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Archival Preface


The collection of documents titled *The Assassination of U.S. President J.F. Kennedy and Soviet-American Relations* was prepared as part of an ongoing project by the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History to publish documents from the “Cold War” period. A notable outcome of this project can be considered the preparation and publication, under the editorship of Academician A.A. Fursenko, of the fundamental work *Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee*¹ and the initiation of studies based on a new array of historical sources reflecting the activities of the highest party body, shedding light on the history of the confrontation between the two systems after World War II².

The compilers of the collection aimed to reflect, based on archival sources, one of the complex periods of Soviet-American relations in the 1960s: the restoration of full-fledged, trust-based contacts at the highest level between the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the tragic death of U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and the establishment of initial contacts with the new president, Lyndon Johnson.

The central theme of the collection is the Soviet reaction to the assassination of J.F. Kennedy and the beginning of interactions with the new U.S. President, L. Johnson. For the first time, based on strictly documentary evidence, the active assistance of Soviet authorities in the investigation of this crime is demonstrated. The selection of documents for inclusion in the collection was carried out primarily based on their novelty and relevance to the intended purpose of the publication.

The majority of the documents were previously held in closed storage at the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation (formerly the CPSU Central Committee Politburo archive) and were only recently transferred to the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History. All published materials underwent the established declassification procedure.

The compilers adopted a thematic-chronological principle for organizing the documents. All documents are grouped into four sections, arranged chronologically within each section, but they share a unified sequential numbering. Considering that the materials within the sections are arranged in chronological order, the inevitable partial loss of cause-and-effect connections between documents is restored in the comments (notes on content) through cross-references.

The first section of the collection includes documents on Soviet-American relations at the highest level during the onset of the U.S. presidential election campaign. These are primarily...

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Footnotes:

¹ *Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee, 1954–1964: Draft Minutes of Meetings, Transcripts, Resolutions*, in 3 vols. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2003–2008.  
² Vainshtein, *The Balance of the Cold War (Around the Meetings of N.S. Khrushchev and J.F. Kennedy in 1961 in Vienna). Documents*. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2011; *Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev: Two Colors of Time. Documents from the Personal Archive of N.S. Khrushchev*, in 2 vols. Moscow: MFD, 2009; *A New World in Europe (GDR, FRG, and the Moscow Treaty of 1970 Based on CPSU Central Committee Documents)*. Moscow: Kuchkovo Pole, 2020.