archival gap in the Leningrad Affair
레닌그라드 사건의 사료 공백
The persistent documentary void that prevents historians from reaching definitive conclusions about the true causes and course of the Leningrad Affair, resulting from the destruction or continued classification of key MGB investigative files, trial protocols, and personal party dossiers. Some documents were destroyed on Malenkov's orders in 1954 and 1957 to conceal his role, while the bulk remain classified in former party archives and security-service repositories, and the archive of the Party Control Commission is incompletely preserved. This gap forces historians to explain the affair's motives through competing hypotheses: Stalin's paranoia, a power struggle between the Malenkov-Beria and Zhdanov factions, or real local corruption, leaving the debate unresolved more than seventy years later.
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- Wikipedia (RU) Russian Wikipedia: states that key document collections remain classified in party and security-service archives and that many documents were destroyed between March 1950 and late 1953. Also notes that the archive of the Party Control Commission is incompletely preserved, and that without access to closed materials no comprehensive scholarly study has been possible.
- dokumen.pub Sushkov, A.V. (2018), «Ленинградское дело»: генеральная чистка «колыбели революции»: preface explicitly states that the bulk of documents remain in closed storage in former party, state-security, and other departmental archives; neither investigative nor party-disciplinary files are accessible to researchers, and personal and nomenklatura dossiers are closed or severely restricted.
- news.rambler.ru Rambler interview with historian Alisa Amosova (St. Petersburg State University): identifies three reasons the true causes remain unknown: documents destroyed on Malenkov's orders in 1954 or 1957; most materials still classified under the 75-year rule; the topic was long taboo for researchers.
- facultystaff.richmond.edu Brandenberger, D. (2013), The Purge of Stalin's Would-Be Successors: manuscript summary notes that scholarly research 'remains inconclusive, largely due to the complexity of the research' and that 'remarkably little is known about the purge itself' despite its importance.
- britannica.com Encyclopaedia Britannica: states that 'the actual motivation for the purge is still unknown,' confirming the epistemological gap that defines the term.