Store or protect?

What archives are inaccessible to historians and why

Fix the neck! The fight against the falsification of history is impossible without access to documents and sources. However, many of them are still inaccessible to researchers. What is secret and why - was interested in The New Times
Our archival system is stricken with a severe disease. Diagnosis is an unconstitutional ban on access to information. More precisely, the rather clear provisions of the Law on State Secrets do not apply. They were paralyzed by "sub-legislative" ministerial instructions and bureaucratic practices.

Official discretion The law prescribes systematic and regular declassification measures, but this work is not carried out. The declassification of the archives of those state institutions that have a “successor agency” is carried out by the “successor” himself. Thus, last year a large array of documents from the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Finance and the State Bank was declassified. But if the "foundation institution" does not have a successor, as, for example, the CPSU, then the declassification of its papers is entrusted to the interdepartmental commission for the observance of state secrets. In early 2009, this commission was headed by Sergei Naryshkin, who is now called upon to fight the falsification of history at the same time. The declassification commission had previously been formally chaired by the president, but the president had too many other, more pressing concerns, and nothing was heard of the work of the declassification commission. On the other hand, the opposite action of the commission once caused a worldwide scandal. This happened when she imposed a secrecy stamp on the materials of the investigation of the Katyn massacre conducted by the Prosecutor General's Office for 15 years. Meanwhile, documents that have expired should be made available to researchers automatically. But this mechanism is not described by by-laws and, accordingly, does not work.

Hidden Cases The Law on State Secrets establishes a maximum period of secrecy of 30 years, with a longer period of 50 years only for intelligence documents and materials related to the Soviet nuclear program. It can be assumed that the Soviet nuclear files do still contain relevant technological secrets, but this is a rare exception, which falls under a very narrow and specific category of documents. But the recent statement by the head of the Rosarkhiv, Vladimir Kozlov, that Russian archivists have irrefutable documents showing that the famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933 cannot be considered genocide, but they cannot be published because they are secret, is a shame. The head of the Rosarchive should be aware of the laws, nothing prevents the immediate publication of any documents classified as classified 76 years ago.

The reason for this embarrassing slip of the tongue is perhaps that a very large amount of publicly significant documentation - primarily millions of investigative files - are classified on the grounds that they contain personal secrets. For such papers, the secrecy period is set at 75 years. Meanwhile, the list of such secrets in 1992 was given by an exhaustive list in the current decree of President Boris Yeltsin: these are documents on the financial situation and family relations, data on the state of health and information relating to the secrecy of adoption. When archives are closed under the pretext of "personal secrets" significant arrays of state documentation - this is archival amateur activity. All investigative files completed before June 1934 should be open today, but this is not the case.

The trick is that this rule does not apply to people who have not been rehabilitated, since their cases are not considered completed, and only legal representatives of the repressed — lawyers and relatives — can get access to them. Here, despite the formal correctness of the law, some inconsistency with social needs is visible. If a person is not rehabilitated, it is considered that he was repressed correctly. This is the standard approach to the affairs of the organizers of terror, who later fell under this ice rink themselves. They will most likely never be rehabilitated, but this does not mean that we should not get acquainted with their files, which contain a lot of information about the methods and details of terror, which we would not otherwise know. Denying access to cases of this kind is a camouflaged way of withholding information.

In addition, all departments of Russia have not carried out the decree of President Boris Yeltsin, signed in 1992, on the removal of the secrecy stamp from all, without exception, cases related to the violation of human rights and political repression, regardless of the time of their creation, even if 1980- x years. However, the FSB slows down this process in its huge departmental archive under the pretext that these documents contain information about intelligence and operational work. But the Law on Investigative Activities establishes a 30-year term for the secrecy of operational materials, therefore, everything older than 30 years must be declassified and made public.

Absurd Neighborhood It comes to the point of absurdity. In Ukraine, huge arrays of the most "sensitive" documents were declassified last year - the archives of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR. The Baltic states have done the same for a long time. Many Russian secrets will now be revealed thanks to the availability of documents in copies from the archives of the Republican KGB.

Increasingly, one hears that the publication of the “dark pages” of Soviet history casts a shadow on Russia as well. It is absolutely impossible to agree with this position. Russia, of course, is the legal successor of the USSR, but it cannot carry all the secrets of the totalitarian regime with it forever. Modern Russia has a completely different Constitution and completely different interests.

Nikita Petrov
Deputy Chairman of the Board of the International Scientific Information
and educational center "Memorial"