Since its foundation, the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes has been working to make accessible and studying documents of the Soviet security services pertaining to political repression targeted at Czechoslovak citizens and nationals. In view of the unfavourable archival policies of the Russian Federation, these efforts have chiefly been focused on Ukrainian territory. Following partial successes in previous years, a key turning point in the research came in 2014, when thanks to the political changes in Ukraine the archives of the Soviet security services were opened to the public.
Cooperation with the Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (HDA SBU) has enabled the systematic research of the archival collections in its regional branches and the launch of digitalisation of documents relating to Czechoslovak history. At the same time we also began cooperating with other Ukrainian archives.
The whole process of document acquisition is highly demanding. It includes negotiating contracts with individual archives, researching archival collections without sufficient inventories or analysing incomplete archival aids, studying files and transferring them to places digitalisation can be carried out, copying, quality control, handover and inventorying of copies and, ultimately, making them accessible.
A major step in refining document acquisition took place in September 2018 with the signature of an addendum to the contract with the HDA SBU archive on sharing documents with the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and the establishment of a digitialisation post in Lviv in cooperation with the local Prison Museum.
Since that time the Institute has managed to obtain over 300,000 pages of documents. This amounts to approximately 2,000 files on Czechoslovaks persecuted by the Soviets, a collection of 5,000 investigative files on Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, including Czechoslovakia, who were arrested during the war and jailed on Soviet territory, and many documents on the Sovietisation of Carpathian Ruthenia and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The Institute has presented selected materials in a Czech Television series entitled Czechoslovaks in the Gulag, articles in the journal Paměť a dějiny, the monographs Czechoslovaks in the Gulag and Jews in the Gulag, and elsewhere in the media.
One of our key targets has been to find and deliver documents to the relatives of victims of the Soviet regime, who for decades knew nothing about their family members’ fates or possessed fragmentary or uncorroborated reports.
Thanks to cooperation with the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Ukraine in 2020 we signed an agreement on cooperation with the State Archival Service of Ukraine. On the basis of this agreement we are beginning the systematic digitalisation of selected collections in state regional archives. We are primarily focused on the State Regional Archive in Uzzhorord, which possesses NKVD investigative files on 5,000 refugees from Czechoslovakia sentenced to forced labour in the Gulag during WWII.
Cataloging, archiving and making accessible hundreds of thousands of pages of documents acquired without inventories requires not just the study of mainly handwritten documents but also technically demanding techniques.
At the end of 2019 the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, along with colleagues from the Department of Cybernetics at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, received a three-year grant from the Czech Ministry of Culture for the project A Digital Archive of NKVD/KBG Documents in Relation to Czechoslovak History. The aim of the project is to create within three years an online archive of the documents and photographs of the Soviet security forces obtained; it will be possible to search these according to various criteria (specific content of documents, names and other biographical data on individuals, sorting of documents according to time and location, place of internment, etc.).
During the course of the project, partial results of the study of the files, inventories of the acquired collections and other archival materials will be published on this site.
The archival fund contains 5,100 criminal files held by the Soviet NKVD secret police on persons of foreign nationality of Jewish origin who were arrested by NKVD organs in the Lviv Oblast in 1939–1940 and later convicted under article 80 of the criminal code of the Ukrainian SSR for crossing the border illegally. These include hundreds of Czechs, predominantly people deported by the Nazis from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to Nisko in the eastern part of the General Government; on arrival in Nisko they were forced to cross into Soviet-occupied Polish territory, where in the majority of cases they were arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to several years’ internment in Gulag correctional labour camps. Until 1977 this fund was held at the Central Soviet Archive in Moscow; it was then transferred to the KGB Lviv Oblast archive.
Total files: 5100
ÚSTR activity: 5100 files digitalised
Total files: 41 000
ÚSTR activity: Personal research into 1,000 files has been carried out, samples have been scanned and materials from 1931–1956 (in particular from 1944–1956), chiefly relating to persons identified by the Soviet security forces after the war as Ukrainian or Polish nationalists or Volksdeutsche, have been uncovered. The fund also contains the files of refugees from Nazism detained on Soviet territory in 1939–1941, as well as of persons arrested by the Soviet counterintelligence SMERSH in 1940–1945 and refugees from the USSR in 1947.
Total files: 8000
ÚSTR activity: Research into 100 randomly selected files, in which no direct connection to Czechoslovak history has been identified. However, it can be expected that there were cases of persecution of Czechoslovak refugees of Jewish origin or of Czech Germans captured in Western Ukraine and convicted of crimes against the civilian population.
The materials in the fund comprise files received from investigative units of the 2nd department of the People’s Council of Carpathian Ukraine (NRZU), the NKVD/KGB USSR Administration in the Zakarpatska Oblast and the Administration of the National Security Service of Ukraine – Security Services of Ukraine (USNBU-USBU) in the Zakarpatska Oblast. It also includes personal files (NKVD, MVD) of persons persecuted during the sovietisation of Carpathian Ruthenia, persons arrested by SMERSH, refugees to Czechoslovakia and other countries and documents on persecution of the church, collectivisation, etc.
Total files: cca 5000
ÚSTR activity: 2516 files digitalised
The materials in the fund comprise files obtained from the 2nd department of the People’s Council of Zakarpatska Ukraine (NRZU), the Administration of the People's Commissariat of State Security/Administration of the Ministry of State Security/Administration of the State Security Committee (KGB) of the Ukrainian SSR in the Zakarpatska Oblast and Administration of the National Security Service of Ukraine/Security Services of Ukraine (USNBU-USBU) in the Zakarpatska Oblast. The first evidential record of the acceptance of the files into the fund dates from 2 December 1954 as the receipt of archival files of criminal cases reported by the information centre of the Administration of the Interior of the Zakarpatska Oblast Executive Committee. The fund contains NKVD personal investigative files on around 5,500 refugees (predominantly Czechoslovak citizens) from Carpathian Ruthenia to the USSR in 1939–1941 and on persons accused of anti-Soviet agitation or activities within the framework of the Greek Catholic Church and other religious groups.
Total files: 3378
ÚSTR activity: 1378 files digitalised
This mainly concerns OGPU-NKVD-KGB investigative files on the persecuted Czech minority on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR in the 1930s, files on persons abducted from Czechoslovakia to the USSR after 1945, documents on protests against the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and more.
Total files: ?
ÚSTR activity: 621 files digitalised
Total files: cca 100
ÚSTR activity: Research is being carried out and digitalisation prepared.
Total files: cca 12 000
ÚSTR activity: Research, identification of Czech names in inventories, comparison with Gestapo deportation documents, and photocopies of fragments of files (refugees from Nazism) was carried out in 2012–2014. This cooperation will resume after the completion of digitalisation in the above archives.
Total files: ?
ÚSTR activity: A treaty on cooperation was signed in 2020 between ÚSTR, the Security Services Archive of the Czech Republic and the State Archival Service of Ukraine. Preliminary research of accessible inventories has been carried out. The cooperation will get underway following the completion of digitalisation in the above archives.