FOREWORDxxiii
most of the insignificant underbrush that would have taken any individual researcher
years to plow through (the handful of documents that we obtained laboriously
through the FOIA process exemplified this difficulty). Therefore, the main problem
here is not that the FRUS volumes are necessarily selective. Rather, the editors them-
selves have protested the continuing and sometimes gratuitous exclusion of highly
relevant papers. They did this by listing in FRUS the mere existence of documents
whose contents remain classified, in major part or even entirely.^32 How many more
there are, or were, can only be guessed.
Still, these documents alone were adequate to prove that Kissinger was rather
sparing with the facts, to say the least. More recently, a joint US–Russian publication
of the parallel reports submitted by Kissinger and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly
Dobrynin on their ‘“back channel” meetings has filled in a lot of the blanks and
confirmed our hypotheses.^33 This collection is not only as entertaining as an episto-
lary novel, thanks to the authors’ comments about each other; it also underlines the
risks of relying even on archival documents from a single side of any process, as the
two interlocutors’ versions of a conversation often hardly appear to describe the same
event. From the back channel, by definition, there are and will be no transcripts, so
piecing together what actually was said and agreed is tricky. Yet even the most chari-
table reading for Kissinger shows up his memoirs as hardly worthy of the trust that
historians have put in them.
D. The four filters between events and accessible archival documents
As we compared the Soviet archival papers that did surface with other newly available
sources, it became increasingly apparent that political decisions and military opera-
tions that hardly squared with the USSR’s declared principles would never be inten-
tionally, directly and authentically revealed in official documents. Indeed, declassifica-
tion and accessibility are only the last of a series of filters that such decisions and
operations had to pass before being so disclosed.
First, the matter had to be put to paper to begin with. Both testimonies about the
Soviet decision-making process, and the failure even of latter-day Soviet and Russian
leaders to locate documentation of key turning points, showed that these were rou-
tinely determined in informal and undocumented meetings. Rudolf Pikhoya, who
was head of the Russian Archival Service (1990–6), wrote in 1998:
The most important and responsible decisions were worked out not in Politburo sessions,
but before them in what was known as “the Walnut Room” next to the Politburo’s meeting
hall in the Kremlin. ... The director of the General Department simply noted in the work-
ing journal: “this issue was discussed in the Walnut Room and was not recorded.”It was in such a meeting, at a dacha in Crimea, that the decision to invade
Czechoslovakia was made in August 1968—a move that was mutually related with