Andrei Artizov, Head of the Federal Archival Agency of Russia (Rosarkhiv)

— Andrei Nikolayevich, the unusual chime of the clock in your office…

— It is a unique clock, from the nineteenth century. It migrated to Rosarkhiv from the office of the head of the Main Archival Administration of the Soviet Union, which was at the time on Pirogovka Street. After the move to the new building the clock became temperamental and stopped. It did not work for twenty years. When I took over as head of the agency I decided to have it repaired. We found a wonderful clockmaker who restored the mechanism — and the clock began marking time again. It is a symbol of the unstoppable river of time. Time flows, as does history. And we archivists preserve the nation's historical memory.

— Speaking of the flow of time: Rosarkhiv recently turned a hundred, and the starting point for the agency was Lenin's decree of 1 June 1918, 'On the Reorganisation and Centralisation of Archival Affairs'.

— That is the date when a dedicated service was established. Before 1917 there was no such service. Archives existed but were scattered. A specialised archival service was created by a decree of the Council of People's Commissars bearing Lenin's signature. Incidentally, every document touched by the hand of the Bolshevik leader is held in the federal archives. Virtually all documents of Marx and Engels are there too. And the largest collection of Paris Commune documents — also there.

Lenin signed the decree, but it was drafted by the old academicians — historians of Tsarist Russia — because they understood the significance of archival documents and the necessity of creating a service whose mission was to preserve the nation's historical memory.

The Bolsheviks gathered the history of the revolutionary movement — including the social-democratic movement — from across the world. There was famine, yet they were buying these documents for hard currency in Weimar Germany and hauling them to Moscow. Many rarities subsequently perished in the Nazi period, while ours survived — at least in copies.

— A hundred years is an enormous span: the Civil War, the Great Patriotic War, the turbulent nineties, when various forces tried to destroy documents inconvenient to them. How was the documentary heritage preserved?

— The documents held by the federal archives are thousands of years old. Archives appear alongside writing, the state, power, and society. Many ancient documents are above all instruments confirming rights of ownership: if you hold a title, you hold the right to govern territories. The oldest documents in Russia's archives date from the late eleventh to early twelfth century — effectively the archive of the Grand Princes. We hold documents from the father of Alexander Nevsky, Grand Prince of Novgorod, and treaties between the Vladimir Principality and the Novgorod Republic.

And Muscovite rarities: the spiritual testament (dukhovnaya gramota — a combined will and prayer document addressed to God, written by a ruler before a dangerous journey) of Ivan Kalita (Ivan I, Grand Prince of Moscow, died 1340, nicknamed Kalita — 'Moneybag'). What is a spiritual testament? A man addressed God in case something happened to him when facing an enemy. You were riding to the Horde to bow before the khans — no one knew whether you would return. So you wrote your will. We hold two original spiritual testaments of Dmitry Donskoy (Grand Prince of Moscow, victor at the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380). The 1320s: Kalita; the 1370s: Donskoy. These unique documents are held in the collections of the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA — Rossiysky gosudarstvenny arkhiv drevnikh aktov, the principal repository for documents of the Russian state before the early eighteenth century).

— Extraordinary. But how did they survive? Moscow burned so many times — so many wars and internecine conflicts — Moscow against Tver, against Novgorod, against Lithuania…

— Exactly! The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the second centre of Rus; Old Russian was its official language. Endless wars, fires, Tatar raids — everything was burned. And yet our ancestors preserved so much. How? When I first saw these documents I was astonished: 'Good God, what a heritage they have left us!'

First, our ancestors were patriots — in the good sense of the word. They loved their native land. They had a sense of duty. State documents formed part of the Grand Prince's treasury, the most valuable of possessions. When disaster struck, the first things to be spirited away and hidden were gold, jewels — and documents. Because these established the rights of rulers and the foundations of ownership.

— Did this tradition hold in later periods too?

— Of course. In 1812 the archives were evacuated from the Kremlin — they were saved. The Soviet period was exactly the same. Yes, not every document survived, but the core heritage was preserved. And thanks to this, Russia is today a great archival power.

