National Archives and Left-Wing Sources from Russia: Records of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, The Communist Party of Canada and Left-Wing Internationals‪.‬

I. Introduction AS THE COMMUNIST ORDER in Russia and the other Union Republics began unravelling, its bonds critically weakened by Gorbachev's efforts to humanize and modernize that order both in theory and structure, one of the countless side-effects of Gorbachev's ministrations was, in the realm of archives, a loosening of extraordinarily strict controls over records in the Soviet archival system, and in access to them. This phenomenon manifested itself by 1989. By the time that Gorbachev was finally stripped of any nominal, residual authority in late 1990-early 1991, Russian archives were revealing riches whose existence had been suspected by many, but experienced by very, very few.