PSRS VDK un IeM represīvo iestāžu dokumenti Latvijas, Lietuvas un Igaunijas arhīvos
ENThe paper on the heritage of the documents of the Security Committee of the USSR (hereinafter – the KGB ) was inspired by a number of factors. First of all, the unceasing public interest in the documents of the former State Security Committee of the Latvian SSR , incited by the mass media. Second, the need to make as objective as possible assessment of the documentary heritage of the Soviet repressive institutions as a whole from the point of view of source research. Third, to compare the body of the KGB archive documents that have remained in Latvia with the documents of the KGB archives of the Lithuanian SSR and Estonian SSR in order to verify how complete is the documentary heritage of the KGB archives in Latvia. The article deals with the range of documents of the KGB and the Ministry of the Interior of the USSR that have remained in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia after the restoration of the national independence of these countries in 1990–1991 and are deposited in the archives of these countries. The paper analyzes the procedure of the depositing of these documents in the state archives and the specifics of their composition in each Baltic country. The issues pertaining to source research and historiography have remained outside the scope of the present paper, because in the author’s opinion they deserve a special study. Even more so because in a number of Central and Eastern European countries, where there had existed communist totalitarian regimes, qualitatively new studies of the archives and documents of special services, and related topics have seen light in the recent 20 years.
