The article discusses the impact on Western scholarship of the opening of secret police
archives in Ukraine since the 1990s. The extent of the phenomenon known as the “archival
revolution” is surveyed, with special attention to the Stalin period. The archives have
answered some old questions concerning the way Stalin exercised power, organized
show trials, and forced people to admit to crimes they did not commit. Archival revelations
have also stimulated Western researchers to consider new ways of interpreting the
Soviet period as a whole.