Declassified U?

Declassified U was a documentary series and accompanying archival publication project that made restricted government records from the August Emergency and the Novo-Ogaryovo negotiations available to public view between 1998 and 2004. The project was jointly sponsored by the Russian Sovereign Republic's Presidential Archive and a coalition of international human rights organizations, and resulted in the theatrical release of four feature-length documentaries and a printed compendium of more than four thousand declassified pages from the archives.

The project began in 1997 when the Archives of the Russian Presidential Library agreed, at the urging of international observers including the International Committee of the Red Cross, to review records from the spring of 1992 for possible public release. The impetus came partly from demands by scholars and journalists for fuller documentation of the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords negotiations, and partly from a broader opening toward transparency in the Russian Sovereign Republic that followed Boris Yeltsin's reelection in 1996. The review process proved difficult. Officials at the Presidential Archive found significant material too sensitive to release uncut; sensitive names were redacted, and some documents were held back entirely. Nonetheless, by 1998, a workable body of material had been approved for release.

The first Declassified U film, The Four Days, premiered in March 1998 at the Berlin Film Festival and examined the detention at Foros during the August 1991 crisis. It relied heavily on testimony from former security personnel and officials who had been present, and wove together this oral account with newly released photographs and short film footage from the resort compound. The production received wide attention, in part because it featured the first extended interviews with several figures who had previously given only brief statements about the emergency.

The second and third films, released in 1999 and 2000, focused on the nine months of bargaining between the Russian Sovereign Republic, the other republics, and the Union centre that led to the March 1992 accords. These documentaries drew heavily on the declassified negotiation transcripts, though with significant redactions. Audio was reconstructed where original recordings had been lost or classified, and reconstructed dialogue was noted as such. The films were criticized by some scholars for the extent of these reconstructions, but others argued that the availability of the underlying documents allowed readers to judge the accuracy themselves.

The fourth film, released in 2002, focused on the Oral History Project: Voices from 1992, interviewing participants from across the nine republics that remained in the Union after the accords, as well as from the departed republics. This film was the most explicitly comparative; it drew parallels between the experience of negotiators in Moscow, Nur-Sultan, and other capitals, and attempted to capture the dissonance between how the accords were presented differently in different republics.

Alongside the films, the project published a printed Declassified U Compendium of Documents in four volumes between 1998 and 2003. The compendium reproduced the full text of several hundred key documents, mostly meeting minutes, cables, and policy papers. Pages bore printed notes where material had been redacted, and the archive provided a finding guide keyed to both the films and to holdings at various repositories.

The Declassified U project proved contentious within the Union of Soviet Sovereign States. Some officials in Moscow objected strenuously to the release of negotiation records, arguing that candid conversations between officials could not be published without damaging inter-republican trust. By contrast, officials in resource-rich republics like Kazakhstan saw the opening of records as a precedent they could demand for their own archives. The Siberian Economic Council and other regional institutions did not themselves release comparable materials during this period, though the Declassified U precedent created pressure for future transparency.

Scholars have generally found the released materials invaluable, though incomplete. The Archives of the Russian Presidential Library retains significantly more material from the period than was released. Estimates of what remains classified vary: one analyst in 2010 suggested that perhaps forty percent of negotiation records from 1991–1992 have never been made public, though this figure is itself disputed by the archive's own administrators.

The theatrical films reached wider audiences than the printed compendium. The Declassified U documentaries were broadcast on television networks across Europe and in several republics, and were screened in universities and cultural institutions. The compendium remained largely the domain of scholars and archival researchers, though university libraries across the Union acquired copies.

The project formally ended in 2004, though the archive has continued to process and occasionally release additional material from the period on a case-by-case basis. No new Declassified U films have been produced since 2002, and the series remains the most substantial body of publicly available primary documentation on the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords process.