SUMMARY:

Sohpie Coeurié in her article reconstructs the “stolen memory” of French archives, i.e., the story of the documents that became Soviet and Nazi “loot” in the course of the WWII. Nazi archival extrusions as well as inter-war period regulations of archival policies and rules (national as well as international) provide context and comparative cases for the major case of the Soviet Union’s dealing with French archival documents. In 1945, the Russian term “trophies,” as applied to the conquered archives and other cultural products, had no equivalent in the language of the Soviet Union’s war allies. As the article shows, this term indeed expressed the essence of Soviet archival policy in defeated Germany and in other European countries. On the one hand, the documents were needed to disclose Nazi crimes, and to this degree Russia went along with its war allies. Yet, on the other hand, the documents were viewed as a compensation for war loses, and as something that could be used strategically in ideological purposes.
Sohpie Coeurié explains that the logic behind the Soviet collection of “archival trophies” was not national – Soviet leaders did not support conscious projects whose aim was to assemble in the Soviet Union documents pertaining to Russian history and culture. Confiscations were governed by political and police pragmatism, and later by the logic of the Cold war. Therefore Coeurié suggests that the Soviet “managing of the past” assumed a more complicated form compared to Nazi Germany: the Soviet Union rejected nationalism in favor of the “empire of the revolution” ideal. Moscow became the center for historical archives of the world revolutionary movement (e.g., socialist, communist), and the “trophy archives” became a part of the “empire of the revolution” memory. Coeurié illustrates this statement by analyzing the history of the Central State Special Archive; principles of classification and usage of the “trophy archives” in the 1950s-1960s; implications of the rejection by Soviet archivists of the principle of respect toward a “collection’s origin”; and the most frequently consulted French collections from the Special archive. While doing this, she notices the moment of nationalization of Soviet ideology and archival policy during the later Soviet period – the trend that became dominant in post-Perestroika Russia. To explain this trend, the author turns to Russian debates about restitution, and specifically to a complicated story of returning French archival “trophies” to France. Partial success of French efforts to get back their archives are explained in the article by the absence in Russian society of a consensus regarding the history of WWII and the nature of the Soviet period, as well as by the nationalization of Russian state ideology. The choice of documents to be restituted was based not on the fact of their French origin, but on their “French” character. Materials that were confiscated by the Soviet Army and officials at the end of the War but recognized by contemporary Russian archivists as a part of “Russian cultural heritage” remained in Russia.