Preserving History: The Strange Case of the Lakoba Papers

Hoover research fellow Paul Gregory, a specialist in Soviet economics, finds compelling the human aspects of life under the Soviet regime. Gregory, director of the annual Hoover Sino-Soviet Archives Workshop, is a seasoned researcher. In his book Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin's Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina (Hoover Institution Press, 2010), he tells their tragic story. In this guest blog, he relates the story of a family's fearless actions to save a legacy that was subsequently entrusted to the Hoover Archives.

The N. A. Lakoba papers, one of the most fascinating collections at the Hoover Institution Archives, contain the personal papers of one of Stalin’s closest friends, Nestor Lakoba, the party boss of Abkhazia (now part of Russian-occupied Georgia) and Stalin’s host on his frequent visits to the Black Sea resort of Sukhumi. The crown jewel of the collection is Lakoba’s personal photo album, filled with candid pictures of Stalin and his retinue hunting and fishing; it also contains Lakoba’s personal papers, including his official health certificate, which indicates that he was almost completely deaf. Most documents are in Lakoba’s own hand, including his personal notebook containing his candid musings. Secret correspondence with and reports from his informers reveal his concern about encroachments on his authority by political rivals, including Georgian boss Lavrenty Beria [Lavrentii Beriia].

Shortly before Christmas 1936, Beria poisoned Lakoba during a dinner in Beria’s home. Lakoba’s body was returned from Tbilisi to Sukhumi by special train; he was buried with full honors in the Sukhumi botanical garden. Beria was among the mourners, somberly carrying a funeral banner in honor of his old friend. In the aftermath of the murder, Lakoba’s extended family was either executed or imprisoned, and those associated with him were accused of being part of his plots to kill Stalin and other Soviet leaders. Before their arrest, the family, having learned of Beria’s plan to burn the body to destroy evidence of the poisoning, secretly reburied his body in an undisclosed location, presumably near his home village. Despite torture, Lakoba’s wife took the secret to her grave.

In reading the autobiography of Lakoba’s sister-in-law (more than a quarter-century his junior), I came across the following account of how the Lakoba family saved his archives from Beria’s grasp and certain destruction:

“In this difficult time, Saria [Lakoba’s wife] and Musto [her younger brother] succeeded in saving Nestor’s archive. In the presence of witnesses, they burned in the courtyard letters from Trotsky and other dangerous letters. Other documents they placed in a box, which they packed in thick paper and then hid in a hiding place under the floor of their house. When Musto [one of the few to survive] returned from prison and exile in 1955, he found that their house had been turned into a dormitory of a technical institute. The package was not in the secret hiding place. Workers, who remodeled the floors, had found the box. Musto began a personal investigation of its whereabouts. He learned that it was in the possession of local authorities (who did not understand what it was), and to his astonishment the box was returned to him. To his surprise, the archives was remarkably well preserved. After Musto’s death, the archives went to his son.”

Lakoba’s sister-in-law thus provides us with one link in the chain of events that eventually brought the Lakoba archive to Hoover and tells us that the family burned documents that it felt would be incriminating, such as the correspondence with Trotsky. The candid photos of the vacationing Stalin have been widely reproduced in many books on Stalin. The collection is also a valuable source on the history of Abkhazia, which, even in Lakoba’s time, had separatist tendencies. Abkhazia and its capital city, Sukhumi, today have a government appointed by Putin and are occupied by Russian troops.

When I read through the Lakoba archive in July, it was in the hands of the capable Hoover Archives preservation staff, who were applying preventive care to the eighty-year-old photographs. It is fortunate that the Lakoba archive ended up at Hoover. In a poorly funded Russian state archive, there is no telling what its condition would be today (or if it would even be accessible).

Paul Gregory's blog

Guide to the N. A. Lakoba papers

Nestor Lakoba, circa 1930s. N. A. Lakoba papers, box 3, Hoover Institution Archives

Joseph Stalin (right) and Lavrentii Beriia on vacation in Abkhazia, circa 1930s. N. A. Lakoba papers, box 3, Hoover Institution Archives

Joseph Stalin (center) and Kliment Voroshilov (right), people's commissar for military and navy and people's commissar of defense, on vacation in Abkhazia, circa 1930s. N. A. Lakoba papers, box 3, Hoover Institution Archives

Don’t Mess with Cupid: A Remembrance

The intrigues of international politics are dominated by ambitious and dedicated individuals who relish power and influence. How often, however, do we hear about someone who gave up fame and a promising career for love?

