It seemed like another coup for Harvard. The scholars in Cambridge sent out a press release in October touting the acquisition of a treasure trove of formerly top-secret documents on communist rule in the Soviet Union.
Only one problem: Stanford's Hoover Institution masterminded the archival project and has long had a full set of the documents. Harvard's version -- some 10,000 reels of microfilm purchased for $600,000 -- is simply a copy. What's more, Stanford gets a royalty of $90,000 in the deal. "We thought they made a good purchase," says Charles Palm, '66, Hoover's chief archivist. "It helps pay some of our costs."
The gaffe left Harvard officials crimson. "Oh, brother. That's embarrassing," said Marshall Goldman, associate director of the David Center for Russian Studies, when he was alerted to the flub by a Boston Globe reporter. A day later, Goldman received a fax from Hoover archivist Elena Danielson. The first page was a polite note suggesting Goldman might want to read the attached article, a six-page cover story from the May/June 1999 issue of Stanford that detailed the work Hoover officials did over the last eight years to acquire the Soviet archives ("Cracking the Kremlin Files"). Goldman said he was still excited to have the documents, which bolster Harvard as a center for Soviet studies, but admitted the novelty was gone.
Hoover began working with Moscow officials in 1991, when the chief of the Russian archives paid a visit to the Stanford think tank. The agreement they eventually reached allows Hoover to microfilm some 25 million pages of previously secret Soviet material, including records of Stalin's execution orders during the Great Terror, the papers of the Soviet police and documents about purges within the Communist Party. A British publishing firm processes the microfilm and markets it to other institutions, which is how Harvard got its set.
