Amir Weiner Getting to Know You

GETTING TO KNOW YOU 17
army and the garrison, as well as those of the Strelets association and those of
the newspapers Dilo and Bat´kivshchyna. The paper carnage continued despite
protests to the top military command and party bosses in the city. These
pleas fell on deaf ears, however, as neither seemed to consider the archives an
issue of vital importance. The situation was made worse by the fact that the
highly qualified archival staff was almost entirely Polish and affiliated with
nationalist and former government parties. Some were even army officers.
Interestingly, the archival official objected to the recommendation of the
NKVD top command in western Ukraine to dismiss them, given that there
were no available replacements. Until he received qualified personnel who
had a command of Polish, he opted to continue and employ them under
NKVD control. 39 Yet regardless of these and other obstacles, the enterprise
rolled on relentlessly. Between May and October 1940, the archives yielded
some 28,607 “politically tainted” people, including 18,476 former policemen
and gendarmes and 3,521 members of counterrevolutionary parties. 40
On 4 September 1940, the new Council of the Soviet Estonian People’s
Commissariat declared all documentary archival materials to be state property.
All institutions and organizations, both active and defunct, had to surrender
archival materials of “public value” to the State Central Archives. A large
portion of the material was immediately transferred to the Secret Department
of the State Central Archives in Tallinn, which promptly launched the search
for compromising data under tight supervision of new arrivals from the
Soviet core. 41
If this was not exactly the way local professional archivists viewed their
tasks, it did not matter. They were forced to adjust to the new order. When
the director of the Estonian Central State Archives expressed his amazement
at the subordination of the archives to the NKVD, he was bluntly notified
that the prevalent view in the world that archives were research institutions
should be quickly forgotten; perhaps it was so in the capitalist world, but “in
the Soviet state, the main task of the archives is to expose class enemies and
destroy them.” 42 In case the message was lost on anyone, it was hammered
39 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. 5325, op. 10, d. 533, ll. 2–6, esp.
3–5.
40 Ibid., l. 160; Pol´skoe podpol´e, 654; Gross, Revolution from Abroad, 148.
41 For a thorough description of the Sovietization of the Estonian archival system, see Priit
Pirsko, “Eesti arhiivinduse sovetiseerimine 1940–1941,” in Eesti NSV aastatel 1940–1953:
Sovetiseerimise mehhanismid ja tagajärjed Nõukogude Liidu ja Ida-Euroopa arengute
kontektstis, ed. Tõnu Tannberg (Tartu: Eesti Ajalooarhiiv, 2007), 106–52.
42 Gottlieb Ney, “Teadlasest tshekistiks,” in Eesti riik ja rahvas II maailmasõjas (Stockholm:
Kirjastus EMP, 1956), 3:154.