Lyubov Sarkisian deftly numbered each page of a thick sheaf of documents, stacked them in a big box already full of other once top-secret Communist Party archives, and sighed.
"We can't get it all done. The pace is just amazing," the former Central Committee cataloger said as she got ready to delve into another bunch of party files that have been opened by the Russian government.The millions of secret and unclassified documents cover the party's 74-year rule in the Soviet Union and are laced with potentially damaging information for political figures as well as private citizens.
The Russian government has been selectively releasing documents to discredit the former Communist regime and its leaders, including former President Mikhail Gorbachev. Documents already available show how the Communist Party financed foreign party organizations and terrorist groups, and even that the late American industrialist Armand Hammer was a courier for the Comintern, the international Communist organization, in the 1920s.
Not all party files are being opened. And there are millions more KGB and military files that remain closed - with secrets potentially more damaging than anything in the party archives.
But Russian President Boris Yeltsin has shown he is ready to go even further than Gorbachev in breaking decades of official Kremlin silence on issues such as the fate of American POWs who may have been held in the Soviet Union or U.S. spy planes shot down over Soviet airspace in the 1950s. That information is not in the Communist Party files.
The Russian government seized the party archives shortly after the failed August coup. In October, the Central Committee building where the papers are housed became the Center for the Storage of Contemporary Documents.
"We've been working since March and have only opened 200 files. There are plenty more. We'll be working for a long time," said Sarkisian, who worked for the Central Committee for 18 years.
Located on a busy street leading to Red Square, the turn-of-the-century building housed a bank and a store before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, when it was turned over to the Central Committee.
During the years of Communist rule, KGB guards maintained heavy security in the building. Now, a single uniformed security guard of the Russian Interior Ministry is on duty. His hat still bears a hammer and sickle.
In the archive's main reading room, gilded columns support the vaulted ceiling, and brass lamps with green glass lampshades stand on wooden reading desks.
Huge portraits of Marx and Lenin stare down at visitors. The bookcases are full of histories of the working class, volumes about party congresses, and the collected works of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Newspaper racks store former party newspapers like Pravda (Truth), Red Star, and Lenin's Banner.
Any Russian citizen can ask for a pass to see the files. Librarian Lyubov Yeliseyeva said most of the visitors so far have been foreigners, journalists, diplomats and scholars. Use of the archives is free.