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Dutch experts on a visit to help modernize the former Communist Party archives have stumbled across documents missing from the Netherlands since World War II, according to archivist Leo van Rossum.
Experts from Amsterdam's International Institute of Social History arrived in Moscow with $415, 000 of aid from the Dutch government to give to the archives.
But while visiting Moscow's libraries, van Rossum found documents which he recognized as missing from their Amsterdam institute since the war. He believed that the documents were stolen by Nazi Germany and landed in Russia as war trophies.
Among the papers was the original 1912 peace manifesto drafted by the Socialist International, with handwritten comments by Jean Jaures, leader of the French Socialist Party.
Van Rossum said he was pleasantly surprised to find the Dutch documents. "At least we know that they haven't been lost forever and are still in good condition", he said.
Whether or not the Netherlands will get them back has not yet been discussed, he added.
"The collections these archives have are huge and some are simply rotting away", Von Rossum said. "We want to improve the infrastructural facilities, for the benefit of scholars from Russia and abroad".
Formerly known as the Communist Party's Central Archive, the Russian Center for the Preservation and Research of Documents of Modern History used to be responsible, among other things, for inserting appropriate quotations from the Marxist classics into speeches of top bureaucrats.
Since the failed August 1991 coup, the library was stripped of equipment and money to finance the preservation of more than 1 million documents.
The library is renowned for having the most complete collection of manuscripts of European labor movements. Other beneficiaries are the independent research and document center Memorial and various institutions that succeeded the former Communist Party's Institute of Marxism-Leninism.
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