KGB Archives Workshop

Monday 7 February 2022, 07:00 – 20:30 Australian Eastern Daylight Time (UTC+11)

Three decades have passed since the fall of Soviet communism, and yet our knowledge about the functioning of the institution at the heart of that system—the chekist state security apparatus—remains fragmentary, incomplete, and highly uneven. In some cases, the archives were opened to researchers in the early 1990s, and a wealth of information is available; in others, such as Ukraine and Latvia, declassification is a very recent development. In Russia, where the archives are closed, civil society has been ingenious in developing alternative ways to study this history. Meanwhile, the Russian government has used documents declassified by its neighbours to pursue its own political and ideological purposes, to discredit politicians and civil society activists as ex-KGB informers, for example.

This interdisciplinary workshop is being held as part of the Australian Research Council Discovery Project ‘KGB Empire: State Security Archives in the Former Eastern Bloc’. The workshop aims to bring together scholars working in and on the state security archives. Participants were invited to present historical work in the archives (using archival documents to advance our understanding of how the security apparatus operated); and historical work on the archives (investigating the post-socialist afterlives of state security archives and their ongoing legacy in the region’s political development).

More details and registration: https://events.unimelb.edu.au/historical-and-philosophical-studies/event/13030-kgb-archives-workshop