The Archive War: How Lenin Seized Russia's Past

In the chaos of revolution, who controls history? In 1918, Vladimir Lenin signed a decree creating the Central Archive of the RSFSR, nationalizing all prerevolutionary documents and placing them under state control. This episode explores the little-known story of how the Bolsheviks systematically seized private archives—from the Okhrana's secret police files to noble family estates and church records—to rewrite Russia's past. Historian Mikhail Pokrovsky was put in charge, a Marxist who believed archives were weapons for class struggle. We follow the desperate race by former imperial officials to destroy compromising materials before the Cheka arrived, and the tragic loss of countless documents to fire, looters, and deliberate sabotage. The Bolsheviks even set up 'archive field offices' on the front lines of the Civil War to capture White Army records. By 1922, a centralized Glavarkhiv emerged, controlling access to history itself. This episode touches on the fate of the Romanov family's personal papers, the destruction of the Moscow Archive of the Ministry of Justice in 1917, and the strange survival of the Smolensk Archive—captured by the Nazis, then by the Americans. A story about power, memory, and the physical stuff of history.

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