Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .  With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 came not only the chance of opening up a closed society but the hope of a kind of scholarly glasnost -- opening up closed archives and bringing long-buried secrets into the light of day.

In 1992, Jonathan Brent, an editor at Yale University Press, first flew to Moscow to investigate the possibility of publishing documents from the vast collections of the defunct Soviet state.