Soviet bureaucratic record-keeping itself destroyed reliable historical evidence
Evidence
The only important addition to our knowledge, the contents of the Smolensk Archive (published in 1958 by Merle Fainsod) have demonstrated to what an extent dearth of the most elementary documentary and statistical material will remain the decisive handicap for all inquiries into this period of Russian history. For although the archives (discovered at party headquarters in Smolensk by German intelligence and then captured by the American occupation force in Germany) contain some 200,000 pages of documents and are virtually intact for the period from 1917 to 1938, the amount of information they fail to give us is truly amazing. Even with “an almost unmanageable abundance of material on the purges” from 1929 to 1937, they contain no indication of the number of victims or any other vital statistical data. Wherever figures are given, they are hopelessly contradictory, the various organizations all giving different sets, and all we learn beyond doubt is that many of them, if they ever existed, were withheld at the source by order of the government. Also, the Archive contains no information on the relations between the various branches of authority, “between Party, the military and NKVD,” or between party and government, and it is silent about the channels of communication and command. In short, we learn nothing about the organizational structure of the regime, of which we are so well informed with respect to Nazi Germany. In other words, while it has always been known that official Soviet publications served propaganda purposes and were utterly unreliable, it now appears that reliable source and statistical material probably never existed anywhere. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 38
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Directly relevant to biopolitics/necropolitics strand: how state power shapes and erases the archival record — parallels censorship/statistical gaps in other exclusionary regimes the reader will encounter.
- DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the state’s rational documentation apparatus produced a systematic absence of record — where the machinery of governance guarantees the unrepresentability of its own victims — resists a one-line summary and reframes how one reads any archival source on totalitarian states.
- SEED: Angl: how statistical gaps and contradictory figures become themselves documentary evidence of a regime’s nature — the absence of numbers as a historical source.
Related
- Reliable Soviet statistical and organizational records never existed even in captured archives. (similarity 0.92)
Broader Connections
- Counterhistory functions to disinter truths that power has deliberately concealed
#complicates(0.70) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 89