Stefan Olszowski was twice the foreign minister of communist Poland and a Politburo member with a strong pro-Soviet record. His career seemed to be on an upward trajectory until he was suddenly ousted from the Communist Party leadership in 1985, in part because of his affair with a Polish journalist whom he married after leaving his first wife. A man known for actively supporting the suppression of the fledgling Solidarity movement and once a rising star in the world politics, Olszowski left for New York in 1986, when his new wife accepted a staff position at the United Nations. Disregarding his colleagues’ admonitions that it was bad publicity for such a high-profile Communist to be living in enemy territory, Olszowski settled with his wife and their son in a Long Island community near the Hamptons. Could Olszowski have had a sense of the dramatic changes to come in Poland? Or had he recognized that a relatively anonymous life with his son and the woman he loved were far superior to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune behind the Iron Curtain.

Stefan Olszowski’s privacy was recently “invaded” by our Curator for Eastern Europe and the papers and photographs with which he left communist Poland are now in the Hoover Archives. Several examples of these photographs appear below.


Stefan Olszowski (right) with General Wojciech Jaruzelski, prime minister and last Communist leader of Poland, 1983. Stefan Olszowski papers, box 3, Hoover Institution Archives


Stefan Olszowski (left) with Andrei Gromyko, Soviet foreign minister, during his visit to Warsaw, 1983. Stefan Olszowski papers, box 3, Hoover Institution Archives

Stefan Olszowski and wife Zofia in America. Stefan Olszowski papers, box 3, Hoover Institution Archives

The Man Who Played with Fire

Might Stieg Larsson have taken a page from Theodore Abel? In The Girl Who Played with Fire, Larsson's best-selling detective novel, a reporter is stymied in trying to track down a retired police officer. He has the retiree's e-mail address but no town or street. Veteran reporter Mikael Blomkvist suggests a trick: notify the retiree that he's won a mobile phone that must be delivered to his home address. The reporter takes Blomkvist's suggestion, the retiree takes the bait, and the plot thickens.

An early implementer of a similar technique, Abel sought to track down followers of Adolf Hitler in 1934. As a sociologist at Columbia University, he thought that the life stories of early party members could help make sense of the National Socialist movement. How to locate those people? A contest, of course, in which Abel offered 400 German marks "for the best personal life history of an adherent of the Hitler movement." Limiting the contest to people who had joined the party before 1933, his announcement, distributed at all local headquarters of the party and published in the party press, stated that "contestants are to give accurate and detailed descriptions of their personal lives, particularly after World War I. Special attention should be given to accounts of family life, education, economic conditions, membership in associations, participation in the Hitler movement, and important experiences, thoughts, and feelings about events and ideas of the post-war period."

Abel paid the awards out of his own pocket. Had he been able to offer more money, he thought, he would have gotten more entries. Even so, he received 683 manuscripts, "a result as unexpected as it was gratifying. The wealth and variety of material contained in these life histories fully justified the undertaking." Many of these life histories are among the Theodore Abel papers at the Hoover Archives. If you can't visit to read the originals, try Abel's book, Why Hitler Came into Power: An Answer Based on the Original Life Stories of Six Hundred of His Followers (1938), from which these quotes were taken. I can't truly call Abel the man who played with fire, but he surely played a smart game.

Nazi Party Biography of Wilhelm Schmitz, Box 1, Folder 3, Theodore Abel papers, Hoover Institution Archives

Microfilming: A Meticulous Preservation Process

Someone said that “today’s activity is tomorrow’s history.” That is certainly true at the Microfilming Department at the Hoover Institution, where we preserve documents for future reference. Over the years, many people who have visited our lab, whether they had used microfilm before or not, said they had never realized what a thorough process microfilming was. As a result of witnessing our work, they appreciated and had a better understanding of microfilming as a meticulous preservation process.

I won’t go into the many technical details in this short article, and even though preservation and access go hand-in-hand, I will deal only with preservation here. I will begin with the preparation aspects of the process.

Ideally, all the documents should be ready to be microfilmed when they come to our lab. There are times, however, when we have to do some document preparation before filming, including removing fasteners, staples, paper clips, pushpins, etc. Depending on the age of the documents, the fasteners may be old and rusty (first photo below). We don’t use staple removers (second photo) to remove the metal fasteners, since they could leave marks. Instead, we use micro-spatulas and other tools (third photo). Once the metal fasteners are removed, we replace them with plastic clips (fourth photo). Finally, the documents are ready to be microfilmed.


To give you an idea of the extent of the preparation, the following photos show the number of fasteners removed from 110 boxes from September 2009 through mid-March 2010. Their total weight came to 2.866 pounds. (The total number of each type of fasteners was approximated by weighing all the removed fasteners and approximating the percentage of each type from the total.) The breakdown is as follows:

Each metal paper clip weighed 0.0881 ounces. There are 500-600 metal paper clips. Each pushpin weighed 0.0352 ounces. There are 150-250 pushpins. Ten staples weighed 0.0352 ounces. There are 2,000-25,000 staples.


