Postface. Ego-Documents As Counter-Archives in Russia

In discussions about the value of autobiographical texts as historical sources, the potential of these texts to compensate for limitations of archives has played a greater role in Russia and the Soviet Union than in Western Europe. Historians, literary scholars, and publicists valued this category of texts as “counter-archives” and saw in it a documentation of those events that otherwise remained inaccessible in the arcana of power – sealed behind archive walls, concealed by censorship. The a..