Against All Odds

Researchers like to share archive war stories: traveling across the world to review foreign archives, cutting through red tape to obtain access, deciphering incomprehensible finding aids, and, if luck is on their side, finding a pearl of a document.

Sometimes, however, archival pearls lurk in much quieter waters.  I spent weeks in Almaty, Minsk, and Kyiv collecting sources on the nuclear disarmament of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet one of the most surprising finds turned up close to home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Browsing through the Harvard library catalogue, I stumbled upon a collection of oral history interviews with Ukraine’s first defense minister—Colonel-General Kostiantyn Morozov.  General Morozov belongs to the generation of Soviet military leaders whose lot it was to preside over the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its gargantuan army. Yet his story is not about the demise of the old Soviet system but about the precarious birth of a new state—Ukraine—and its armed forces.