CoL49 Group reading ch3 Ref: Krasnyi Arkhiv

[Michael Bailey]

Mentioned as repository of an official report with a description of
Pinguid’s sea encounter.

I was thinking that might be a fictional archive off of Red Square, but it
was a real publication -


https://www.jstor.org/stable/2491707

Even if you haven’t got jstor, the sample page is pretty informative


Another link also has a nice description which I was able to copy:
https://www.eastview.com/resources/journals/krasnyi-arkhiv/

*Krasnyi arkhiv* was published in Moscow from 1922 until June 1941 first by
the Central Archives of the USSR and later by the Central Archival
Administration. The proclaimed goal of this journal was to reveal the
secrets of diplomatic documents hidden in the archives of Tsarist Russia
and to regularly publish important archival papers “for the education of
the proletariat.” These included official documents of the political police
department, diaries and personal correspondence of the highest political
figures (members of the royal family, top officials of the Tsarist Russia,
etc.) The complete set of *Krasnyi arkhiv* contains more than 900 unique
archival documents on the history of Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries,
development of the Bolshevik movement and the Russian communist party, the
Russian civil war, Russia’s foreign policy, and the history of Russian
endeavors in Siberia, Central Asia and Kazakhstan. The journal also
includes literary-historical materials, such as 16 publications on
Alexander Pushkin, 12 publications on Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 14 publications
on Leo Tolstoy and numerous other materials on famous Russian classical
writers and literary critics.



Also available at Internet Archive

https://archive.org/details/pub_krasnyi-arkhiv

I added a Cyrillic keyboard on my phone (surprisingly easy) & tried
searching for Bogatir & Gaidamak but no results.

As a sanity check, a search for Popov got 77 hits, which is a lot but
doesn’t seem enough for such a popular name (
https://forebears.io/surnames/popov )

in an archive with thousands and thousands of pages.

Help on this from someone with Russian skills wd be mighty nice (-; - not
so much looking Peter Pinguid but for anything about the Popov San
Francisco Bay presence during the Civil War -

Admittedly it’s at best a sidebar hoping for an Easter egg -

But it does seem to show Mr Pynchon dipping into Russian history even prior
to GR/Tchitcherine.