FOREWORDxxii
open.” We then encounter disbelief or worse when we reply that this opening was
largely mythical even at its height during the chaotic and corrupt heyday of Boris
Yeltsin’s administration.
There were several joint initiatives with Western countries to publish selected
documents of the respective foreign ministries on their mutual relations; the Soviet
entries were selected by Russian officialdom, but nonetheless were occasionally
revealing, intentionally or otherwise. The same applies to document collections that
were published unilaterally (though with Western sponsorship) by the Russian
Foreign Ministry or other official institutions.^26 Disorder and economic hardship in
the disintegrating USSR itself combined to make it possible for well-connected and
well-heeled Westerners to obtain entire, but random, fonds of archival material.^27
Regime change in former Warsaw Pact member states enabled access to Soviet docu-
ments that had been shared with them.
But the declassification of Soviet archives, which was decreed by law soon after the
transition from the USSR to the Russian Federation, “ran into political resistance as
soon as 1992.”^28 The archives that might be most essential for our purposes—such as
those of the military General Staff and GRU (military intelligence), the Politburo
and the KGB—were never made accessible in any systematic fashion. Occasionally,
Russian researchers were granted a peek, or defectors made off with copies they had
accumulated.^29 But even officially sanctioned writers who in theory should have
enjoyed full access (from foreign intelligence chief, foreign minister and premier
Evgeny Primakov through researchers of the Military History Institute and on down),
often had to resort—admittedly or not—to citing Western studies on some key issues
and to leaving others completely undocumented. So a good deal of material did
emerge, and there was a good deal to be learned from it, but the opening was nowhere
near exhaustive enough to permit drawing conclusions from absence of evidence.
Again, the situation in the United States and Israel differs mainly in degree, and it
appears that even if full release does occur someday it may produce far less than all
the answers. In the most recent Israeli example, when after forty years large batches
of testimonies before the Israeli Commission of Inquiry on the Yom Kippur War (the
Agranat Commission) were at last declassified in 2012, the potentially most revealing
features were still withheld. Other records in the IDF archive are for the most part
accessible only selectively and to officially authorized researchers.^30
In the American case, from the accession of the Nixon administration in January
1969 through the Moscow summit, we initially had only limited US documentation
to compare with the memoirs of Kissinger and others. These documents were mainly
transcripts of formal Soviet–American talks, which, though made by the US side,
presumably recorded the conversations verbatim or almost so.^31 This period, like the
Johnson administration before it, was gradually covered by successive volumes of
Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS). These were immensely useful and are
extensively cited here, as the editors can certainly be trusted at least to have omitted