Historical research on archives today examines various cases of the use, exploitation, plundering and destruction of archives in various wars, but research specifically on the Cold War is almost non-existent. In this paper, I wished to address this lacuna by examining shortly three claims for archival restitution that were at the center of Soviet-American relations, thus demonstrating how archival displacement was an important aspect of Cold War policymaking The way each power perceived displaced archives as sources of information, as property, as a diplomatic apparatus in the international arena and the way it changed throughout the twentieth century can teaches us about US-USSR domestic attitudes towards the archive as an institution and its role within these two ideological, political and social systems.