I hope you can now appreciate all the work that goes into microfilming.

You Have Been Warned

Hoover fellow Mark Harrison is one of the first researchers to delve into the recently acquired Lithuanian KGB materials. When he heard about a law that would expand the powers of Russia's FSB (Federal Security Service) if enacted, his immersion in these materials became even more material. Mark's blog entry, You Have Been Warned, tells how the KGB files have informed and enriched his understanding of the proposed law.

A draft law before the Russian Parliament (since passed) gives new powers to the FSB (Federal Security Service), the successor to the KGB. It allows the FSB to issue binding warnings to citizens suspected of creating conditions, through negligence, passivity, or incitement, in which crimes might be committed or facilitated. A warning that is ignored can be followed by an unspecified penalty, even though the actions that led to the warning may not be offenses in themselves.

This provision of the draft law restores the legal basis of a function once widely exercised by the KGB. This function was known in Russian as profilaktika, which translates directly as "prophylaxis" or "prevention."

Across the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, the KGB subjected around 15,000 people a year to profilaktika, more than half of them for displaying some sort of overt political unreliability, or having connections with foreigners leading to suspicion of disloyalty (see Rudol'ph Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz: istoriia vlasti, 1945–1991: Moscow 1998, pp. 365-366.) In proportion to the population, this would be about one in 10,000 adult Soviet citizens in each year.

What did profilaktika mean? Evidence of many, many individual cases can be found, for example, in the Lithuania KGB collection of the archive at the Hoover Institution, where I'm working now. How did they work? You could imagine it like this. Out of the blue, you get a call to come into your local KGB office. You really don't know what it's about, but you're on your best behaviour. Sitting behind his desk is a KGB colonel. He asks you what you think of the Soviet Union. Wonderful! You declare. Good, he says.

But in that case, he goes on: How come you told this anti-Soviet joke to your colleagues in the office on Thursday? And on Friday in the bar you repeated the news you heard the day before on Radio Liberty? And on Saturday you were heard cursing your Soviet-made automobile and wishing you had a BMW?

At first you bluster and deny everything. Inside, however, your world is collapsing. You're realizing just how much trouble you're in; your job and your home depend on the state and both are on the line. But that is only the start. Worse, it's dawning on you that your colleagues, your friends, maybe even your family members have been telling tales about you to the KGB. You're on your own.

You crumble. You start to make excuses: You were tired and under stress, you've always been a bit of an ignorant big mouth, you've been promoted above your competence and this has put you under pressure. You didn't realize how wrong it was. But you do now. Yes, you do, you do.

You promise you will never, ever do such things again. And you really mean it because, short of being physically beaten or locked in a cell, nothing is worse than the state of mind that this profilaktika has put you in. You've been exposed, hurt, humiliated, compromised, and isolated from society: From now on you will trust nobody, not even yourself. In fact, the only honest person in the room is the man in front of you.

The colonel listens as you stammer out your explanations. He is calm and nods a lot. He accepts what you say. When you've done, he closes the file. Go away, he says, and change your ways. We'll keep the information but, as long as you do the right thing from now on, we'll never have to look at it again. As you leave, you thank him for putting you back on the right track.

After you've gone, he makes a note to keep a special watch on you for a few months or a year, just to be sure that you meant it.

Profilaktika was applied to all sorts of cases, from loose morals and rowdy behaviour to indiscreet or unauthorized contacts with foreigners, petty smuggling or currency violations, and to adolescents who, in a place like Lithuania, might get caught up in the romance of anti-Soviet fly-posting or dreams of emigration. In such cases profilaktika was applied to the parents as well as the children.

More than half of all the cases of profilaktika were carried out in the privacy of the KGB offices, but there was also another version of the drama. This was enacted in public meetings. In this case the psychological beating was administered by your own colleagues, your student peers, or the pillars of your neighbourhood community.

For a police state, profilaktika was relatively humane. For hundreds of thousands of people it took the place of arrest and imprisonment, which would have been their fate in Stalin's time. It was also very effective in causing people to change their behaviour. In eight years, according to Pikhoia, out of more than 120,000 people subjected to such treatment, only 150 were subsequently taken to court for an actual offense. That's one eighth of one percent, a recidivism rate that western penal systems can only dream about.

A durable police state cannot be built out of bricks alone. There are building blocks like the security police and civilian police, border controls, the control of public assets, the distribution of taxes and resource rents, and media monopolies. In addition, binding agents are needed to assemble the blocks and glue them in place by controlling and coordinating the everyday behaviour of citizens at work, at home, and in the streets. Profilaktika was part of the mortar that held the bricks of the KGB state in position. Looks like it will do so again.