— What does 'archival power' mean? What does it look like in practice?

— Let us compare Russia with other countries. Britain holds an enormous archival heritage — but it is an island state and at the same time the world's largest colonial empire. France was another colonial empire but did not preserve its archives — invaders came and plundered Paris. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — the largest mediaeval state of Eastern Europe, many of whose lands are independent countries today — also lost a considerable heritage. We, among the continental countries, managed to preserve the documentary treasures of mediaeval Rus, the Muscovite State, and Imperial Russia.

The Muscovite State had a Razryadny Prikaz (the Department of Military Affairs — the central administrative body that organised the noble levy, recorded military service, and managed campaigns). The army was irregular: a muster was called for each campaign. Wealthy noblemen brought more cavalry and infantry and were paid a salary for this. All of it is recorded in the Razryadnye knigi — the service registers — and we hold it. The archive of the Razryadny Prikaz — the oldest military department — is in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts.

There was also the Posol'sky Prikaz — the equivalent of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It holds ambassadorial missions, treaties with foreign states, everything relating to the staff of the department (interpreters, translators), the journeys of Russian ambassadors abroad, their salaries, and much more. An extraordinarily rich and unique documentary heritage.

— And what documents of the Russian Empire have survived?

— The documents cover the period from the Empire's foundation — the Petrine era — to 1917. All of this history is held in the Moscow and St. Petersburg federal archives. The heritage is vast: the Russian Empire was an enormous state that encompassed the Kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Finland, and the Transcaucasian and Turkestan Governor-Generalships. Today these are independent states, but the documents relating to their history are held in Russian archives.

— And the Soviet period? The war, the blockade, the evacuation — how were the archives saved?

— During the Great Patriotic War documents were certainly damaged, but the main treasures were concentrated in Moscow — and the city was never surrendered to the enemy. Despite the Leningrad blockade, archival documents there survived.

Part of the archives was evacuated from Moscow during the war. Evacuation decisions were taken literally in the first month. In accordance with the mobilisation plans — just as in the time of the princes — the archives were moved alongside the treasury and the gold reserves.

Archives were damaged in Belarus, Ukraine, and some western regions of Russia. The Party archive in Smolensk could not be evacuated in time and largely fell into German hands, which then took it to Germany. It ended up in the Western occupation zone, from where the Americans took it after the war — and only in the 1990s did they return it to us. I was personally involved in those events and remember the return of the Smolensk archive very well.

— So the Americans understood the value of these documents — they preserved them rather than destroying them.

— They contained the membership lists of communists. For the intelligence services these were an asset. The Americans subsequently used this archive for propaganda purposes during the Cold War. Archives have always been an instrument of ideological struggle. Regrettably, that is a fact.

— How did the nineties affect Rosarkhiv? There must have been people who wanted to take things out of Russia, destroy documents, have things 'accidentally' catch fire. And on top of that the collapse of the country.

— Some call it a 'collapse'; others call it a 'revolution' — or a 'counter-revolution'. You see what different assessments emerge depending on political position. But history is history. The Soviet Union disintegrated. The Russian Federation became an independent state. And in this sense, I believe, we were fortunate — because the authorities from Yeltsin onward treated personnel with care.

In the Russian Federation, unlike in the Baltic states, Poland, and other countries, there was no wholesale personnel purge. The staff were retained — people who had undergone a rigorous training. If the same Party archivists had performed their professional duty conscientiously in the Soviet years, what was there to stop them continuing to do so in the 1990s? Of course there are isolated cases of so-called 'archival betrayal', where people sold documents for personal gain.

— What was the archival system like in Soviet times?

— The Soviet Union operated two parallel systems: state archives and Party archives. The Party archives did not answer to the state, lived by their own rules, and had a special access regime. To work in a Party archive you needed a Party card and clearance from the Committee for State Security (KGB).

