Reference Library
Germany's Two Constitutions (1949)
The two documents that gave the division of Germany the force of law: the 146 articles of the Basic Law promulgated at Bonn on 23 May, which calls itself a provisional order 'until the day of unity' and begins with human dignity, and the 144 articles of the Constitution of the German Democratic Republic adopted by the People's Council on 7 October, which declares 'Germany an indivisible democratic republic' and writes in the right to work, nationalisation and the supremacy of the People's Chamber. The founding texts of two states, from one country in one year, side by side.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersBeria in 1953: the March amnesty decree and the December trial documents
The amnesty decree of 27 March 1953, three weeks after Stalin's death, which on Beria's initiative freed over a million prisoners while leaving political prisoners inside; and the December communiqué of the Special Judicial Presence and the execution act that condemned the same Beria, arrested three months later, as a 'foreign agent'. Nine months from the amnesty's author to his execution.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsImre Nagy and the Kremlin: the Moscow talks of June 1953 and the Presidium's criticism of January 1955
Two Hungarian records of meetings in the Kremlin. On 13 and 16 June 1953 Malenkov, Beria, Molotov and others condemned Rákosi's one-man rule, over-rapid industrialisation and mass prosecutions, and named Imre Nagy chairman of the Council of Ministers. On 8 January 1955 the same Presidium condemned Nagy's article of 20 October 1954 and his 'new stage' line as anti-party and backed Rákosi again: 'either with the party or against it'. Korean translation from the Hungarian.
Read the full text → Treaties & agreementsThe Warsaw Treaty
The full text of the eight-nation treaty of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance: the Article 4 mutual-assistance clause mirroring NATO's Article 5, the Joint Command and Political Consultative Committee, and Article 11's promise to dissolve into an all-European security treaty.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsThe Pospelov Commission Report (1956)
The seventy-page investigation submitted to the Presidium a fortnight before Khrushchev's secret speech: the first tally of 1,920,635 arrests and 688,503 executions for 'anti-Soviet activity' in 1935–1940, the quotas of the 'kulak operation' and the nationality statistics of the 'national operations', the extrajudicial 'album' procedure and the troikas, Stalin's 1939 telegram sanctioning torture, and the cases of Postyshev, Kosior, Eikhe, Rudzutak, Chubar and other Central Committee members of the Seventeenth Congress, opened one by one through interrogation records and letters. The raw material the secret speech drew on almost verbatim.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesKhrushchev's Secret Speech, On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences
A complete Korean translation of the report Khrushchev delivered to the closed session of the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU on 25 February 1956. Beginning with Lenin's proposal in his Letter to the Congress to remove Stalin, it moves through the mass repression that followed Kirov's murder, the execution of most of the Central Committee elected in 1934, confessions obtained by torture, the misjudgements of the first months of the war, the deportation of whole nationalities, the break with Yugoslavia, the Leningrad Affair and the Doctors' Plot, and the making of the cult itself. At its centre are the prison letters of Eikhe, Rudzutak and Kedrov, read out from the rostrum. Translated from the 1989 publication in the CPSU Central Committee Bulletin, with that edition's sixty-six editorial notes rendered as a separate section.
Read the full text → Intelligence & investigation recordsThe Poznań Rising in the CIA Current Intelligence Bulletin (1956)
The Poznań items of the CIA Current Intelligence Bulletin of 29 and 30 June 1956, the day after the workers' rising and the day after that. The first reports how a protest over wages and food turned into a political demonstration that tore down Soviet flags, and the use of tanks; the second sets the regime's admission of 38 dead and 270 wounded beside the East German rising of 1953 and judges that the riots will slow the 'liberalization' program.
