Amir Weiner Getting to Know You

16 AMIR WEINER AND AIGI RAHI-TAMM
Ukraine and Belorussia with a photo agency, given its constant requests for
more photo paper and equipment. Failing to register for a passport with the
local militia was ruled a criminal offense. As a result, between January and
early March 1940, 1,758,000 people (out of an estimated 4 million) in the
cities and district centers of western Ukraine were issued passports. Tellingly,
the NKVD already credited passportization with the creation of a pool of
nearly 15,000 people with compromising material, a figure that more than
doubled a month later. 37
Local archives emerged as a key tool in the information-gathering
enterprise. Here, too, the Soviets brought along two decades of expertise in
utilizing largely professional archives for their social and political engineering
drive. Inside the pre-1939 borders, archives had long been employed
to support the task of cleansing society of “alien elements.” As early as
April 1918, a special committee in the Petrograd Archive of History and
Revolution was charged with the compilation of compromising materials,
a task that constantly expanded as the regime consolidated its grip on the
country and launched a crash course in building socialism. Twenty years later,
at the height of the terror, the NKVD claimed jurisdiction over the archival
system, which it then used extensively in carrying out mass repressions, and
on 21 September 1939, with the USSR’s westward expansion underway, it
introduced the Soviet index-card recording of “politically tainted people.”
Each card consisted of personal, professional, and political data as well as
compromising information and its sources. All those recorded were entered
into reference lists in triplicate and immediately forwarded to the NKVD
for operational use, its Soviet archives, and the director of the organization’s
archives. The archives were obliged to respond within 24 to 48 hours to
inquiries fielded by the police and the Party. 38
Needless to say, the mayhem brought on by the occupations did not
bode well for smooth implementation. In late 1939, an official at the Archival
Department of the NKVD in L´viv reported to Moscow that many critically
important archives were destroyed and almost all archives were damaged in
one way or another. But the official did not blame the former Polish authorities
who, he said, destroyed very little. Rather, it was the Red Army that did
most of the damage. Quartered troops destroyed the archives of anti-Soviet
movements and liquidated the archives of the command of the district Polish
37 Derzhavnyi arkhiv Ministerstva vnutrishnikh sprav Ukraïny (DAMVSU) f. 3, op. 1, spr. 6,
ark. 4–6, 12–15, 23–26, 45–48.
38 V. E. Korneev and O. N. Kopylova, “Arkhivy na sluzhbe totalitarnogo gosudarstva (1918–
nachalo 1940-kh gg.)” Otechestvennye arkhivy, no. 3 (1992): 13–20; Kopylova, “V poiskakh
‘spetskartotetki GAU NKVD SSSR’ ” Otechestvennye arkhivy, no. 1 (2000): 33–34.