Rancorous Luminaries

R.W. Davies

• Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives edited by J. Arch Getty and Roberta Manning
  Cambridge, 294 pp, £35.00, September 1993, ISBN 0 521 44125 0
• Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant by Amy Knight
  Princeton, 312 pp, £19.95, January 1994, ISBN 0 691 03257 2
• This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow by Anna Larina
  Hutchinson, 385 pp, £25.00, March 1994, ISBN 0 09 178141 8
• Stalin i Ordzhonikidze: Konflikty v Politbyuro v 30-e gody by O.V. Khlevnyuk
  Rossiya Molodaya, 144 pp, December 1993, ISBN 5 86646 047 5

Western historians have been struggling for decades to get into the archives of the Stalin period. In the early Eighties, before Gorbachev took office, we were granted very limited access, but were forbidden to see the finding aids and were segregated in a special foreigners’ reading-room. The real transformation came after the defeat of the August 1991 coup. The following month, the party archives made available reports of plenary meetings of the Party Central Committee from the Thirties, as well as Politburo minutes of that time, to both of which I had been refused access the previous April.