Valery Ivanovich Boldin

In February 1987, during a break in a Central Committee plenum, Gorbachev pointed at Boldin over tea with the Politburo members and announced, "Here's the new head of the General Department." Boldin had already declined the post two months earlier, protesting that he knew nothing of "paper work," but Gorbachev insisted: "This is something I really need." And so Boldin became the head of the largest department in the Party apparatus, with a staff of over six hundred.

The General Department (Общий отдел) controlled the entire document flow of the Politburo, Secretariat, and plenums. More than a million citizen letters and tens of thousands of reports from ministries and party committees passed through it each year. Boldin found himself working past midnight every night, later recalling that he "nearly suffocated in the paper carousel." But the real core of the department lay deep in the Kremlin, in the basements and in part of Stalin's former apartment, where the Politburo archive had been accumulating since the mid-1920s. It held stenographic records of plenums and congresses, Politburo meeting protocols, NKVD–KGB documents, personal papers of prominent figures, files of foreign communist leaders, and the notorious "special dossier" (особая папка) alongside sealed packets that had not been opened since the 1930s.

When Boldin surveyed the archive and proposed opening at least part of it to the public, the General Department launched the journal Izvestiya TsK KPSS (Известия ЦК КПСС), which for the first time published previously secret materials, including documents from the Politburo Commission on the repressions of the 1930s–40s and early 1950s.

The most sensitive documents, however, remained in Boldin's hands. Shortly before a meeting with General Jaruzelski, Gorbachev gave an urgent order: find the Katyn documents. Within two hours Boldin brought him two sealed "top secret" packets. One contained Beria's note confirming the NKVD had shot the Polish officers; the other held the postwar commission's fabricated conclusion blaming the fascists. Gorbachev read them, resealed the packets himself with adhesive tape, and told Boldin: "Keep these safe. Let no one near them without me." Polish leaders, a joint Soviet-Polish commission, and even Soviet reformists like KGB chief Kryuchkov and Valentin Falin repeatedly requested disclosure. Gorbachev rebuffed them all and instructed Boldin to tell the Poles that "no reliable facts beyond those made public during the war have been found."

The Molotov–Ribbentrop secret protocols were still more dramatic. Boldin discovered the originals: two pages initialed by Ribbentrop and Molotov, plus a large map signed by Ribbentrop and Stalin, and reported them to Gorbachev. The General Secretary unrolled the map on his desk, studied the agreed border line, and said simply, "Hide it." Yet at the Congress of People's Deputies in 1989, Gorbachev declared to the world that "all attempts to find the original have been unsuccessful." Boldin later wrote: "Why he needed to tell an untruth before the whole world, I cannot say for certain." In August 1991, the gatekeeper who had guarded every one of these state secrets joined the coup to overthrow the very leader he had served for a decade.