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union the two systems were merged. One of the first decrees signed by Yeltsin in August 1991 dealt specifically with the Party archives: under it, the Party and state archives were merged into a single system under state control. The Party was formally 'a law unto itself', but in practice, in accordance with the well-known article of the Soviet Constitution (Article 6 of the 1977 Constitution, enshrining the Party's 'leading and guiding role'), it was the directing and ruling force. All key questions of governing the country — foreign and domestic policy, defence, security — were decided by the Party's supreme bodies, the Politburo and the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the CPSU.

— In Russia documents are regularly declassified to mark significant dates. What is the retention period? When can a 'secret' classification be lifted?

— The official term under the law is thirty years. There is a special Interdepartmental Commission for the Protection of State Secrets — a collegial body under the President of Russia that coordinates the activities of federal government bodies, regional government bodies, and other organisations in protecting state secrets. The commission's work is supported by the Federal Service for Technical and Export Control (FSTEC). One of its functions is the declassification of archival documents.

Today fewer than three percent of documents in the federal archives remain classified — everything else is open. Twenty-five to thirty years ago it was very different indeed. But one must not forget the legitimate security interests of the state. No one is going to explain how nuclear submarines are built, or how missiles and their engines are produced. Their blueprints and schematics are classified information, of course.

In the Soviet Union the Bolsheviks had a tradition of classifying every Party decision in its entirety — to the point of absurdity: even decisions about socialist competition (sotsialisticheskoye sorevnovaniye — the Soviet practice of setting production targets for collective workplace rivalry) were classified.

— In our time information can be found on the internet, in Telegram channels…

— Of course. In those days every rotaprint duplicator (rotaprint — the spirit duplicator widely used in the Soviet era for producing internal documents; owning one privately was treated with deep official suspicion) had to be registered. You could not keep one at home without authorisation. If anyone found out, they would assume you were printing underground leaflets. Total secrecy gave the leaders of the day what they believed was an easier means of retaining power.

— When there are many prohibitions, there are many fabrications. People want to know the truth but cannot tell it from falsehood. As a specialist you probably see this clearly.

— This is one of the most difficult challenges for archivists. We operate within the law — there are regulations, there are statutes. If something is classified, only those with clearance know it. That is what they receive high salaries for; they must be aware of their responsibility. And this is not unique to Russia. If anyone thinks that in the West all documents are in the public domain, they are mistaken. I have worked in many foreign archives. The people who work there also undergo vetting and know what they may and may not do. The state must ensure protection of information that falls within that category.

— Are there important documents that could shed light on contemporary conflicts in the post-Soviet space?

— Here is a vivid example. The second half of the 1980s — the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. I was working in the Central Committee of the CPSU at the time. People came from Yerevan, where the Communist Party of Armenia was in power, and from Baku, where the Communist Party of Azerbaijan was in power, with a request to copy and hand over the documents showing how the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast came into being — created in July 1923, when Stalin was People's Commissar for Nationalities and the chief specialist on the national question. The documents were copied and handed over.

— The same documents?

— Yes. They received identical sets of documents — identical in every respect. But when they got home, the conclusions they drew were diametrically opposed. And it has been going on ever since. That is what you might call the difficulty of translation — the interpretation of historical sources. The fight against untruth must always go on. If documents exist that show what actually happened, they must be published. But that does not mean everyone who reads them will draw the right conclusions. Those who want to hear — those who have the necessary scholarly and cultural foundation — will hear.

— Do you cooperate with colleagues from other countries? After 2022, much must have changed.

— We cannot be outside politics — it was always so, even in the time of the great princes of Moscow. Today contacts with unfriendly states are reduced to a minimum. Perhaps only with our Hungarian colleagues do we continue to work. We recently published a volume on the construction of the metro systems in Moscow and Budapest — the Budapest metro was built drawing on Soviet experience, with our assistance.

— Let us talk about Russia's friends. I understand there is a very interesting Russia–China project in the pipeline.

