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This article analyzes institutions, actors, and archival science, understood as both theory and practice, to interrogate the existence of a Soviet paradigm of archives within the framework of the Marxist-Leninist communist project implemented in Soviet Russia after 1917. By examining the processes of collecting, sorting, categorizing, preserving, destroying, and communicating archival documents, it seeks to show that archives are anything but neutral, to understand the specificities of the socialist archival project, and to situate its reception and international uses in the global evolution of the relationship between archives and powers over the twentieth century. The article begins by defining the legacies and foundations of the Bolshevik revolutionary project for archives. It then traces the general evolution of administrations and of the archival profession, which allows us to understand three key elements of the documentary circuit of twentieth-century Soviet archives: ideologization, violence, and secrecy. This in turn makes it possible to reflect on the specificity of personal collections and ego-archives in a socialist society under a socialist state. Finally, the article considers the question on the scale of the long international and transnational Cold War, which mobilized archival diplomacy, spoliations, and transfers, and saw the emergence of counter-archives.