Arseny Roginsky. Source: Memorial Archive.
“For me, the archive (and I mean, of course, only literary and historical archives) is the natural continuation of the library. And unpublished archival documents are in no way different from published documents, you can treat them as accidentally unpublished or as-yet-unpublished. I believe it’s necessary to explain this now because I often meet people far from historical research who are sincerely convinced that archives always contain classified documents, or documents that might defame someone or something. And that’s why they only let chosen people into archives, people endowed with some ‘special trust’, and that that’s how it should be. This idea of what an archive is, is, of course, completely mistaken. Just as mistaken as an attempt to classify documents as more important or less important, more valuable or less valuable. Every document is important, every document is valuable as evidence of our past.”
