The Soviet Union’s Endless Paper Trail of Evil Comes to Light : History: The communists, like the Nazis, kept detailed records of their atrocities. Not since Nuremberg have such mass crimes been disclosed.

In the mid-1980s, as the Soviet Union emerged from its self-imposed ice age of communism, Iurii Afanasiev, one of the first Russian historians to take advantage of Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost , observed that no other country had distorted its past so systematically and completely as the Soviet Union. Since then, the once seemingly unshakable edifice of state-sponsored historical falsehood has crumbled under unceasing hammer blows of revealed truths. It is no exaggeration to say that the Soviet Union died under the weight of its own history.

Russia’s new non-communist rulers know well what brought them to power: In the wake of last August’s failed coup, their first act was the seizure of Communist Party archives. By making available the historical record of the Soviet state to scholars, President Boris N. Yeltsin’s men are working to ensure that the Soviet Union will never be resurrected. Freedom of the press and the opening of once secret state archives have loosed a flood of historical information.

Five years ago, Gorbachev could claim, with seeming sincerity, that the Soviet Union had solved its nationality problems. He even suggested that the United States could defuse its own ethnic tensions by adopting Soviet methods. Last August, by contrast, Yeltsin’s foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, said that the Soviet Union had really been an evil empire. Freedom of the press and frankness about history had made Gorbachev’s earlier stance appear absurd.

The dark history of the Soviet state has emerged through the publication of memoirs, journalistic and historical accounts and, most significant, the publication of archival documents. Not since the defeat of Nazi Germany, in 1945, has such a treasure trove of untapped sources become available to historians. Nor, since the Nuremberg Trials, has such a record of mass crimes seen the light.

We now know, for example, that the Soviets, like the Nazis, kept detailed records of their atrocities. Rumors abound about a cleansing of the archives, but enough material remains to paint a gloomy portrait.

One of Josef Stalin’s lesser-known crimes was his deportation of several subject nationalities, judged “disloyal” during World War II, to Siberia and Soviet Central Asia. Documents published in Istoriia SSSR last year convey some sense of these policies’ human cost: By 1949, these “special deportees” totaled 2,463,940, which, with chilling bureaucratic precision, Soviet secret police recorded as consisting of “665,674 men, 829,084 women and 979,182 children under the age of 16.” These numbers were, of course, only a fraction of those actually deported; many died en route to exile, as these documents make plain.

Such documents are of more than mere historical interest. In the case of the Crimean Peninsula, history shadows the present. In the spring of 1944, Stalin deported the region’s Tatar inhabitants less than a year before President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited the area during the Yalta Conference. During this special “operation,” 191,044 Crimean Tatars, who had lived for centuries on the peninsula, were deported to the Soviet hinterland. Five years later, only 43,135 survived in their places of exile.

The Crimean question will not go away. Having emptied the peninsula of its population, Stalin resettled it with Russians. Fifty years on, these Russians, naturally, regard themselves as native. Adding to the complications, Nikita S. Khrushchev granted the Crimea to the Ukranian republic in 1954, at a time when no sane person could have predicted that Ukraine would ever become independent of Russia. Now, amid the rubble of the collapsed Soviet empire, three nationalities--Russian, Ukranian and Tatar--all claim the Crimean Peninsula as theirs.

Revelations in the Soviet press cast light on international relations as well. One book that created quite a stir in Russia, while causing scarcely a ripple in the U.S. press, is a 600-page volume of the oral reminiscences of Viacheslav M. Molotov, Stalin’s right-hand man during the 1930s and his foreign minister during World War II and the early Cold War years. During the last two decades of his life, Molotov, who lived to 96, recounted his experiences to a sympathetic Soviet author, Fedor (or Fyodor) Chuev. Molotov’s vantage point was unparalleled, and his recollections range from observations on Stalin’s bloody purges during the late 1930s, which he defends as having been necessary to guard against treason, to pen portraits of Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman and most communist leaders.

Molotov’s observations offer little comfort to historians who have argued that Soviet foreign policy was benign and defensive during and immediately after the war. Molotov’s world view was Manichaean, with socialism and capitalism irrevocably hostile. Stalin’s foreign policy was also frankly expansionist. “I saw my task as minister of foreign affairs,” says Molotov, “as being how to expand the boundaries of our Fatherland. And it seems to me that we and Stalin did not cope badly with this task.”

Accordingly, he gave no credit to Western leaders, such as Roosevelt, who tried to cooperate with Moscow. According to Molotov, Roosevelt was simply better at dissimulation than his more overtly anti-Soviet successors. “Roosevelt believed in dollars,” Molotov claimed, and so he thought that a Soviet Union weakened after war with Germany would bow to American capital. “But in this they were not Marxists, and we were. When they lost half of Europe, they woke up.”

For decades, historians have been sharply divided on whether Soviet espionage in the West was critical to Moscow’s acquisition of the atomic bomb. Molotov’s account supports the recently published contentions of Khrushchev and Andrei Sakharov that Soviet spies in the West, including the Rosenbergs, did provide vital information, enabling the Soviets to shorten their atomic project. Molotov, it should be remembered, was head of the Soviet atomic-energy project. “It was a very good operation of our chekists,” he recalled, using the earlier name of the KGB. “They stole what was needed very well. At the most appropriate moment, when we had only begun to work on this.”

As for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Molotov was coy: “It cannot be ruled out that they helped us. But we should not talk about that. This might prove useful to us in the future.” Propaganda portraying the Rosenbergs as martyrs of anti-communist hysteria was apparently too useful to discard with casual honesty.

One irony of this outpouring of historical information is that, by all accounts, the Russians have become much less interested in each successive revelation. In the early days of glasnost, when every new historical fact was a taste of long-forbidden fruit, the public eagerly devoured newspapers that published historical scandals. Now the collapse of the Russian economy and the triumph of press freedom have dulled Russian tastes.

In a strange way, however, the fact that Russians are less obsessive about their past may itself be a sign that the country is returning to health. Instead of debating where the revolution went wrong, or how bad Stalin really was, Russians are freer to concentrate on answers to their current problems.