Interviewing the Soviet Elite

Abstract

Interview methods have rarely been employed at leading levels in modern societies, and they have been even less frequently employed, despite their potential, in societies under Communist rule.1 It was appropriate, for example, that a discussion of the Khrushchev period between Aleksandr Shelepin, Vladimir Senichastnyi and former Moscow first secretary Nikolai Egorychev, recorded in what was then the Central Party Archives, should appear in a volume entitled Unknown Russia.2 The interviews that took place with leading members of the Gorbachev leadership for the BBC programs on the Second Russian Revolution are also available for scholarly use in the West.3 A series of interviews with the Polish post-Communist leadership appeared in the late 1980s;4 studies have also appeared of, for instance, the Nazi elite, and a recent program has begun to record the experiences of the former East Germany's leadership.5 The oral history, or life story, method has otherwise rarely been employed at elite level, despite the fact that contemporary social science already has demonstrated its potential.6 There was clearly little prospect, in the Soviet period, of launching an interviewbased program of research at leadership level. But it became possible to do so in the early post-Communist period, partly because of the demise of the Soviet system to

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