So I accidentally slept late and didn't go to the archive until after the lunch break. It didn't really turn out to be a problem, which is both good and bad, I guess.

The archive is in a relatively unassuming building on Karl Marx street (which, for UNC people, I'd describe as the Rosemary St. to Lenin Blvd's Franklin). Inside it looked like a lot of other Russian buildings, with a front security gate and poor lighting. I talked to the woman at the security desk, who gave me a pass and told me to talk to the director, who told me to fill out a form. I did that, she signed it, and then I had to bring the form to the reading room to sign in.

The reading room was much smaller than I'd expected; it had six desks for visitors and one for the archive worker, who was extremely helpful. I think it's at these points that clothing/shaving/hygiene really comes into play; since I was dressed decently, I think she saw me as "cute confused foreigner" rather than "creepy foreigner". I had to fill out a couple more forms, and then she handed me the archive guide and said I was ready to go.

I'm very glad I came here first rather than Moscow, because just the process of doing archival work is so intimidating right now that I certainly don't need the bustle of the central archives to add to my bewilderment. The archive guide is a 1000 pg. or so book that lists all the fondy (subjects, kind of) and describes what they have. You look at that book, decide what fondy interest you, and the archive worker gives you sub-guides for those. From there, you can see all the collections within that fond. You then get a form and fill it up with the numbers of the collections you want to request; the archive workers then pull them out and let you look through them. That process, however, takes a few days when the archive is crowded, like it was today. So I really didn't spend much time there today, since there was nothing for me to do after filing a request form.

The trick is, there's just so much in the archive that it's hard for me right now to even conceive of looking through everything that could be useful...so I'm going to have to just budget my time well to make sure I can look at all the different sources that might help me. Just the papers of the local soviet from 1941-1945 take up thousands and thousands of pages, and I also need to look at regional soviets, individual factories, letters/memoirs if I can find them, banks, etc. So it's going to be tricky; I just hope I can adjust on the fly well enough to get everything I need to write a good paper.

And don't worry -- I won't be writing about archival work in the future unless it's of general interest, but I figured that this stuff might be interesting since most people never have and never will work in an archive. Speaking for myself, it was interesting because I always had this vague conception of archives as a place where people do research, but I couldn't really imagine how exactly it worked. So now I know.