Documenting Communism: The Hoover Project to Microfilm and Publish the Soviet Archives

In late 1991, the Soviet Union was officially dissolved. Over the next 12 years, the Hoover Institution microfilmed and published the newly opened records of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet State. Among the 10 million pages were records of the central organs of the Communist Party; the NKVD, which regulated the ordinary lives of the Russian people; the GULAG, the secret police department that ran the forced labor camps; and the 1992 trial of the Communist Party.

Charles Palm, who...