Professor Harrison's blog


Her home telephone having been disconnected by the KGB, Arina Ginzburg calls the U.S. embassy in Moscow; fellow dissident Sergei Moshkov ensures that no one enters the telephone booth. In the background, a KGB woman watches. Undated, Aleksandr Ginzburg papers, Hoover Institution Archives

Fiftieth Anniversary of the Confederation of Iranian Students

As long as archivists keep processing new collections, the tale of a single historical event or personage is never quite put to rest, which was certainly my experience when processing the Hamid Shawkat collection. Unfortunately, for an Iranian-American, my knowledge of modern Iranian history is fragmented, at best: Mosaddeq was thrown out, the shah came to power, the shah was thrown out, Khomeini came to power, and the Islamic Republic of Iran was formed. Often it takes a modern phenomenon to awaken interest in a now distant historical event. Last year's contested Iranian election provided the fuel for a generation of Iranian students to slip beyond their firewalls and, for a brief moment, converse with a world that has otherwise labeled them as other, distant, and disconnected.

The power of the Iranian student uprising, however, is not without precedent. In 1960, a group of students came together to form what would become the most organized and democratic student group Iran had ever seen: the Confederation of Iranian Students (CIS). Originally made up of members of the Tudeh Party and the National Front, CIS expanded in 1961 to include members of the Iranian Student Association of the United States. Armed with the unifying goal of denouncing the shah and the human rights violations of the secret police, the confederation was seen by some as the only political organization capable of representing the needs of the Iranian people in a time when opposition groups were being forcefully eradicated.

To uphold this responsibility, CIS produced an assortment of printed materials, including journals, newsletters, and newspapers, that strengthened the network stretching across Europe and the United States. Those materials, many of which are included in the Hamid Shawkat collection, offer a rare glance into the organized student front that helped promulgate the tumultuous political climate that gave rise to the Iranian revolution in 1979.

In 2010, we are proud not only to have access to these records but to recognize the fiftieth anniversary of the Confederation of Iranian Students which, for the most part, has escaped the narrative of modern Iranian history.

"Nameh Parsi" Published by the
Confederation of Iranian Students,
Box 9, Hamid Shawkat collection,
Hoover Institution Archives

You've Got V-Mail

When a colleague encountered something unfamiliar while working on a collection of documents and asked me if I knew anything about "V-Mail," I thought she must be referring to some new and exotic form of electronic mail. I was unaware that the term “vmail” was currently used by some people as shorthand for voice mail. But rather than the present, her question led to the past and a form of mail devised in exceptional circumstances—World War II—and making use of technology, albeit of a non-electronic kind.

A little digging and a helpful web page turned up a wealth of details on the subject of V-Mail. It turned out that the V stood for Victory, a word ubiquitous in the discourse of the Allied war effort, which had already seen the promotion of Victory gardens (to grow vegetables on the home front) and the sale of Victory bonds (to raise money from the public). V-Mail referred to a process whereby correspondence being sent to troops overseas was microfilmed to reduce its physical volume so as to free up space on cargo planes for war material.

The basic V-Mail program was fairly simple. One used standardized stationery on which to write letters; the letters were then microfilmed, and the microfilm was then shipped overseas, where it was developed and then delivered. But behind this lay a formidable logistic undertaking. Processing centers had to established, both in the United States and abroad, requiring significant amounts of personnel and equipment. Eastman Kodak was awarded the contract for the microfilm machines, and V-Mail detachments were created in the postal units of the armed forces. Three regional centers were established in the United States (San Francisco, New York, and Chicago) to process V-Mail, along with numerous stations overseas.

The archives has a number of promotional posters that stress V-Mail’s reliability and speed and suggest that it was the “most patriotic” way to send mail to troops. One poster details the savings that V-Mail created in terms of cargo space. Its morale-boosting importance was another theme, captured in the slogan “You write, he’ll fight.” Of course, like other mail sent during wartime, V-Mail was subject to censorship.

The V-Mail program lasted from June 1942 until November 1945, but the mail itself has survived and thus remains available. The same may not hold true for e-mail, at least in its electronic form. As technology and formats change, files may not always remain recoverable, a challenge with which archivists are beginning to grapple.

A fuller description of the specifics of the V-Mail program can be found at the National Postal Museum section of the Smithsonian Institution’s web page.

Political Poster Collection, US 7299, Hoover Institution Archives

Political Poster Collection, US 7298, Hoover Institution Archives

Political Poster Collection, US 7297, Hoover Institution Archives