The KGB (State Security Committee) and its Soviet-era predecessors were among the key USSR institutions. As one of the major communist party ideological levers, the KGB was responsible for controlling the society, surveilling various professional groups, repressing the dissidents, conducting espionage and disinformation operations, and purging the groups designated by the regime as the "enemies of the people." Virtually all the documents created by the KGB and its predecessors were either "secret" or "top secret." The first attempts to declassify the KGB archives in the early 1990s proved a crucial role of the KGB documentation in our revision of the history of the Soviet Union. After the 2015 Ukrainian "de-communization" reform, the Ukrainian KGB records formed one of the largest open archives of the Soviet Union secret services. Explore what KGB archives in Ukraine have preserved, what archival files entail, and how the Ukrainian legal system regulates access to the newly declassified "top secret" documents of the Soviet era.
Dr. Andriy Kohut is Director of the State Security Archive of Ukraine. He received his PhD from the Shevchenko National University (Kyiv) and his MA from the Franko National University (Lviv). As a historian, he focuses on Soviet population politics, the history of Soviet secret services, the politics of memory. He authored or co-authored several books including "Chernobyl KGB Dossier," "Crimean Tatar National Movement in 1017-1020," "The Great Terror in Ukraine: German Operation 1937-1938," and "KGB Archives for the Media" handbook.