For anyone who has burrowed into the often scruffy and always unpredictable files in any of the state archives of the former Soviet Union to try to better understand religious life, Sonja Luehrmann's book will provoke flashes of recognition. Leafing through the often randomly assembled, sometimes barely decipherable texts and annotations, who has not wrestled with trying to glean the truth from pages of at times turgid, clichéd prose, amid isolated intriguing and even exciting discoveries? The more you read, the more conscious you become that what is recorded is not the truth, but a slice of the truth as conveyed by local officials (or religious believers submitting appeals) who recorded developments in pursuit of a particular goal. You also become painfully aware that the more you read, the more you see the glaring gaps which need to be filled from other sources. But material from other sources (records from other archives, memoirs, oral history, published accounts, contemporary journalism) is also required to cross-check the reports found in the Soviet archives.

Luehrmann is a Russian-speaking anthropologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver who has worked in archives of the later Soviet period in Ioshkar-Ola, Kazan and Moscow, particularly looking at the surviving files of the Council for Religious Affairs (CRA) and its predecessors, and the Knowledge Society.

She cites Michel-Rolph Trouillet, a historian of Haiti's colonial era, who distinguishes ‘four levels of silencing’ affecting archival research: ‘the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history)’. She laments that Soviet archives are organised not by theme, but by the institution lodging the documents. What is more, the institutions had an inherent bias: they were the very organisations tasked with controlling and eliminating religious communities. She contrasts this with one non-Soviet archive: that of the former research centre Keston College, now housed at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, which she describes as a ‘counter-archive’, ‘organised according to a different logic’ and with its ‘angle of critique’.

In tackling how sources are created, Luehrmann analyses the various records, why each was created and how they might be interpreted. She also examines the role, say, of regional religious affairs commissioners or other officials, who lived among the people whose religious life they had to describe to higher authority. Former party officials whom she spoke to in Mari-El recalled ‘being aware of ritual activity but striving to save everyone trouble by not giving official notice’. So a vital part of religious life in a locality never appeared in the records. She also points out that officials were painstaking in trying to ensure that orders to religious communities (such as over the appointment of clerics) were seen not as state decisions but decisions of the communities themselves (‘a narrative of bureaucratic correctness and respect for the division of state and religion’). Given that state documents were entirely secret (a point Luehrmann does not bring out), the reasons can only be guessed at. She also examines memories of religious life in the Soviet period, as well as the work of Soviet sociologists of religion (a source that – for want of others – was regularly tapped by foreign historians at the time, as she acknowledges). Soviet officials clearly tried to balance their view that religion was bound to disappear with the, for them, uncomfortable reality that it persisted. As for the ‘counter-archive’, Luehrmann laments that the frequent lack of provenance for samizdat writings that reached the West makes it at times impossible to read such documents in any context.

Any historian of any period or theme should always seek as broad an input of sources as possible and constantly keep in mind what an author might have chosen to say or not say and why, as well as what areas are missing from the documentary sources and how to interpret and remedy what is not there. It is salutary to read Luehrmann's discussions of her experiences looking at the surviving records over, for example, appointing a mosque leader in Kazan in the early 1960s.

So far, so good. I part company with Luehrmann in her view of how archives themselves should be viewed. Yes, the Soviet archives were organised by the lodging institution (as are probably most state archives in most countries) and yes, the institutions lodging their paperwork were the ones that had the tasks of controlling and ensuring the eventual elimination of religion. But I believe that she ascribes too much importance to what document was placed next to another in any file. Does this context help when reading and trying to interpret an individual document? Did officials – just before transferring documents to an archive – or archivists subsequently arrange the material in a conscious sequence? My experience suggests that most archives are random accumulations of documents thrown together with little thought for how they should or might be viewed subsequently. Moreover, some institutions, such as local religious affairs offices, handed over far more documentation than others. Luehrmann notes that a former religious affairs commissioner in Mari took home and never returned a selection of files. At the end of the Soviet period, CRA officials in Moscow themselves decided what to destroy and what to hand over to the archives.

Does the motivation of those assembling the material matter? If Soviet archives were those of an anti-religious state, the Keston ‘counter-archive’ – which Luehrmann even describes as ‘not really an archive’ because of its alleged lack of adherence to provenance – was that of a centre where, she claims, ‘staff greeted and amplified signs of religious resilience behind the Iron Curtain’. So should those studying its documentation now discard what they find? Luehrmann indirectly answers this unasked question: ‘Once the state that underwrote them is gone, the documents of powerful bureaucracies have the same wretched paper experience as samizdat. Both must be recognized as traces of a valuable and usable past in order to last.’

Individual historians have to take responsibility for the narratives and history that they create. They cannot do anything about the way in which the archives of others were created, but they do need to weigh constantly what they are reading, and seek ways to cross check accounts. Studying religion in the Soviet Union is no different from studying any other historical topic. But while implying dissatisfaction with the way in which scholars are using archives, Luehrmann does not specify what her grievances are. Nor does she suggest any solutions.