Two Years On, No Second Thoughts On Opening Ukraine's KGB Archives 'To Everyone'
By Dmitry Volchek
Just over two years ago, on April 9, 2015, Ukraine's parliament adopted a historic law on opening up the country's Soviet-era secret-police archives. In the new law's first full year in effect, requests for information and access boomed by 138 percent.
"It is very important for us that everyone has the chance to look at the complex history of the 20th century through the prism of their own family," says Andriy Kohut, director of the historical archives of Ukraine's SBU security service. "It is one thing when they speak of enormous historical events without any connection to real people. It is something else entirely when you see how these historical events are connected to you."
The new rules of archive access could hardly be simpler, Kohut said.
"The law contains the formula 'everything open to everyone,'" he explained in an online interview with RFE/RL's Russian Service. "It doesn't matter if you are a citizen of Ukraine or not, if you are a relative or have some other relationship to those mentioned in the documents. Everyone has an equal right to access."
Under the law, the archive is not even allowed to charge for providing copies of its documents. Eventually, the entire archive will be transferred from the SBU to the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory.
There are no exemptions for privacy or other such considerations. The law prioritizes "the right of society to know what happened under the totalitarian regime," Kohut says. Access to documents also cannot be restricted based on Soviet secrecy classifications.
That concludes our live blogging for today. Please join us again tomorrow for more Ukraine coverage.
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