A group of historians from Lithuania have posted once-secret documents from the KGB online at www.kgbdocuments.eu for the entire world to see. Dalia Kuodyte, director of the Genocide and Resistance Research Center, explained that the site was created to “prove beyond doubt that the Baltic states were occupied by the Soviet Union after World War II” (see AP article). In the about section of the site the creators also go on to explain that they wanted “to give students, historians, and all those who were interested, more possibilities to research KGB archives.”

On www.kgbdocuments.eu you’ll find an explanation of the Soviet secret services’ progression from the NKGB in 1940 to the MGB in 1943, and finally to the KGB in 1954. In the documents section, PDFs of scanned in original KGB files are available for download (but of course they are all in Russian). Each document presented on the site is accompanied with a paragraph or so of description (in English or Russian), and further details like date, country, and type of document.  Two sections of the site, “Counter-Propaganda” and “Articles,” are empty but set up for future content.

This post first appeared on AHA Today.