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What is meant by "Soviets open vaults" and on what date did this occur?

Public Comments

1. It refers to the opening of the Soviet government archives, and allowing independent historians and researches more or less free access to them for the purposes of historical investigation and research. Apart from important, and previously unknown records from the Communist era, there are also plenty of German documents removed after the capture of Berlin in 1945, also either previously unknown or thought lost. These include a transcript of a German radio broadcast (with a Russian translation attached) declaring Dresden an open city shortly before the Allied air raids of February 1945, and now in the archives of what was Communist Party Headquarters in Minsk (now in Belarus). Access was granted beginning in 1990 and, although you have to jump through some hoops to get approval and wait for the Russian (or Belarus) bureaucracy to grind through its procedures, it's possible for Western as well as Russian historians to visit the archives and use them for research - I've done so myself.