Historian `optimistic' Russia will open Cold War archives soon

The Miami Herald November 1, 1998 Historian `optimistic' Russia will open Cold War archives soon

By ANDRES OPPENHEIMER
Herald Staff Writer

             Alexander A. Fursenko, chairman of the Russian Academy of Sciences' History
             Department, is hopeful that Russia will soon declassify a wealth of Cold War-era
             documents from the former Soviet Union.

             ``I'm optimistic,'' Fursenko said Friday during a visit to Miami to speak about his
             1997 book One Hell of a Gamble: The Secret Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis,
             which he co-wrote with Timothy Naftali. ``There are many influential people in
             Russia who are pressing to open these archives.''

             A government-appointed commission to declassify documents is being formed and
             may expedite regulations calling for the release of documents that are at least 30
             years old, Fursenko said. President Boris Yeltsin has yet to sign an executive
             order authorizing the commission to make public files from the Soviet Politburo
             and other Communist Party agencies, he said.

             ``There is a misconception out there that Russia opened up its archives after
             1991,'' when the Soviet Union collapsed, said Naftali, of Yale University. ``But
             what has come out so far is mostly stuff from the Soviet Foreign Ministry, which
             was way down in their political food chain.''

Fursenko and Naftali are working on a book about the history of the Cold War
during the Nikita Khrushchev years as seen from Moscow and Washington.

             At a speech at the University of Miami last week, the two historians expanded on
             the key points of their last book, which said Soviet officials did not perceive Fidel
             Castro as a Communist in the early years of the Cuban Revolution -- contradicting
             some Castro biographers who assert that the Cuban leader was a closet
             Communist from his early days as a guerrilla.

             Among the curious details in One Hell of a Gamble is a report that Castro once
             applied to Harvard University, and was turned down. Quoting from published
             reports, including a 1959 Harvard Crimson interview with former U.S. official
             McGeorge Bundy, the book says Bundy used the story of Castro's failed
             application to Harvard when he introduced Castro to 8,700 members of the
             Harvard community in April 1959.

             ``Caught up in the exuberance of the event, he [Bundy] declared that Harvard was
             ready to make amends for its 1948 mistake. It had decided to admit him. How
             different the world might have been had Fidel Castro accepted a place in the
             Harvard class of 1963!''