Read the full text → Party & government documents'On Overcoming the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences': the CPSU Central Committee resolution (1956)
The Central Committee's first public statement four months after Khrushchev's secret speech, and the official de-Stalinisation text that Soviet citizens and foreign communists could actually read until the speech was published in 1989. It explains the cult as a product of Stalin's personal traits and objective conditions while insisting that 'the nature of the social system' was untouched, rebuts Togliatti and the 'bourgeois ideologues', and draws the permitted limits of criticism of Stalin.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsHungary 1956: Seven Documents of the CPSU Presidium
Mikoyan's telegram from Budapest of 14 July, reporting Rákosi's removal and describing the party leadership as 'in a state of prostration', and five of Malin's pencilled working notes of Presidium sessions from 23 October, the day the rising began, to 3 November, the eve of the intervention, with the resolution of 31 October. Khrushchev's proposal to send in troops on the 23rd, the tilt towards withdrawal on the 30th, the reversal of the 31st — 'reconsider the assessment; do not withdraw the troops' — and the forming of a new government with Kádár on 2–3 November, all in one man's handwriting.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsThe Berlin Wall 1961 — East German Documents: Ulbricht's Press Conference and Politburo Protocol 39/61
The stenographic excerpt of Walter Ulbricht's international press conference of 15 June 1961, with Annemarie Doherr's question and the answer 'Nobody has the intention of building a wall', and Protocol 39/61 of the SED Politburo's extraordinary session of 7 August 1961, which, days after Khrushchev's consent, set the 'planned control measures' to begin 'in the night from Saturday to Sunday'. The document that fixed the date of the border closure never uses the word 'wall'.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsThe Berlin Wall 1961 — Four US Diplomatic Telegrams: the Berlin Mission's Report of 13 August and the Friedrichstrasse Crisis of 27 October
Telegram 185, the Berlin Mission's report of the Commandants' meeting with Mayor Brandt on the evening of 13 August 1961, and three telegrams from 27 October, the day Soviet and American tanks faced each other at Checkpoint Charlie: Thompson's 1378 from Moscow, where Gromyko told him that GDR sovereignty was not negotiable; Clay's assessment to Rusk (856); and the Department's instruction (620) suspending armed civilian probes. From FRUS 1961–1963, vol. XIV.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsThe Nine Commentaries on the Open Letter of the CPSU Central Committee
The nine commentaries the Chinese party published between September 1963 and July 1964, answering the Soviet open letter: from the assessment of Stalin and peaceful coexistence to the class character of Soviet society itself.
Read the full text → Intelligence & investigation recordsAmbassador Kohler's Telegram 1183 on the Fall of Khrushchev (1964)
The analytical telegram Ambassador Foy Kohler sent from Moscow four days after Khrushchev's removal: the irony that the principle Khrushchev himself established, the Central Committee as custodian of power, was used to remove him; a leadership arrangement that invites conspiracy by a few Presidium members; and the prospect that Brezhnev now faces the same pitfalls, in five points.
Read the full text → Treaties & agreementsTwo Détente Agreements: the SALT I Interim Agreement (1972) and the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War (1973)
The SALT I Interim Agreement signed in Moscow in May 1972, which froze ICBM and SLBM launcher numbers and left verification to 'national technical means', and the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War signed in Washington in June 1973, in which a Soviet draft pledge of mutual nuclear non-use became, after a year of negotiation, an obligation to consult urgently whenever nuclear war threatened. The two documents at the core of Soviet–American détente. Appended at the end is President Carter's letter of 3 January 1980 to Senator Byrd asking that Senate consideration of the SALT II Treaty be delayed in light of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: a short document on how the détente treaties ended.
Read the full text → Treaties & agreementsThe Helsinki Final Act (Excerpt): the Declaration of Principles and the Confidence-Building Measures Document (1975)
The security section of the CSCE Final Act signed by thirty-five heads of state on 1 August 1975: the Declaration on Principles Guiding Relations between Participating States, with its ten principles from sovereign equality and the inviolability of frontiers to respect for human rights and the self-determination of peoples, and the Document on confidence-building measures providing for prior notification of major military manoeuvres. The economic and humanitarian baskets are omitted.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersThe 1977 Constitution of the USSR
Complete Korean translation of the Soviet Constitution adopted at an extraordinary session of the USSR Supreme Soviet on October 7, 1977 (the "Brezhnev Constitution"). A preamble proclaiming developed socialist society is followed by 174 articles in nine parts and 21 chapters covering the social system, citizens' rights and duties, the national-state structure, the Soviets of People's Deputies, the highest organs of state, justice and the procuracy, and state symbols; Article 6 enshrines the CPSU as the leading and guiding force of society. Translated from the Russian text as adopted in 1977.
