The Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI), which was formed on the basis of the USSR Communist Party Central Archive, holds the collection of CPSU documents, personal archives of Soviet leaders such as Lenin and Stalin, also Marx and Engels files, documents and museum pieces on social history of Europe from the 18th up to the 20th century.
Over the last 30 years the archive has fundamentally changed, from a closed CPSU institution with the explicit aim of protecting retrospective information, to a fully functional civil archive open to researchers. It has become an actor of the so-called archive revolution , under which hundreds of thousands of documents of the Soviet era have been declassified and published both in book and electronic forms.
RGASPI now sees its mission in the presentation and publication of retrospective information. Following one of RGASPI s recent initiatives, the internet site Documents of the Soviet Epoch was created, where Stalin s personal archive, the electronic Comintern database, the State Defense Committee (1941 1945) archive, the Politburo archival collection and others were displayed during the last few years.
