Donald Rayfield
THE PAST IMPRISONED

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So many British and American historians write books (many not just good, but seminal) about twentieth-century Russia that readers must assume that these historians have fed on a cornucopia of information and are illuminated by blinding rays of insight. Certainly, from 1917 to 1989 Soviet publications gave few truthful statistics or accounts of events; archival access was restricted to a few Soviet citizens who would be silent about what they saw. The flood of memoirs, minutes of meetings, case files, etc that burst out in the early 1990s was intoxicating but also indigestible.

Russians, starting with the military historian Dmitri Volkogonov, were the first to enjoy relatively untrammelled access. They were (and still are) too overwhelmed by the mass of material, apart from its horrible revelations, to produce magisterial surveys of seventy years of Soviet history. Their success, often aided by funds from American and European universities and from NGOs, has been in collating and publishing documents from the files of the Communist Party, the Soviet government and, with less success, the secret police. From these publications, which even under Putin's hostile gaze still continue, a Western historian can assemble what he needs to construct a monograph.

The hubris of any totalitarian government, but particularly of the Soviet regime, is in record-keeping. Everyone implicated in its crimes leaves a paper trail behind him - the rulers to ensure that their commands are fulfilled, the underlings to prove they were acting under orders. For every one of the 700,000 people shot in Stalin's and Yezhov's 'Great Terror' of 1937-8 there is a charge sheet, a record of interrogation and confession, a sentence and a confirmation of execution. In the 1920s and 1930s, distrusting the telephones, Stalin communicated with his henchmen and the Lubyanka by letter. Every visitor to Stalin's office over thirty years was registered, as was the length of time they spent there. Seven historians with seven laptops in seven years can only sample this treasure trove of kompromat.

The best and bravest Russian historians (they are shunned by the official establishment), like Nikita Petrov or Sergey Mironenko, continue, in collaboration with Memorial, virtually the sole surviving major NGO in Russia, to excavate facts and figures. Few of Moscow's bookshops stock these heavy, expensive volumes on their top shelves, while the cheap books on accessible stands are full of pro-Stalin and sensationalist nationalistic junk. Enterprising school textbooks of the mid-1990s have been superseded by propaganda presenting the 1930s and 1940s in a positive light. The best general books on Stalin, his henchmen and their crimes are translated from English (Putin has cracked down on the mass media, but specialised books are regarded as harmless to public opinion).

A British historian can now cannibalise his Russian colleagues. Fifteen years ago, however, visiting the archives made an academic feel like Indiana Jones: perusing the letters that Stalin received, the wild jottings he made in his books, the angry correspondence between his functionaries, and the pathetic appeals of his victims was a shocking contact with history. Russian archivists reacted variously, often according to their age, to this foreign influx. Some, defending national interest or honour, were obstructive, forbidding the use of laptops or refusing to issue documents; others, eager to see their treasures broadcast to the world, were Virgils to the naïve Dantes struggling with the opacity of the archival catalogues.

About ten years ago doors began to jam, and then were slammed shut. (The most important archive, that of the NKVD-KGB, admitted foreign scholars only when the security services saw the benefit in feeding sifted information.) Archives have been closed, ostensibly because the buildings were to be renovated or requisitioned. Opening hours are reduced to a few hours a week; documents are delivered a week after being requested. Archivists are again overseen by the security services: woe betide any foreign visitor who comes armed only with a tourist visa. As in Soviet days, academic distinction is rewarded with a visa cancelled on arrival at Domodedovo (the British did the same when they refused Sergey Mironenko of Memorial a visa to visit the London Book Fair).

Let's not overstate the drawbacks for history writing. In the 1960s and 1970s, Robert Conquest wrote The Great Terror, and Alec Nove The Soviet Economic System, with no access to the USSR, let alone to its archives: from the fragments of archives that had been purloined by Leon Trotsky and by the Nazis, and by extrapolating from falsifications, they both arrived at a picture which today's historians have only enhanced. There have been recent attempts to apply modern theories to Soviet history: to see it as determined by external forces, or as the result of the spontaneous impulses of the masses. But the evidence that continues to emerge reinforces the simple view: a coterie of intellectuals, led by a Machiavellian psychopath, destroyed a civilisation and built a totalitarian system that even today may not be extinct.

Nineteenth-century Russia could understand where it was going as well as where it was coming from. It had world-class historians, such as Sergei Solovyov and Vasilii Kliuchevsky (for this reason there is not much new that a Western historian can say about Russian before 1917). Lenin gave Russian historians to the West, deporting the very best in 1922; Stalin arrested or suborned those who remained. A century later, Russia awaits its own Toynbees or Trevor-Ropers. So the burden of writing Russia's history lies with the Antony Beevors, Robert Services or Simon Sebag-Montefiores. I talk of Anglo-Saxon scholars for good reasons: the bookshops of Warsaw, Madrid or Berlin, where totalitarianism is a matter of direct experience, are full of histories of modern Russia, mostly translated from English. Pay a visit to FNAC, however, and you find the French have a dozen studies of Hitler on their shelves for just one of Stalin - the French intelligentsia's complicity with Stalinism makes the subject taboo.

Updated versions of Donald Rayfield's 'Stalin and his Hangmen' have recently been published in Russia and Poland, and his new translation of Gogol's 'Dead Souls', with 96 engravings by Marc Chagall, is available from Garnett Press.