archival gap in the Leningrad Affair

Definition: what the gap is

This entry names not the Leningrad Affair itself but the state of knowledge about it. The main document collections on the affair are still closed in party and departmental archives, so a full scholarly study of its causes and course has not been carried out. Criminal files and documents on arrests, interrogations, the indictment, and the trial remain classified today, and researchers have had to rely on indirect material such as the investigative reports drawn up by the Party Control Commission.

History: sealed files and a long taboo

The gap begins with the affair's own course, not only with the closing of the files. Arrests began in July 1949, the trial of the first group was held on 29-30 September 1950, and that group was shot on 1 October 1950. Rehabilitation and publication then narrowed the gap slowly. In 1954 the Supreme Court reviewed the case and rehabilitated those involved, and the CPSU Presidium recognized the case as falsified; the victims were posthumously restored to the party in the late 1980s. In 1997 the Russian Supreme Court ruled that Abakumov and his subordinates had created the affair and repressed about 150 family members of those convicted.

Rehabilitation did not close the gap. Britannica dates the purge to 1948-50, starting several months after Zhdanov's death on 31 August 1948, and notes that the affair was never officially announced, being mentioned only in Khrushchev's secret speech of February 1956. Rehabilitation stretched over decades, from the Khrushchev thaw to perestroika; the affair remained practically unstudied in the USSR until the 1980s, while American historians took an interest as early as the Khrushchev period. In this light, the affair and related repressions are among the least studied and least understood events of the late-Stalinist postwar period, a condition the literature attributes to unavailable party files, expanded personal-data protection, and incomplete preservation of key archives such as that of the Party Control Commission.

Examples and distinctions

Not everything is closed. Additional Party Control Commission and state materials on the same affair remain unpublished or outside researchers' reach, for example information on the Karnakov fraud case connected to the Leningrad leadership. Yet Party Control Commission material has been available: files microfilmed in RGANI became consultable at the Library of Congress from the 1990s, Abakumov's report to Stalin of 24 October 1950 on the remaining arrested persons, with lists of those to be shot or imprisoned, has been published, and the affair's own indictment was published and analysed by Boldovsky and Brandenberger in 2019.

Such material does not substitute for the missing files, and it is internally inconsistent. Brandenberger shows that the Party Control Commission's sums were inconsistent and manipulated: for one hunting estate the figures ran to more than 245 thousand rubles, then 400 thousand, then 304 thousand, while a later check found 366 thousand, and the 1947 monetary reform was not accounted for. Sushkov starts from declassified Party Control Commission and state documentation and treats it as reliable, whereas Chirikova and Brandenberger hold that he leaves open supplementing or changing the picture of the affair as the ban on unknown archival sources is lifted. The dispute over figures itself records the gap: different sources place the affair's victims at about 30, while the official counts are 214 convicted and 26 shot.

The gap must be distinguished from the affair itself and its repression scale, from rehabilitation, which was official and repeated, and from the Party Control Commission material and other declassified sources, which are partial and contested. Brandenberger's review judges Sushkov's use of declassified archival sources 'exhaustive' and notes that some aspects of the affair can only be understood comparatively, while criticising his uncritical reading of post-purge investigative reports. That is the precise boundary between open and closed evidence.