What is it Like to Work in an Archive?

Archival research is the basis of most academic historical research. For historians, archival research is the equivalent of running experiments for physicists or setting up chemical reactions for chemists. It gives us the raw data we need for our analysis. As first-year history graduate students, however, we often don’t have much of an idea of what archival research is actually like. In this post, I hope shed a little light on the mysteries of the archive by describing what daily life is like for archival researchers in the former Soviet Union based on my work in Moldova and Armenia this summer.

My window at the Armenian former Communist Party archive

One thing you have to understand first is that archives hold a vast amount of documents. I never really understood how bureaucratic modern states really are until I started looking through the stacks and stacks of documents the Soviet Union produced. One day the lovely staff of the former Communist Party archive in Moldova let me go beyond the door with a sign in Romanian that said “Foreigners strictly prohibited” (oops) to check out the storeroom [хранилище] of the archive. Even though the former Party archive is relatively small, their holdings still took up a floor of the Moldovan Ministry of Justice, where the archive is located. Bigger archives can take up entire buildings.

As you probably gathered from the above paragraph, archive staff normally don’t just let you wander around and find the documents you want. Oh no. You have to order the documents, and they will be delivered to you in the reading room usually in one or two days. The main challenge you face in the archives is figuring out where exactly the documents you want are located in their cataloging system. Imagine trying to find what you want in a library without being able to walk through the stacks or have access to a search engine or even a card catalog. Instead, you have to search, page by page, through large catalogs of documents. In Russian. Poorly mimeographed Russian.

A brief word about the organization of documents. In the former Soviet Union, the highest level in the taxonomy of documents is the fond [фонд]. Each fond is a big collection of documents—in Moldova, for example, the documents of the Ministry of Culture of the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic can be found in fond R-3011. This fond alone contains 3343 files of documents. 

The next level of taxonomy is the opis’ [опись], which is a catalog that contains a brief description of the documents. There are times when each opis’ is organized rationally—by the different divisions of the Ministry of Culture, say. And there are times when the opis’ is clearly just whatever random documents were being sent to the archive at the time (hint, hint, Armenian Ministry of Culture). So far I have been unable to find any logic to the organization of the Armenian Ministry of Culture documents. They constantly overlap chronologically for no apparent reason, so you can never really know if the documents you want simply don’t exist, or if they are located in some future opis’ you just haven’t looked at yet. And there’s always an opis’ you haven’t looked at yet. Even when the organization system isn’t a complete mess, you do sometimes have weird and inexplicable organization choices. Why, for example, was the Republican Artistic-Expert Soviet on Affairs of Monuments and Monumental Sculpture located under the accounting department of the Ministry of Culture? Good question.

Each opis’ contains a short description of what is located in a delo [дело], basically a stitched-together collection of documents. Unless you have something like an overview of the fond [обзор фонда] that tells you which opis’ or delo may relate to your topic, then you have to go page-by-page through the opis’, skimming the descriptions for something interesting. Sometimes the descriptions are fairly self-evident, like “Letters from Soviet citizens on the need to preserve the memory of the genocide of Armenians.” And sometimes there’s just a long list of vague categories that means that basically anything could be in there. If you think there might be something you’re interested in, you just have to order it and find out. But choose wisely, my friend—you only get to order 10 or 15 dela in a day. If you don’t pick the right dela, then you get to spend the next day sifting through the dross in a vain search for gold.

My color-coded spreadsheet of potential dela to order

So, as you might have guessed, researchers spend a good deal of time just trying to figure out what documents to order. And sometimes you’re just out of luck: as far as I can tell, nobody in Moldova knows the current location of Ministry of Culture documents after 1975. They’re just...lost. Literally a ton of paper appears to have gone missing. 

When you can find the documents, they come to you looking something like this:

A file of my beloved Ministry of Culture of the Moldovan SSR

When you receive the delo, you get to start flipping through it in order to find something interesting.

Of course, every once and a while you hit paydirt. Last week I got to read a summary of comments at a hearing to determine the design of the Armenian Genocide Memorial, a project which was only initiated after huge protests occurred on the fiftieth anniversary of the genocide. Here was a group of architects, engineers, and sculptors in a highly charged political environment trying to decide the physical form that memory should take. How can a monument do justice to 1.5 million killed and hundreds of thousands of people driven from their homeland? Should it be decorated in the traditions of Armenian architecture? Or should it be austere? Should it reflect hope for the future? Or should it resemble a grave? It was a fascinating snapshot of people trying to understand what the past means for the future.

So that’s the agony and the ecstasy of working with documents. Many of your day-to-day anxieties in an archive may have nothing to do with documents, however. Staff and the material conditions of the archive and the reading room can take up quite a lot of your attention. Your research can live and die by the quality of the archivists that work in the reading room. It can often be difficult to explain what you need in Russian, so you just have to hope their patience doesn’t dry up. Sometimes, when an order mysteriously doesn’t show up on time or you’re having trouble finding something that should be simple, it’s easy to wonder whether you’ve offended the staff in some way. There are archives that are famous for fickle archivists who take it upon themselves to block access to the unworthy. (Word on the historian street is that the Moscow city archive is basically inaccessible to American historians simply because the head archivist hates Americans.) Want to complain? Unless you have a local patron who can smooth things over for you, you’re on the bottom of the totem pole.

Sometimes the archivist in Armenia makes me coffee

The material conditions of the archive can also vary considerably. Bathrooms often lack soap and toilet paper, so you’ll have to bring your own. Archives may have cafeterias, or they may not even have a room for you to eat lunch in. My favorite place to work was the Moldovan former Party archive because it was located in the Ministry of Justice, so they always had clean bathrooms with soap and (usually) toilet paper. It also had a great cafeteria that served a mean baba ghanoush! At the Moldovan National Archive I received a hot tip about walking over to the headquarters of the gendarmerie next door (apparently you can walk right in) and getting lunch at the cafeteria for the elite police force. A hearty meal could be had for under $3.

With highs hitting 100 this week in Armenia, my main problem right now is air conditioning. One archive building has it, the other does not. If I need to work in the one without air conditioning, I make sure I get a strategic seat near the window and have plenty of bottled water. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, someone upstairs will leave a window open and the conditioned air from the storage rooms above will waft down to me. This is  heavenly.

Actually, come to think of it, my main problem right now is making sure that scans of important documents get done by the archive staff. They’re willing to inefficiently scan the documents for me (maybe) for the low, low price of 50 cents a page. If I write any more about this, I will start to get emotional.

All in all, working in archives isn’t so bad. It is an incredibly slow process, but until things get digitized (which, realistically, probably won’t happen in my lifetime), it’s indispensable. Also, considering that I don’t pay taxes in either of these countries, I appreciate that they let me work in their archives for free. And hey! Many countries (Uzbekistan) make it basically impossible for foreign researchers to work in their archives, and other countries (Tajikistan) like to imprison researchers on trumped-up charges (Alexander Sodiqov was freed yesterday!), so that makes my problems with A/C, toilet paper, and unreasonable rates for scanning seem rather mild. Basically, I get to rummage around in secret documents all day, which is pretty awesome. The Holy Grail of Soviet research is still out there though...the KGB archives.

Let us in! Let us in!

In Moldova, they now allow Moldovan citizens to access KGB files. Until they open them up to the rest of us, I’ll just have to pine away from afar...