Read the full text → Treaties & agreementsSALT II: Treaty, Protocol, Joint Statement and Backfire Statements (1979)
The 18 June 1979 treaty limiting US and Soviet strategic offensive arms, with agreed statements and common understandings, the protocol, guidelines for subsequent negotiations, and the Backfire statements. Korean translation of the US government text reproduced by FAS; the memorandum data tables are omitted.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsThree Documents of the Afghan War: the intervention decision (1979), the Geneva Accords (1988), the condemnation (1989)
The Politburo decision of 12 December 1979 that hid the country's name behind the letter 'A'; the Geneva Accords of 14 April 1988 (four instruments and the two guarantors' statements) that fixed the phased Soviet withdrawal from 15 May within nine months; and the Congress of People's Deputies resolution of 24 December 1989 declaring, ten months after the withdrawal, that the decision 'deserves moral and political condemnation'. The beginning, the exit and the end of the war.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesGorbachev, 'On Perestroika and the Party's Cadre Policy' (1987)
The January 1987 plenum report in which perestroika turned from economic 'acceleration' to political 'democratisation'. Locating the causes of stagnation in the 'braking mechanism' and the conservatism of the cadres, Gorbachev proposed multi-candidate secret-ballot elections in the party and the soviets, elected enterprise directors, and glasnost: 'we need democracy like air'. The first official formulation of the method of appealing over the heads of a resistant leadership to the party rank and file and the people, which led to the Nineteenth Party Conference and the 1989 elections.
Read the full text → Treaties & agreementsThe Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1987)
The treaty signed in Washington on 8 December 1987 on the elimination of Soviet and US intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles. Korean translation of the Russian treaty text; the memorandum of understanding and the elimination and inspection protocols are not included.
Read the full text → Party & government documentsPolitburo working record — the third day of Sumgait (29 February 1988)
The verbatim working record of the Politburo on the third day of the Sumgait pogrom: Gorbachev asks whether the appeal has worked, the KGB and the interior ministry report casualties and the state of the city, and Yazov's request for a curfew is settled by 'Members of the Politburo: agreed'. The lag of information (casualty figures only on day three), leaders who had 'not read' the Karabakh letters, Gorbachev calling the killers 'extremists' while urging a rethink of nationality policy — the inside record of perestroika's first great nationalities crisis.
Read the full text → Writings & speechesGorbachev's Address to the UN General Assembly (1988)
A full translation of Gorbachev's address to the UN General Assembly on 7 December 1988: the summa of the New Thinking, from the primacy of universal human values to freedom of choice and de-ideologization, and the announcement of a unilateral cut of 500,000 troops that became a milestone of the Cold War's end. Translated from the English of the UN provisional verbatim record (A/43/PV.72).
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersThe Interim Travel Regulation of 9 November 1989, 'Schabowski's Note'
The interim regulation on travel and permanent emigration circulated by the GDR Council of Ministers on 9 November 1989, with the attached press release: private travel abroad may be applied for without stating reasons, visas are to be issued 'without delay', and permanent emigration is possible at all border crossings. Read out by Schabowski at the evening press conference as 'immediately, without delay', it opened the Wall that night; the document itself was to take effect the next day.
Read the full text → Constitutions, laws & ordersThe Union's Last Year: the Secession Procedure Law (1990) and the Draft Union of Sovereign States Treaty (1991)
The secession procedure law of April 1990 that the Baltic states called the 'law on non-secession' (a two-thirds referendum, a transition of up to five years, confirmation by the Congress), and the draft treaty of a Union of Sovereign States of August 1991 that tried to refound the Union as a 'voluntary association of sovereign republics' and was wrecked by the coup the day before signing. Two documents the USSR never got to use: one to make leaving hard, one to give a reason to stay.
Read the full text →