Harvard students interested in the inner-workings of the KGB or the last days of Stalin now have an invaluable new resource.

The Harvard College Library and the Davis Center for Russian Studies announced yesterday the exclusive purchase from the Russian government of a huge collection of formerly top-secret Soviet archives.

The collection includes documents ranging from party censuses to information on the inner workings of the Russian secret police. In all, Harvard acquired 10,000 microfilm reels of various Soviet archives for a total of 25 million images. The original documents remain in Moscow.

Marshall L. Goldman, associate director for the Davis Center for Russian Studies, said Harvard has provided its students with a rare opportunity for scholarship by purchasing the archives for $600,000.

"Harvard is the only place that has been able to come up with the money to buy them," Goldman said.

Although Stanford University's Hoover Institution also has the collection, Goldman said that only post-doctoral scholars can access the collection there.

Harvard's copies, on the other hand, will be open to undergraduates as well.

Goldman said the Russian government made the archives available for sale due to extreme financial difficulties. Harvard's purchase was finalized in late March, although not without some last-minute drama.

"We were worried that Russia might change its mind during the bombing in Kosovo," Goldman said.

The collection is officially named the "George and Abby O'Neill Archives of the Communist Party and Soviet State" after the O'Neill family, who donated the necessary money for the purchase. Goldman said that George O'Neill '50 of New York has always been fascinated by documents from the Cold War.

Mark N. Kramer, director of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies, said that while the $600,000 the O'Neills paid for the archives was substantially less than the amount the Russian government initially demanded, it still was more than Harvard was otherwise willing to pay.

"We would not have acquired the collection had it not been for his gift," Kramer said.

The purchase of the collection was handled by Chadwyck-Healy, a British microfilming firm. Kramer said the company was successful in getting most, although not all of the classified documents it requested.

"The Russians had a lot of say in what they can microfilm," Kramer said.

Kramer said he and others have already studied some of the archives and uncovered valuable information.

"You can see how the system was designed to get families to betray one another," Kramer said. "Stalin was actually removed from the Politburo [the ruling body of the central committee of the Communist party] before he died."

Goldman said the University has acquired valuable Soviet documents before. Perhaps the most famous of these is the Smolensk collection, seized from the Germans--who had stolen it from the Soviet Union--at the end of World War II.

"They gave us our first insight into the Communist party," Goldman said.

Still, Goldman said the O'Neill collection will be even more valuable than the Smolensk collection, as it contains nearly 200 times more information and offers information on the entire Soviet state, not just the city of Smolensk.

The O'Neill collection is currently being processed for shelving in Lamont Library.

Michael C. Herrick, who is in charge of the cataloguing, said processing would take about two months. But 30 reels have already been made available.

Herrick said only half of the collection will be kept at Lamont. Those used not as frequently will be stored in Harvard's depository.

"A lot of this is sort-of run-of-the-mill stuff," Herrick said of the documents that will be stored off-site.