The Ministry of Defense received the right to prevent historians to documents with negative information

The Central Archive of the Russian Ministry of Defense received a directive according to which the agency could limit public access to unexpected documents, reports Radio "Echo of Moscow" with reference to the military historian Mark Solonin.

According to him, the ministry received the right to prevent researchers to documents containing negative information about Russian military personnel.

In accordance with the Federal Law "On the State Secret of the Russian Federation", after 30 years from the moment of creation of documents, they must be declassified, with the exception of cases where the disclosure of the information contained in them may damage the country's defense capacity. However, in the archive there are a number of intra -defense directives that allow employees to destroy documents after the storage period.

In 2007, Russian Minister of Defense Anatoly Serdyukovsigned an order to remove the secrecy vulture from archival documents of the Red Army and Navy from 1941 to 1945. However, the declassification of documents slows down that it is not carried out massively, but by piece.

The Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation stores various headquarters and departments, associations, units and military schools of the department from 1941 to the end of the 1980s. It was formed in 1936 as the Archival Department of the People’s Commissariat of Defense of the USSR.

In total, about 18.6 million documents are in the Ministry of Defense archive, including the award documents and personal affairs of the military. In addition, in the main building of the Central Archive there is a scientific and reference library.