Фонд «Тайна» · Дело № 5 · После 1991

The Soviet Union ended in 1991. Its secrets did not. They were burned, carried off to Russia, split between fifteen new states, and in some places are still locked away.

Contents
What happened to the KGB’s files after the USSR
Period
1989–present

One archive, fifteen heirs

Soviet secrecy did not stop at the border of 1991, because the secrets themselves were never cleanly divided. Before the collapse, the KGB began cleaning house: in September 1990 its chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, ordered agents’ personal files purged and destroyed by July 1991.[1] Files were also moved out of the republics. In autumn 1989 the KGB removed more than 13,000 former agents’ files from Estonia to Russia, and another 4,500 files on active agents followed in spring 1990.[2]

So what each country can reveal today depends on two things: what was left behind, and whether its government wants it seen. The two do not always match. Russia, Belarus, Armenia and Kazakhstan made an agreement under which a secret archival document could only be declassified with the consent of all the other parties; Ukraine never joined it.[3] A document that is open in one capital can be sealed in another.

At a glance

CountrySoviet security filesAccess
LatviaAgent card index published online, 2018The “Cheka bags”[4]Open
LithuaniaKGB archive kept largely intact in VilniusHeld by the Special Archives[8][9]Open
EstoniaMost files removed to Russia or destroyed[2][27]Little left
UkraineOpened by law in 2015Free copying allowed[3][13]Open
GeorgiaOpened, then increasingly restrictedFormer KGB archive closed in late 2023[19][20]Restricted
RussiaMany 1917–1991 categories secret until 2044[22]Closed
BelarusKGB archive inaccessible to historians[25]Closed
Azerbaijan, UzbekistanResearchers refused entry to security archives[26]Closed

The Baltic states: opening what was left

Latvia kept its secret the longest and then published it outright. When the KGB left Riga in 1991 it left behind a card index of agents in cloth postal sacks, known ever since as the “Cheka bags.”[6] After years of political argument, the National Archives put the scans online in December 2018. The index covers roughly 4,300 of the approximately 25,000 agents active between 1953 and 1991, mostly from the late 1980s.[4] Among the names were a two-time prime minister and the sitting chief justice of the Supreme Court.[5] Some of those named insist the files were doctored and left behind on purpose as a parting disinformation operation.[7] A partly destroyed KGB database recovered later, known as “Delta,” remains restricted to academic researchers and journalists.[6]

Lithuania was left with far more. Its Special Archives, founded in 1995, hold the records of the Lithuanian KGB for 1940–1991: over 1.35 million files on some 17 kilometres of shelving.[8] In 2010 the Hoover Institution called them the largest accessible holdings of the Soviet political police anywhere.[9] Even so, the gaps are telling: the files of the KGB’s 5th Department were largely destroyed, and the most important were .[10]

Estonia got the least. The agents’ files that would identify collaborators are not in Estonian hands; they are in Russia.[2] Some material did come back: in December 1991 half a tonne of investigative files that had reached Ulyanovsk in Russia was returned to Tallinn.[11] Pieces still surface decades later, such as KGB surveillance files on Estonia’s first president that only recently reached the National Archives.[12]

Ukraine: the most open archive

On 9 April 2015 Ukraine’s parliament passed a law opening the archives of the Soviet “repressive organs” of 1917–1991.[3] The law declared Soviet-era security classifications invalid, and set the right to know about Soviet repression above the right to privacy.[13][14] More than 800,000 files held by the security service archive became available.[13] Visitors can copy documents with their own cameras or scanners, which is unusual even by EU standards.[3]

It had been tried before. An opening in 2007 was reversed under President Yanukovych, whose appointees reclassified around 2,000 Soviet-era cases; those have since been declassified again.[3][14] The result is a strange inversion: Russian historians locked out of their own country’s security archives can read the same kind of files in Kyiv.[15]

Georgia: open, then closing

Georgia was once counted with Ukraine and the Baltic states as a post-Soviet country that opened its Soviet archives, and in 2014–15 its government committed to digitising the Soviet records held by the Interior Ministry.[16] But much was already lost: according to the ministry’s official account, about 80% of the KGB archive burned during the civil war in Tbilisi in 1991–92.[17]

