The Moscou Fonds: Perhaps the Unexpected Genealogy Treasure of the Century

1. What Exactly Is the Moscou Fonds?

At the heart of the Moscou fonds lies the fichier central of the Direction de la Sûreté nationale, the French national police intelligence service. Created in 1934, this centralized archive compiled millions of dossiers on:

• Foreigners living in France
• Political militants
• Criminals and suspects
• Persons under administrative or judicial surveillance

By 1940, the Sûreté’s central file filled around 10,000 cartons, representing 2.5 km of archives. These included:

• Identity card and residency dossiers
• Passport, visa, and naturalization files
• Anthropometric forms (photos, fingerprints, measurements)
• Police reports and investigation notes
• Prefectural decrees (expulsions, internments, surveillance)
• Correspondence and press cuttings
• Records concerning refugees, stateless people, Spaniards fleeing the Civil War, Eastern European migrants, and others

The fonds preserved material normally destroyed through routine archival weeding, which makes it a rare, almost fossilized snapshot of French policing between the late nineteenth century and 1940.

2. From Paris to Berlin to Moscow: A Wartime Odyssey

When German forces entered Paris in June 1940, they seized the Sûreté nationale’s entire archive and shipped it to various locations under Nazi administration, especially in Central and Eastern Europe.

In 1945, as Soviet troops advanced into these regions, they recovered enormous amounts of Nazi war loot. Among them were the French police and military archives taken in 1940. These were transported to a top-secret Soviet repository in Moscow, sometimes described as lying below the Kremlin or within secure intelligence facilities.

For decades, France did not even know these records still existed. The Soviets inventoried and occasionally used some files, especially those related to political activities, but the existence of the collection was never publicly acknowledged.

3. Hidden for 50 Years: The Secret Archives of Moscow

The seized archives were stored in what is often described as a clandestine Soviet archive system. These repositories were separate from normal state archives, closed to researchers, and inaccessible even to most Soviet archivists.

For nearly half a century:

• The French state believed the archives destroyed.
• Researchers had no access to the information.
• Entire categories of French police documentation disappeared from historical consciousness.

Ironically, it was this very concealment that allowed the fonds to survive intact. If the Germans or French authorities had kept them, many files would likely have been destroyed through normal record-management procedures.

4. Rediscovery After the Cold War

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, negotiations between France and Russia revealed the existence of this long-lost heritage. Two major repatriation efforts followed:

• Moscou I (1993–1994)
• Moscou II (1999–2001)

In total, around 7 linear kilometres of French archives were returned. The Sûreté nationale files went to the Archives nationales (main site: Pierrefitte-sur-Seine), while military documents went to the Service historique de la Défense.

Once cleaned, stabilized, and processed, the archives were finally opened to the public in 2000, after the standard 60-year delay for sensitive police documents.

5. What Makes the Moscou Fonds So Important?

For historians, the Moscou fonds provides a uniquely complete record of:

• Policing practices of the French Third Republic
• Surveillance of immigrants, political activists, and perceived “undesirables”
• French administrative handling of refugees between the wars
• Early identification methods and anthropometric tracking
• Pre-Vichy and Vichy-era administrative control of foreigners

For genealogists, the fonds is nothing short of a treasure.

Thousands of families with roots in Spain, Poland, Russia, Germany, Italy, the Balkans, the Jewish diaspora, and various anti-fascist exile communities will find detailed personal files on ancestors who passed through France between the late 19th century and 1940.

The fonds contains photos, fingerprints, background questionnaires, expulsion orders, police surveillance notes, and personal correspondence. Many of these individuals vanished from other archives, especially refugees and stateless migrants. In the Moscou fonds, they reappear.

Notably, high-profile figures like Pablo Picasso have dossiers, but the vast majority reflect ordinary lives caught in the complexities of early twentieth-century migration.

6. How to Access the Moscou Fonds Today

The archives are preserved mainly at:

• Archives nationales (Pierrefitte-sur-Seine)
• Archives de la Préfecture de Police (Paris)

An important development is the digitization and indexing of the alphabetical name lists (répertoires russes). In partnership with the genealogy platform Geneanet, hundreds of thousands of entries have already been indexed, making the search process far easier.

Researchers can:

1. Search the online index by name.
2. Identify the file number.
3. Request the physical dossier in the reading room.

For many families, this leads to the first ever photograph or written trace of an ancestor before 1940.