— Russia–China relations today are of strategic significance. We are implementing a fascinating project with Chinese archivists. In accordance with the instructions of President Putin and Chairman Xi Jinping, we are preparing the collection I. V. Stalin and Mao Zedong: Correspondence, Telegrams, and Other Archival Documents, 1943–1953 — within the framework of the Russia–China Sub-Commission for Cooperation in the Archival Field, under the Russia–China Commission for Humanitarian Cooperation.

This is a project of the Federal Archival Agency and the political party United Russia, initiated by party chairman D. A. Medvedev. The Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI — Rossiysky gosudarstvenny arkhiv sotsialno-politicheskoy istorii, the principal repository for Communist Party of the Soviet Union records) are participating in the work. It is in this archive that the 1945–1953 correspondence between J. V. Stalin, Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, and Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the Central People's Government of the PRC, is held.

Working with the archival documents has given me many professional revelations — particularly in my understanding of Stalin's figure. Stalin and Mao, their actual dialogue, are the most captivating element of the collection. I believe its publication will be a landmark event for Moscow and Beijing.

In the course of work on the collection the archive identified hundreds of documents characterising the full spectrum of USSR–PRC relations in the political, economic, military, and diplomatic spheres, including questions of foreign policy coordination and the Soviet Union's contribution to the founding of the PRC, the development of its economy, and the building of China's armed forces.

In addition to the original letters and cipher telegrams of Stalin and Mao, the collection will as an appendix include transcripts of the conversations of A. I. Mikoyan (Anastas Mikoyan, Politburo member and Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers) with Mao Zedong and the first Premier of the PRC's State Council, Zhou Enlai, held during Mikoyan's visit to China in early 1949.

On their side, the Chinese archivists demonstrated a high degree of openness and proposed for publication more than 300 documents held in the Central Archives of China relating to various aspects of Soviet-Chinese cooperation.

— Tell us about the recent exhibition at the Tauride Palace — it was an interesting project.

— With pleasure! On 27 April 2026 it was 120 years since the opening of the first State Duma (Gosudarstvennaya Duma — Russia's first elected legislative assembly, which convened for the first time on 27 April 1906 in the Tauride Palace). We presented 15 rare original documents from 1906 showing how Russia's first parliament came into being. First the idea of a consultative assembly — the famous Bulygin Manifesto (named after Interior Minister Alexander Bulygin), signed by Emperor Nicholas II in August 1905. Then, under the pressure of revolutionary events, the October Manifesto of 1905 — already declaring a legislative body with power to pass laws, drafted by Prime Minister Witte (Sergei Witte) and his circle.

We showed the subsequent course of events: how the decision was taken for a bicameral parliament (the State Duma and the reformed State Council as the upper chamber), and how the first session proceeded. The leadership of our parliament — Valentina Ivanovna Matviyenko, her deputies, the leadership of the State Duma — all visited the exhibition. Vladimir Putin came to see it too.

— What was his reaction?

— He has a fine human weakness: he loves history. He has an excellent grasp of it and loves reading archival documents. It is only a pity that there is rarely enough time for it.

— When archival documents go on exhibition, what does that involve technically?

— It is a labour-intensive process. Documents are brought and exhibited with an escort; our representatives maintain observation at the display cases, and all necessary security measures are in place.

— These exhibitions are guarded just like exhibitions of works of art!

— Of course. How do you think the Mona Lisa is transported? Security must be provided, the premises must meet the required climatic standards, a precise temperature-and-humidity regime must be maintained. The same requirements apply to the exhibition of documents.

In late 2025 we held a large-scale exhibition at the Manege (the Manezh exhibition hall next to the Kremlin) — 'The Great Victory' (Velikaya Pobeda), which we organised together with the Patriarchal Council for Culture of the Russian Orthodox Church. The President was there, the Patriarch was there. 120,000 people visited. Everything was organised to the highest standard — security, specialist display cases — because the core of the exhibition consisted of original archival documents on the history of the Great Patriotic War.

— Are there still blank spots in the history of the Great Patriotic War?

