Nor were they helped by a widespread, even excessive, prejudice against autobiographical material. This last argument was, I felt, all the more valid in the case of Soviet history, since use of archives at that time was impossible, or almost, and since the excessive use of contemporary printed sources, quite often official ones (in themselves an additional source of problems) often led scholars of Soviet history astray. And I was comforted by the thought that, though it is true that one should not place too much reliance on memoirs, it is also true that the "eyewitness" (not, of course, the occasional visitor) has always been the historian's most valuable help: not by chance did the Greeks (and Ranke) put memoirs at the top of their list of the sources a historian should use. I was convinced, however, and still am, that the extraordinary coincidence between the accounts by men of differing nationalities, and with different experiences and political convictions, gave a good guarantee against high margins of error.
Some years ago, for a non-academic Italian journal, I wrote an account of the great strikes of 1953 in the Soviet labor camps.1 It was based on the memoirs of some of the participants, and thus posed all the well-known problems connected with the use of autobiographical material as a source.
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