What survived has become harder to reach. The research group SovLab reports that since 2013 data on Soviet security and Interior Ministry personnel going back to the 1970s has been off limits, that photographing documents is banned, and that a 75-year personal-data rule is used to withhold material covering almost everything after 1949.[18] It also says Georgia’s State Security Service informally decides who sees what, though it has no legal authority over the archives.[18] The Interior Ministry archive, which holds the former KGB and Communist Party records, was closed in late 2023 for what was described only as “reorganisation,” and in 2024 the European Parliament noted it was still closed without explanation.[19][20] The Parliament has since called on Georgia to give scholars full and non-discriminatory access to its Soviet-era archives.[21]

Russia and Belarus: still classified

Russia holds the central files of the Soviet security services, and for nearly all researchers the archive at the Lubyanka is closed.[24] In March 2014 a government commission extended the secrecy of 23 categories of police information from 1917–1991 until 2044, without giving a reason.[22] In 2025 Rosarkhiv, the federal archive agency, reclassified further documents as “official information for limited distribution,” even though Russian law makes Stalin-era case files public 75 years after a case closes.[23] The security-service archives were already admitting only relatives of victims.[23]

Belarus has gone further still. Its security service is still called the KGB,[24] and its archive remains inaccessible to historians, so even the number of people repressed in Soviet Belarus can only be estimated.[25] When the Georgian transparency group IDFI surveyed archives across the former USSR, its researchers were refused access to the security-service archives of Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan altogether.[26]

Sources

  1. “Imprisoned History: The KGB Archives.” Journal of the International Institute, University of Michigan. quod.lib.umich.edu
  2. “The Estonian Secret Services: Established Despite KGB Interference.” The Ukrainian Week. ukrainianweek.com
  3. “Ukrainians discover stories of repressed relatives in newly opened KGB archives.” Euromaidan Press, 16 May 2017. euromaidanpress.com
  4. “First batch of Latvia’s KGB archives published online.” LSM (Latvian Public Media), 20 December 2018. eng.lsm.lv
  5. “New Latvian Archives Show Ex-PM, Top Judge Had Ties To KGB.” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 21 December 2018. www.rferl.org
  6. “Delayed Truth: Latvia’s Struggles with the Legacies of the KGB.” Cultures of History Forum, University of Jena. www.cultures-of-history.uni-jena.de
  7. “Latvia opens up its KGB files and names 4,000+ informants.” Boing Boing, summarising The New York Times, January 2019. boingboing.net
  8. “Lithuanian Special Archives.” Office of the Chief Archivist of Lithuania. www.archyvai.lt
  9. “Lithuanian KGB Files on Microfilm at Hoover.” Hoover Institution. www.hoover.org
  10. “Various documents of Lithuanian KGB departments.” COURAGE Registry. cultural-opposition.eu
  11. “Completed investigative files of the Soviet Estonian KGB.” COURAGE Registry. cultural-opposition.eu
  12. “KGB files trace Soviet targeting of Estonia’s first president and top general.” ERR News. news.err.ee
  13. “Opening the KGB Archives: Andriy Kohut Tells Ukraine’s Story.” Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2016. www.huri.harvard.edu
  14. “Ukraine’s Soviet archives are opening up.” openDemocracy. www.opendemocracy.net
  15. “‘Russia will cover up Stalinist crimes’: Ukraine opens its KGB archives.” Meduza, 21 April 2015. meduza.io
  16. “Accessing Archives in a Post-Soviet World: The Georgian Experience.” Open Government Partnership. www.opengovpartnership.org
  17. “Opening the KGB Archive in Latvia: Useful Example for Georgia.” IDFI. idfi.ge
  18. “SovLab Says Government Hinders Access to Soviet Archives.” Civil Georgia. civil.ge
  19. “Mounting Restrictions in Georgian Archives.” SovLab, 12 January 2024. archive.ge
  20. “SovLab Initiates Memorandum on Creation of Institute of National Memory of Georgia.” Civil Georgia. civil.ge
  21. “EU Parliament urges Georgia to open Soviet archives to counter Russian propaganda.” JAMnews. jam-news.net
  22. “Meet the new secret police, same as the old secret police.” Meduza, 22 July 2015. meduza.io
  23. “In the dark: Access to key Russian archives is being restricted.” Novaya Gazeta Europe, 8 October 2025. novayagazeta.eu
  24. Corrigan, Polly. “Using Soviet Archives.” pollycorrigan.blog
  25. “Soviet repressions in Belarus.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
  26. “The Openness of State Archives in the Former Soviet Republics.” IDFI (report). idfi.ge
  27. “KGB Surveillance in the Soviet Baltic Republics” symposium. Yale MacMillan Center, 2020. macmillan.yale.edu