Introduction: Methodologies of Working in Cold War Archives

This essay introduces “Methodologies of Working in Cold War Archives,” a special issue of East Central Europe. It focuses on four broader questions raised by the contributions: the conceptualizations of historical methods when dealing with ideologically opposed sources, the connection between historiographic and ethical choices related to such sources, the possibility of reflecting on archives as discoursive fields while still mining them for facts and evidence, and, last but not least, the reconsideration of the moral intentionalities of the different historical actors and their documentary work. The introduction and the contributions argue in favor of critical yet empirical approaches to sources that belong to opposed truth regimes and yet are not symmetrical in the perspectives they offer. In this way, the introduction proposes the term of “critical neopositivism” for transgressing binaries and avoiding moral relativism.