#Kgb files online archive

The files, he said, must have been doctored and deliberately left as a вЂњspecial giftвЂќ to Latvia, now a member of NATO, as part of a вЂњdisinformation operationвЂќ by retreating Soviet officers. would leave behind a real list of agents in what it considered enemy territory,вЂќ Mr. Instead, they say, they have been framed by Soviet secret police officers who padded their roster of informants, either to impress superiors or plant a slowly ticking time bomb under LatviaвЂ™s future as an independent state. The latter view is widely held by those who have been outed as agents but insist they had never knowingly worked for the K.G.B.

to sow disarray among the countryвЂ™s post-independence elites with fabricated records of betrayal? Is it slowly coming to terms with the fact that its people were not just victims of Soviet oppression but, in some cases, also eager collaborators? Or has it fallen prey to a devious plot by the K.G.B. So instead of clearing the air, a vote by LatviaвЂ™s Parliament that the contents of the bags be posted online has confronted the tiny Baltic nation with an unsettling question.

#Kgb files online archive

Germany quickly opened up files left by East GermanyвЂ™s Stasi secret police after reunification in 1990.Д«ut only Latvia was left with a systematic index listing the real and code names of more than 4,000 purported agents, along with a large digital archive of K.G.B. Other former Soviet lands, like Lithuania, Estonia and Georgia, found some K.G.B. Latvia, one of three Baltic nations reborn as independent states in 1991, has been arguing for nearly three decades over what to do with the so-called Cheka bags, sacks and briefcases stuffed with secret files left behind by the K.G.B., the Soviet secret police agency originally known as the Cheka.