames, and initials were never written. This suggests that this registration of visitors was a formality and was not given much importance. But the registration of documents arriving on the table to Stalin was a much more responsible matter and was under the control of the Special Sector, headed by Poskrebyshev. The flow of official papers to Stalin was very wide, and, of course, only the most important documents came to Stalin for personal consideration. Equally important was the "outflow" of documents with Stalin's resolutions.

Every day, many more papers passed through the office of the head of state to and from Stalin than there were visitors. But the registration lists of those documents that Stalin personally had to read or look through have not yet been found anywhere. The published lists of documents received, or rather, sent to Stalin from the NKVD - MVD in 1944-1953, were compiled from copies and their registration, carried out in the apparatus of the NKVD - MVD. It is not known which of these reports actually ended up on Stalin's desk.

Stalin always prepared for various meetings. This applies not only to the Politburo, but also to the Orgburo, meetings of various commissions, committees (for example, on the Stalin Prizes, etc.). Preparatory notes of the same type as those found in the APRF, "For the Bureau Meeting" for 1932-1934, should have existed for many other meetings. As a rule, no transcripts or minutes of such meetings were kept. Only decisions were recorded.

The exceptions were negotiations with foreign officials and conversations with some foreign writers. In these cases, formalities were observed, and negotiations and conversations were recorded in shorthand, and, of course, in two languages. But Stalin did not need to keep such transcripts in his own archive. They went to the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Council of People's Commissars, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, the Ministry of Defense, etc. All transcripts of such meetings have been preserved and can be studied by historians. The same applies to Stalin's diplomatic correspondence.

Stalin went on vacation for the longest periods in 1947-1951. In the autumn of 1951, he went on vacation to a newly built dacha complex on Lake Rida and spent six months there, until early 1952. Following his habit of writing letters and notes while leaving Moscow to his colleagues in the Politburo, Stalin certainly sent letters and notes to Malenkov, Beria, Khrushchev, Bulganin, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Shvernik, perhaps also to Suslov, who headed the ideological department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), to the Minister of State Security S. D. Ignatiev and others. Accordingly, all these associates of Stalin could not leave these letters unanswered. From the correspondence of Stalin with his comrades-in-arms in the 30s, during Stalin's not very long vacations, something still survived. Stalin's correspondence in the post-war years, when he spent a total of almost fifteen months in the south, remains virtually unknown.

But even the cleaning of all the dachas did not stop the search and liquidation of Stalin's papers. After the death of Stalin's comrades-in-arms in subsequent years, their archives were also confiscated and partially destroyed. The first in this series was Beria. Malenkov, having become the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR after Stalin's death, soon requested from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to study the folder with the materials of the "Leningrad case" of 1949-1950, in the organization of which he, together with Beria, took the main and most active part. Beria, of course, did not transfer all the papers to Malenkov, leaving for himself the part that he himself would not want to make public for liquidation. As it turned out a few years later, when Malenkov was expelled from the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU in July 1957, most of the papers on the "Leningrad case" were destroyed.

Even more radical was the liquidation of Beria's personal archive after his arrest in June 1953. Dmitry Volkogonov, who collected testimonies of former KGB leaders in preparing his books, reports:

“When Beria was arrested, N. S. Khrushchev ordered to “arrest” his personal archive, where there were many documents sent by Stalin to the NKVD. The commission created on this occasion considered it to be good, without considering, to burn according to the act, without reading, eleven bags of documents (!), apparently unique ... "

Members of the highest party collegium were afraid that these papers contained materials compromising them. Many Stalinist orders and resolutions addressed to L.P. Beria, which fell into the fire of the commission, will forever remain a secret of history. Speaking in April 1988 with A. N. Shelepin, the former chief of the KGB, Volkogonov found out that a very large purge of the Stalinist archive was carried out by General of the Army I. A. Serov on the personal order of N. S. Khrushchev. General Serov was appointed in 1954 chairman of the newly created KGB, as he enjoyed Khrushchev's full confidence. They worked together for many years. Serov, on behalf of Khrushchev, was engaged in the elimination of archival materials in which there was evidence of participation in the repressive campaigns of Khrushchev himself. Since Serov was in Moscow in 1936–1937 and in Ukraine in 1938–1941. was the main executor of these campaigns, he, of course, carried out a fairly complete liquidation of all compromising archives even before the XX Congress of the CPSU.

After Khrushchev's removal from government and party posts in October 1964, he also surrendered or liquidated part of his personal archive. When Khrushchev, already a pensioner, decided to leave behind memories, he told from memory about various events, without having documents in front of him. The oral story was recorded on a dictaphone.

No fund of Khrushchev from his personal papers appeared in the 90s, when the declassification of archives began. But this is not the result of any special liquidations, but simply proof of the well-known fact in party circles that Khrushchev usually did not write any letters, articles or reports himself. He only dictated. The shorthand texts were then edited by numerous assistants. From the point of view of the Russian language, Khrushchev was an illiterate person. A peasant son from a poor family, Khrushchev attended a rural school for only about two years. He could read, but he could not write correctly.

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