Collecting the Ephemeral

No other archival collection can match the Okhrana records in their vivid documentation of Russia’s revolutionary underground in the two decades leading up to the fall of the Romanovs in 1917. The Okhrana collection consists of files and photographs of many of the most-wanted Russian revolutionaries of the early twentieth century and illuminates the surveillance strategies of the tsarist government.

Many of the political enemies documented in the collection would eventually become leaders of the Soviet regime. Vasily Maklakov, the last Russian ambassador to France before the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, secretly arranged to have the files shipped from Paris to the Hoover Library and kept sealed for thirty years. The opening was then delayed until after Maklakov’s death so that he would not face repercussions from the Soviets. The crates were unsealed only in 1957.

Since the archival records were opened, researchers and intelligence agencies have studied the collection to better understand pre-revolutionary Russian secret police techniques, which formed the basis of Soviet espionage and counterespionage during the Cold War. Indeed, six articles on the collection appeared in then classified editions of the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence during the 1960s.

Picking up the trash is a rare way for collectors to get materials into archives, but it was a bit more common back at the end of World War II.  For weeks after the end of the war, Berlin was, in the words of one American eyewitness, “one great junk yard.” 

A selection of papers found in the Nazi Propaganda Ministry courtyard, by then under Soviet control, were collected by an amateur junk dealer for their superior paper quality—but there was something peculiar about them. Coming to the attention of Lieutenant Colonel William Heimlich, an American intelligence officer, the partially burned papers where acquired and identified as authored by Joseph Goebbels, the late Nazi propaganda minister and virulent anti-Semite. After Heimlich's superiors claimed no interest in the documents, he handed the nearly 7,000 manuscript pages over to Herbert Hoover.

Once accessible to researchers, authentication, translation, and publication of the diaries and papers proceeded with the help of the Hoover Institution, providing an eye-opening look into the horrors of the Nazi regime. 

Joseph Goebbels began keeping a diary in 1923 and continued to do so until his death. He wrote entries by hand, three or four times a week until 1941, when he began to dictate daily entries, some of which ran up to thirty typed pages in length. The Hoover Institution has two original portions of the Goebbels diaries: a handwritten notebook covering the period 1925–26 recovered from the Führerbunker, and the typescript diary for 1942–43 salvaged from the junk dealer.