Russia plans to open the world's largest WWII archive, the size of which will "comply with the contribution of our country to the Victory." (The Russians have always insisted that they won World War II, not us. The real answer is that we all won it.) This archive project will apparently entail building new buildings to house the holding which will be brought in from numerous archives around the country. The project will also include a major digitization effort and will apparently include some sort of commercial database dealing with Soviet casualties. The article hints that similar efforts may be undertaken to assess German and Hungarian losses on the Eastern Front.
There are significant practicality issues associated with this project. Furthermore, the desirability of taking war records out of existing archives and putting them into a purpose-built archive designed around an event as opposed to something that organically grew as out of an agency or other organization, is eminently debatable. (For an excellent discussion of these issues, see the fine post at The Russian Front.) On the other hand, many archives in Russia are in lamentable condition, so if the price of survival for these records is some disorganization, perhaps that is a price worth paying. In addition, the digitization component of the project is certainly a good thing, though one does wonder what if any political criteria will be applied to select the documents and files that will be digitized.
Interestingly, Andrei Artizov, the head of the Russian Federal Archive Agency (Federal'naia arkhivnaia sluzhba Rossii aka Rosarkhiv) says that the new archive should include substantial German records "like those of Hitler's chancellery, the Reich's Security Services and others. In compliance with the existing legislation, they are part of Russia's property." Meanwhile, a so-far very modest U.S. Government effort to do something similar with copies of analogous Iraqi records captured in 2003 generates accusation of malfeasance.
In any case, this will be an interesting story to follow.
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