The Soviet Century

NOTE ON SOURCES AND REFERENCES

Most of the documentary evidence used in this book comes from Soviet archives. Some of it was discovered by the author himself in the Moscow archives, while the rest has been published in specialist journals or collections of documents. In the latter instance, the references supplied in the footnotes give the name of the compilers and other indispensable details.

The archives from which most of the material derives are as follows:

Each reference to a document begins with the name of the relevant archive, followed by the number of the collection (f.), the number of the catalogue (op.), the number of the document (d.), and the page numbers (L.). But it is also common practice for historians to omit the first letters of the coding categories and simply supply four consecutive numbers in the appropriate order.

Autobiographies are an important and legitimate source for historians, especially in the case of the Soviet Union, because they contain eyewitness reports of events or secret meetings in more recent years that cannot as yet be studied from the documents they generated. Biographies are a further valuable source when their authors have also come upon otherwise inaccessible evidence.