Gorbachev’s Archive Contains Thousands of Documents
The official papers from his almost six years in office were preserved. Gorbachev took them with him when he announced his resignation as the Soviet president at the end of the year, and donated them to the foundation that bears his name.
Since then, about 10,000 documents have been in storage at the foundation’s headquarters on Leningrad Prospect 39 in Moscow. They include the personal archives of his foreign policy advisers, Vadim Zagladin and Anatoly Chernyaev.
The papers illustrate the end period of the communist experiment.
They include the minutes of negotiations with foreign leaders, the handwritten recommendations of advisers to Gorbachev, speaker’s notes for telephone conversations and recordings of those conversations, confidential notes by ambassadors and shorthand records of debates in the politburo.