On a sweeping countryside campus about a half-hour southeast of Moscow, an army of archivists is painstakingly at work preserving Russia's film heritage.


There, in the massive Gosfilmofond archives, lie the uncut copies of masterpieces banned or severely edited under socialist realism -- "Asya's Happiness" by Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, "The Disgraceful Affair" by Alexander Alov and Vladimir Naumov and based on Dostoevsky, and "Commissar" by Alexander Askoldov.


Thanks to the Gosfilmofond archive, which was built outside the capital because its treasures contain fire-prone nitrate, these films and other valuable footage have survived carelessness, censorship and the ravages of time.


"Films are rigorously examined, cleaned and rewashed if necessary, and chemically tested every five years," said Galina Karayeva, in charge of maintaining the archival stock. "Then they are stored in 12 temperature-controlled vaults and re-examined until they reach the end of their life, when they are copied onto new film."


The Gosfilmofond employees carry out their cinematographic caretaking with singular devotion, living in flats built specially for them on the 445-acre compound, set among green pastures and vegetable gardens that supply the Gosfilmofond canteen.


The results of their labor since Gosfilmofond's establishment in 1948 include archives of 17,000 Russian features, cartoons and scientific films and 50,000 foreign features and documentaries. The research screening facilities and reference library contain 7,000 books, 15,728 periodicals, 332 film stills and 52,000 posters, as well as scripts, indexes and catalogs.


Unfortunately, some of the oldest Russian films were damaged or lost before the archive was created, and only pieces remain. Most of the 300 silent features by pre-revolutionary filmmakers are actually scraps from a vast output of film that was carelessly treated.


"All countries at one time despised cinema for being a 'second-rate', 'technical' art," said Vladimir Dmitriyev, head of the Gosfilmofond Research Center. "The most dramatic moment came with the Sound era, at the beginning of the 30s, when silent movies seemed to be no longer of any use and were reprocessed. Even Hollywood studios tended to destroy all films considered to be of no commercial value. Russia was no exception."


Dmitriyev said that the only negative of the landmark film "Battleship Potemkin" by Sergei Eisenstein, about the mutiny of a battleship crew during the insurrection of 1905, was sold to Germany in 1926 and brought back only after World War II in a version severely cut by the Nazis. The negative of a 1934 patriotic hit, Sergei and Georgy Vassiliyev's "Chapayev," a striking account of a beloved Civil War Red commandeer, was found half destroyed under the snow in Novosibirsk, Siberia, the site to which the film industry had been evacuated during World War II.


Curiously, the archive contains many foreign films from the period after World War II, both because Stalin limited filmmaking and because Russia received Western films captured as booty from the Nazis.


For example, only eight Russian features were made in 1951, in obedience to Stalin's pronouncement that "fewer productions give us more masterpieces." Among the post-war holdings, therefore, are such pompous epics of Stalinist glorification as "The Oath," "The Fall of Berlin" and "Unforgettable 1919."


The films that post-war Soviet movie-lovers were more likely to remember were taken from Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels's archive of more than 2,000 pictures. They include saccharine musicals starring American ingenue Deanna Durbin and German darling Marika Rokk, for example.


Among other projects, Gosfilmofond has breathed new life into the shelved and forgotten 1954 Cold War classic "Farewell, America!" made by Alexander Dovzhenko, the famous film poet of the Ukraine, in which a young American girl becomes disenchanted with the U.S. Embassy and the United States and decides to stay in the earthly paradise of the Soviet Union. Dmitriyev said he hopes to premiere the restored copy at the International Federation of Film Archives jubilee congress in Los Angeles next year.


As a member since 1957 of the Paris-based archive federation, an association of 100 archives in 60 countries, Gosfilmofond is currently working on the association's Lumiere project to restore silent films.


Valuable historical footage is also part of the archive, as a visiting Japanese film curator discovered.


"Gosfilmofond is amazing," said Mikito Tomito of Tokyo's National Film Center. "I managed to find and identify rare World War II footage of Japanese POWs and propaganda films on war episodes in Manchuria, China and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. We don't have a lot of that in our Tokyo collection."


Despite its value as a repository for the nation's cinematographic heritage, however, the archive sometimes has trouble getting contemporary filmmakers to cooperate.


Dmitriyev said the archive is fighting for a new law requiring that film prints be deposited in the archives, as the old Soviet requirement is no longer in effect.


"Not long ago, I was barely able to talk one talented filmmaker into depositing his film in Gosfilmofond. The poor guy had locked the copy in a stuffy iron safe to 'protect' it. Films are so vulnerable," said Dmitriyev, adding that major studios such as Mosfilm or Lenfilm are also sometimes reluctant to turn over a print of their films.


Dmitriyev said the archive accepts any animation or feature film, free of charge, without judgment.


"No selection, no preferences -- this is our motto," Dmitriyev said. "Who knows what films our descendants would consider to be masterpieces?"