Harvard Project for Cold War Studies (Including Volkogonov Archive)

The Harvard Project for Cold War Studies is headed by Mark Kramer and has offices in the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, third floor, CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge. Kramer has collected over 200,000 pages of miscellaneous documents in many languages related directly or indirectly to the Cold War. Among these are documents from central Moscow archives photocopied by the Russian historian Dmitri Volkogonov (now deceased), who wrote a series of archivally-based biographies of major Soviet leaders (Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky) in the late 1980s and 1990s. Many of the Volkogonov documents are not accessible in Russian archives today.

The HPCWS materials from Russian/Soviet archives include many top secret documents from the archive of the Ministery of Foreign Affairs (1945-early 1960s), and documents from the Ministry of Internal Affairs (formerly NKVD, the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs) which include extensive coverage of "dekulakization"/collectivization. There are documents from archives in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Volgograd oblast, Saratov oblast and Nizhnyi Novgorod oblast (formerly Gorkii oblast). According to Mark Kramer the oblast level archival documents include many reports on popular response to Soviet foreign policy and international events (these materials are largely post-World War II). Finally HPCWS also has party documents from RGASPI and RGANI.

The Russian-language materials in the HPCWS collection are in the process of being organized and catalogued by Mark Kramer at the Davis Center. Mr. Kramer works in Room S323 of the Davis Center (third floor of CGIS South). There is a finding aid for the Volkogonov archive, and classification/organization of other materials is under way. Any researcher who wishes to try to use these documents should speak to Ms. Kudayarova.