Bookworm Paradise
Moscow City Archives, which are celebrating their 200th anniversary with an exhibit in ally Manezh, now house over 8.5 million storage units in seven specialized archives - and that number keeps growing.
By Natalia Davydova

Moscow News Moscow's archives started to grow rapidly when the Communist Party finally gave up the mountains of documents it had held in secrecy. In 1991, tons of formerly confidential documents - about 11,500 bags of them, to be more exact - were transported to the city archives at 10 Mezhdunarodnaya St. Their organization and categorization goes on to this day.

According to those at Moscow's Central Archive of Social Movements, the documents stored there form an exhaustive textbook of contemporary Moscow history. However, since the Communists liked to classify all of their documents, it is still not possible to read the entire "textbook" - declassification takes time. In fact, declassification has been completed only for documents dated before 1945.

However strange, the archive on Mezhdunarodnaya sees relatively few visitors. Foreigners, however, seem to understand its value and visit it regularly. The archive at Profsoyuznaya, on the other hand, is always crowded. It is di vided into three specialized archives: municipal, historical and technical. A large number of the visitors are art specialists who study ways to restore historic buildings to their former glory. Another significant group are those searching for their family's roots. During perestroika, mostly Russians of noble descent roamed the archives. Now the nobles visit rarely, but the descendants of merchants are seen quite often. Compared to the number of people using the archives for personal reasons, government researchers are very few. However, some poor regional museums still manage to scrape up the funds to send one of their employees to the capital's archives. A great many students can also be seen at the archive, mostly graduate students pouring over documents and piecing together their dissertations. After all, in academic institutes, the "Moscow topic" is in vogue.

There are plenty of foreigners at the Profsoyuznaya archive as well. However, according to archive employees, most are interested in topics like prostitution. There are, however, serious foreign academics as well. One American, for instance, spent several years in the city archives studying Russian peasantry. He then sent the archive a gift from across the ocean - his new book, "The Muzhik and the Muscovite."

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov has done his best to take care of the precious archives. Workers there fondly recall the mayor's 30 percent raise to their very meager salaries. They also support the mayor's latest move: the creation of a special inspection that will fine departments that don't properly care for their documents. Although the mayor has yet to visit any of the 100 kilometers of shelves that line the city's archives, people who have dedicated their lives to them remember how Luzhkov called Moscow City Archives director, Alexei Kiselev, several years ago and asked for documents pertaining to the Christ the Savior Cathedral. On that very day, the mayor was presented with several boxes, stuffed to the top with documents. Luzhkov was very surprised by the documents' impeccable condition.