Ukrainian Historian Lectures on Ukrainian Security Service Archives

(CIUS) – In November, Volodymyr Viatrovych, a well-known historian from Ukraine, lectured on “Declassifying Documents from the SSU Archives: Achievements and Further Prospects” at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta. A former director of the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU, 2008–10), he is one of the most authoritative specialists on the subject and has made considerable efforts to declassify previously secret KGB documents, especially those pertaining to mass political repression, the Holodomor, and the suppression of the liberation movement in Ukraine.

In his lecture, Viatrovych called the SSU archives the “functional core of the totalitarian mechanism” that was intended to maintain the vitality of the Soviet regime. One of the regime’s salient characteristics was the desire of its political leadership to control every sphere of human life. This entailed the collection of enormous quantities of testimony, surveillance data, secret reports, and compromising information about oppositional organizations and individuals targeted by the secret service. All this information was concentrated in special archival repositories with highly limited access. In contrast to ideologically “purged” archives of the Communist Party, the security-service archives provided more accurate information that the authorities could use for practical purposes.

In Ukraine, the largest collection of such documents was inherited from the KGB and is now preserved in the Sectoral State Archive of the SSU. This differs fundamentally from the situation in Poland, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic states, where such documents have been transferred to special archives or to institutes of national memory. Because the issue is highly politicized in Ukraine, it was not settled even in the period most conducive to its resolution (2005–10). That is why documents whose interest is now strictly historical still remain under the jurisdiction of the secret service, which deals with them as it sees fit, often ignoring current legislation and exploiting documentary evidence for political purposes.

Chronologically speaking, the holdings of the Sectoral State Archive of the SSU cover the period from 1918 (when the notorious Cheka was created) to the last days of the Soviet Union (1991). Through the prism of these documents, the whole Soviet period of Ukrainian history may be observed “from the inside,” and researchers can find answers to hundreds of questions about the past that are still hotly debated today. The SSU’s vast holdings of historical documents (amounting to more than 800,000 files, some of which run to dozens of volumes) are divided into particular fonds classified by type and topic. The largest fond is that of criminal cases - hundred of thousands of testimonies gathered from victims of political repression between the 1920s and the 1950s and in the next terror campaign against dissidents from the 1960s to the 1980s. These files contain huge quantities of confiscated documents of organizations and individuals opposed to the regime, beginning with materials of guerrilla detachments that operated in central and southern Ukraine in the 1920s and ending with documents of the Popular Movement of Ukraine in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They include a unique collection of documents of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (more than 240 volumes). This great cache of documents is perhaps the best evidence of the large scale of anti-Soviet opposition and of the fact that throughout its existence, the Soviet regime maintained itself by means of violence against its citizens.

Information about the day-to-day activities of the Soviet security service appears in thousands of documents concerning normative practices and specific directives, as well as in analytical reports prepared for the top political echelons. They contain general data about government and politics, socio-economic conditions, and cultural and spiritual life in Ukraine, the social and political activities of Ukrainians abroad, and statistical reports about the results of repressive measures. This group of documents includes espionage files with information about individuals who collaborated with the Soviet security services. There are also operational files concerning investigations of individuals or groups targeted by the KGB. These documents are the best proof of the security services’ brutal intrusion into the private lives of citizens and the physical and psychological pressure that they exerted through wiretapping, surveillance, denunciations, mail censorship, and the like.

Viatrovych noted that secret agents spied not only on their own citizens but also on Ukrainians in the West in an attempt to undermine their organized activities. In Canada, for instance, they resorted to outright provocations intended to discredit the local diaspora, which had significant connections with the Canadian political establishment. The lecturer gave examples of faked letters allegedly written on behalf of local Ukrainian organizations, measures intended to “refute the fabrications of OUN followers” about the Holodomor, attempts to influence the Western press, the dissemination of false information, and even threats of terrorist actions.

“However, the archives were not only the place where documents were hidden from outside observers, but also the place where they were destroyed,” noted Viatrovych. Extensive purges of the archives intended to wipe out the traces of the regime’s crimes took place in 1944, 1953, 1954 and, finally, in 1990. The purge of 1990 concentrated on the destruction of documents dating from the 1960s to the 1980s that were liable to contain compromising information about KGB agents. It was at this time that the multivolume operational and investigative files on “Operation Block” against Ukrainian dissidents were destroyed. The only remaining archival evidence of that operation consists of reports prepared on the basis of the files and submitted to Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, then first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine.

Thanks to the efforts of Viatrovych and his colleagues, many documents have been published in documentary collections and in the specialized journal Z arkhiviv VUChK-HPU-NKVD-MHB-KHB (From the Archives of the VUChK-GPU-NKVD-MGB-KGB) and have been posted on the Internet. The years 2008–10 saw the establishment of cooperation with similar archives in Eastern Europe: agreements were signed with the Polish Institute of National Memory and the Research Institute on the Totalitarian Regime in the Czech Republic. In 2009, the archives issued a unique publication, Putivnyk po fondakh arkhivu SBU (The Fonds of the SSU Archives: A Guide), describing their structure and principal collections. Centres with electronic access to the archives were established in all twenty-five oblast capitals of Ukraine. The launch of a special website for these materials was also planned.

Commenting on recent achievements in making secret archives open to the public, Viatrovych pointed out the efforts of the new authorities to copy Russian measures intended to restrict access to these unique documents. Such efforts, however, have already aroused strong objections in Ukraine and elsewhere. Viatrovych noted that such public reaction is extremely important not only for defending the right to know the truth about the past but also for the assertion of democratic principles today. Only a full disclosure of the crimes of the past will make it possible for Ukrainian society to repudiate them completely in moral and legal terms, thereby ensuring that they will not be repeated.

Volodymyr Viatrovych is the founder and head of the scholarly council of the Centre for Research on the Liberation Movement. He is the author of numerous publications, including the monographs Reidy UPA terenamy Chekhoslovachchyny (UPA Raids on the Territory of Czechoslovakia, 2001) and Stavlennia OUN do ievrev. Formuvannia pozytsi na tli katastrofy (The OUN’s Attitude toward Jews: The Formulation of a Position against the Background of a Catastrophe, 2007). He is now a visiting scholar at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. In Edmonton, Viatrovych also participated in the XXIII Congress of Ukrainian Canadians and gave interviews to the local Ukrainian radio program and the Edmonton Journal.

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Volodymyr Viatrovych presenting his lecture at the CIUS seminar