‘A Partial Freedom’: What Latvia Found in the KGB Archives

“They have been part of the Latvian vocabulary since the 1990s, these ‘Cheka bags,’” Mārtiņš Kaprāns, a Latvian cultural historian, told me, using the colloquial term for the files, a reference to the original iteration of the Soviet security services. In countries across the former Soviet bloc, decommunization policies have made other troves of KGB documents available, in full or in part. “They put everyone in the same sack, those who have the blood of partisans on their hands, and those at the other end, who had no idea that they were even considered agents,” said Indulis Zālīte, the former head of Latvia’s Documentation Center, who, for precisely this reason, spent decades campaigning against the public release of the files.

Source: www.nybooks.com