— I cannot say there are no blank spots — but they are no longer of the first order. Since 2018 the Russian archival service has implemented a series of exhibition projects on the background and history of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War. In addition, on the President's instruction, we created a collection of digital copies of archival documents — available on the Presidential Library website. For the first time the entire background to the Second World War was explained in detail, beginning with Munich (the 1938 Munich Agreement). The documentary exhibitions covered: 1939 — the Non-Aggression Pact; the world on the eve of war; and 1941 itself.

We showed the full truth about the war — including the secret protocols (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact's secret additional protocols dividing Eastern Europe into Soviet and German spheres of influence, the existence of which the Soviet government denied until 1989): Ribbentrop's visits to Moscow, Molotov's visit to Berlin in November 1940, and the incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union. All of these subjects have generated so much controversy and continue to attract attention today. The archival documents demonstrate: the idea that everything was decided by the will of two individuals — 'Hitler and Stalin' in quotation marks, as our Western 'friends' like to write — is complete nonsense. Events of this kind are not set in motion by the will of individuals. And direct accomplices in the outbreak of the war include the Western countries — France, Britain. The policy of appeasement is not an empty phrase.

I will say more: after the Red Army entered Germany, we removed archival documents from there as compensatory restitution (kompensatornaya restitutsiya — the removal of cultural property from defeated Germany by the USSR as compensation for wartime losses, a subject of ongoing legal and diplomatic dispute). Among them were documents from French archives — because the Germans had taken these valuables when they entered Paris. We subsequently returned the documents to France, but not before making copies. The French documents of the Warsaw Embassy and France's military attaché for 1939 show how the Poles behaved on the eve of the war — how they obstructed the conclusion of an alliance between London, Paris, and Moscow against Hitler. We even managed to co-publish with German colleagues a substantial volume on this subject — before 2022, in German. It has been bought up by every German organisation that professionally studies the history of the Second World War. These documents cannot be disputed.

— What other topical subjects have you addressed?

— Two important subjects. The first is collaboration. It was precisely the Russian archival service that published a three-volume work on the treachery of General Vlasov (Andrei Vlasov — Soviet general captured by the Germans in 1942, who subsequently led the Russian Liberation Army fighting alongside the Nazis). We placed a full stop on this question: whatever fine intentions and beautiful words you use to cover cooperation with the Nazis, you are a traitor.

In the West Vlasov is often regarded as justifiable — supposedly as an ideological fighter against communism. But France somehow stays silent about its own national hero Philippe Pétain — the First World War commander who in 1940 signed the capitulation of France with Hitler and headed a collaborationist government (the Vichy regime). The French are ashamed to speak of him. Classic double standards: a traitor at home, but in Russia — an ideological fighter!

Incidentally, some professional historians have attributed the Smolensk Manifesto to Vlasov — utter nonsense. He only signed it; it was drafted by German intelligence. More than forty Soviet generals were taken prisoner. Only a handful became collaborators. Vlasov was taken in hand from the start. He turned out to be the most well-known traitor, and was needed as a figurehead for demoralising the Red Army. The Germans ran a planned, purely propaganda campaign — 'Operation Vlasov'.

— And now, unfortunately, these heroes of collaboration are being celebrated in some places — including Ukrainian ones…

— People who collaborate with the devil cannot, by definition, be clean or worthy of respect.

— And the second subject?

— The project 'No Statute of Limitations' (Bez sroka davnosti — the large-scale Russian initiative to document Nazi crimes on Soviet territory and to gather evidence for the legal recognition of genocide). We continue to publish the key documents relating to Nazi crimes, the trials of Nazis and their accomplices. An enormous body of historical evidence has been assembled — we publish it and continue to expand it. It served as the documentary basis for the recognition of the genocide of the Soviet people. The main documents on Nazi crimes have been published; the research continues. People must be reminded of the past — especially the younger generation. Archivists have done enormous work in this regard. It is work one can be proud of.

— Posterity will appreciate it.

— I believe it will.