ABSTRACT
The Historical Archive, Governmental and Party Alike, Remained A cardinal and constrictive bastion that aimed at nurturing an official ideology that would rest on selective history(ies). One of the most prominent figures in the organization of the archives from the earliest months of Soviet rule, despite being a Menshevik since 1906, was the historian Boris Ivanovich Nikolaevskii. The transfer of Tsarist archives from Petrograd (St. Petersburg) to Moscow began in June 1918. Americans like Nancy Shields Kollman, from the kapstrany, felt that they enjoyed less ready access to archives and were stymied in research more often than students from the sotstrany. In December 1986 the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences and the State Archives Administration promised to ease problems in gaining access to archives. When some Party and state archives began to give up their dead and declassify material in 1989, Russian and foreign historians were immediately attracted by the chance to examine them.
