This phrase "archives do not burn" as far as I know is a paraphrase of quote from Bulghakov's "Master and Margarita" - "Manuscripts do not burn".
I know historians often divide history (as pertaining to sources) in two periods before modernity where historians often have problems of not having enough sources and period of modernity (lets say after year 1500) where historians have problems because there is such an abundance of sources that they have to choose which documents to read.
During communism there was enormous production of documents (also in the western world everyone makes documents, for example nurse has to write statements after statements about patients). After end of communism elites that lost power tried to destroy evidence of their crimes by destroying documents. And this is when this phrase become popular.
I remember my religion teacher (Catholic nun) explaining to us that church will never lose evidence of our existence "When you are born (or baptized I can not recollect exactly) there is paper made for that occasion, if you move to another city only a copy is send" and then she proceeded to explain all the ways of spreading documentation so that there are so many copies that even if half the archives, in a country get burned, there are copies in other archives.
With communist archives, there also was this proliferation of copies plus, there were documents describing what is in other documents, documents about making particular documents, quotes from one document in the other one. So the philosophy behind this phrase of “fire resistant archives” is that unless world annihilates itself in a nuclear war “truth” is always somewhere there, just maybe not yet accessible.
And one more thing worth mentioning is that while officially documents of communist political police were burned, many people believe that as they were of value for many, before being burned they were turned into microforms and sent to Moscow.
Now as Russia is being accused of destroying KGB and Gulag files, I wonder if they are not simply hiding these documents, that are now digitized, and even if some documents are destroyed are not there copies and quotes from original that are simply forgotten in some basement of provincial archive.
So basically, my question is whether humankind is not in third part of history (as related to documents and archives). That is after 1945 there is no “truth” that can be hidden, it is just a matter of time and technology when it will be discovered.
And obviously this phrase does not pertain to the period between 1500 to 1945 where many archives were in fact destroyed. And for example information about XVI century Poland is partial as this country suffered so many wars, catastrophes and also production of documents was incomparably smaller that in the period after 1945 that while historians of that period have to struggle with abundance of sources, but unlike with communist period there are documents lost forever and that we do not even have information that they existed.
TLDR
Since 1945 there is such a proliferation of documents and so many copies of them are made and digitized, that phrase "archives do not burn" is in fact true, as there are copies of everything and no "truth" can be lost. What do you think?
It's a silly phrase, really. Archives can burn. They can also flood, be stolen, be vandalized, be destroyed by the state, and be lost, Indiana Jones-style.
It is true that duplication helps decrease the odds of things being destroyed or lost. But nothing is guaranteed, and in fact the mere proliferation of records sometimes acts against their meaningful organization — which can lead to them being lost or inadvertently destroyed.
Let me give you some concrete examples. I work with documents that were created by the US military industrial complex. That means that they not only exist in triplicate (if not more), but that they were often given security classification. Now a security classification is annoying for a historian, but it is in some ways great for the preservation of the document: it is literally illegal for the state to lose track of the document, or to let it get damaged or destroyed. Like an offense punishable with fines and jail time. You'd think that would mean such documents would never be lost, then, right?
In 2012 the National Archives and Records Administration admitted that it had lost 4 million pages of classified documents. Specifically:
An inventory of the holdings at the Records Center determined that 81 boxes containing Top Secret information or Restricted Data (nuclear weapons information) were missing. As of March 2011, an additional 1,540 boxes of material classified at the Secret or Confidential level also could not be located or accounted for, the Inspector General report on the matter said. Each box can hold approximately 1.1 cubic feet or 2000 to 2500 sheets of paper.
One might be shocked at this, but this kind of thing happens all the time. Anyone who has ever tried to use the Library of Congress stacks knows that about 10% of their books are missing — they look for it on the shelf, don't find it, and give up. You can request they go look for it in detail, and sometimes they find it. Often they don't.
Is losing stuff, because your bureaucracy is so large, and your archives so massive, and your capability of organizing them so limited, a form of burning? It is if you're a historian, and you're trying to reconstruct the past.
The loss/destruction/etc. rate is never going to be 0%. It does not have to be very large, in a world with so many records, for the total number of lost things to be large. From the previous-linked blog post:
The NARA College Park facility has at least 3,340 boxes of materials in Record Group 326 (Atomic Energy Commission) alone. This is just one agency, and a lot of that agency’s files are still held at the Department of Energy archives in Germantown, or at other NARA facilities. (This count is taken from RG 326’s Master Location Register, which, I might add, as I look it over again, has quite a few “item not on shelf during last inventory” notes in it, many for classified entries.)
So let’s imagine that the unavoidable loss rate is something that feels quite low, like 1-2%. That’s 33-66 boxes out of this one Record Group, many of which are classified to one degree or another. (Is the loss rate per year or a constant? I don’t know, but either way, it adds up.) Let’s imagine that the loss rate is higher than the unavoidable rate, because people are using these records, the organization is not as perfectly well-oiled a machine as possible, or the record-keeping is sloppier than it ideally could be. What if the loss rate is as high as 5%? That’s 167 boxes.
Now multiply that across the entire organization, all of its records, all of its secrets. Quite a lot of boxes. So 1,540 boxes doesn’t quite surprise me, nor does it look all that surprising that you’d run into that sort of problem.
I’m not trying to exculpate anybody. It isn’t like this fact makes losing classified records right. But it does make it expected.
Anyway. Archives can still burn. They can definitely be lost. They are often closed (the Russian state archives became very hard to use in the Putin years, after a brief period of openness). They can be defunded. They can be shuttered away. They can be destroyed. (Law enforcement agencies routinely purge their "closed" files — very annoying as a historian if you are trying to study a historical crime.)
And let's flip this around. What does it take to preserve archives? The idea that archives don't burn assumes that it's just a matter of existence that keeps them around. Any archivist would laugh and laugh and laugh at such an idea. (I am not an archivist, but have worked with them.) Archiving things requires space, time, people, money. (Digitizing them does too, if you think that'll get us off the hook.) If you want to keep your archives from burning, you'd better invest in a good fire suppression system... and that's not cheap, either. All of this, like everything else in the world, requires work to maintain the status quo. And that work is only available if resources are allocated. And they aren't always allocated in our zero-sum world.
So yeah. I think the quote is dumb — whomever coined it has never really tried to use or maintain archives. They do "burn," both literally and figuratively. It takes extraordinary amounts of human labor to keep them from doing so. And even with that labor, they will still burn a little.
