During the almost seven decades-long existence of the USSR, the leading organs of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) invariably acted as the principal regulating and directing powers in all spheres of activity of Soviet society. In the majority of cases, before documents came to the leaders of the Party and state, they were laboriously worked on by the various Sections of the Party's Central Committee apparat. These Sections received voluminous and varied information about Soviet life and world events, including information and communications from ministries, departments and social organizations; letters by Soviet and foreign citizens; and much more.

The collection of declassified documents from Fond No. 5 ("Departmental Records of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union") of the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI), offered here to researchers, consists of documents from different sections of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which in the 1950s and 1960s supervised Party development work, ideology, propaganda, science, education, culture, and agriculture.

Presented in a unified complex of documents, the Collection's materials substantially expand our opportunities for the study of Soviet history in the second half of the twentieth century; they introduce into scholarly circulation a significant mass of new, previously classified archival documents. Together with previously published complexes of documents from the holdings of RGANI (the CPSU Congresses and Plenary Sessions of the Central Committee, the General Section of Central Committee and the CC Section for Relations with Foreign Communist Parties), they promote an improved understanding of the processes involved in the formulation and adoption of decisions by the Soviet political leadership with regard to the various problems of domestic and foreign policy in the USSR.

448 reels