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ArcheoBiblioBase: Archives in Russia: D-28

Last update of repository: 7 December 2020

Arkhiv Upravleniia Federal'noi sluzhby bezopasnosti po Sankt-Peterburgu i Leningradskoi oblasti (Arkhiv UFSB SPb)


Holdings

Total: statistics not available, 1918–1990s

The archive retains the general administrative and other records of the FSB Administration for St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast, which encompass those of successive organs of state security—the Cheka (ChK), OGPU, NKVD, MB, and the KGB—for the city and oblast (guberniia) of Leningrad, dating from 1918 to the 1990s. These include investigative and criminal files on repressed individuals during the Soviet period and other local records.
        Among the various groups of records are the remaining administrative records, including regulatory documentation, correspondence, plans and reports of the local administration, and related files. Some records also remain of local city and raion security organs.
        A separate group of records constitutes personal files and personnel records of local KGB agents and their informers, and those who worked in similar or related agencies, including prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and isolation facilities (service records, autobiographical data, letters of recommendations [kharakteristiki], and related materials). Operational files include reports, control, verification, investigations, operational and recruitment files for agents, and personal files of informants.
        There are extensive archival investigatory files on suspected or repressed individuals, including materials seized in the process of searches and investigations, along with other criminal or political proceedings against individual citizens. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s there are extensive records of rehabilitation proceedings for illegally repressed individuals, including the so-called discontinued fond—files on which rehabilitation decisions were based or covering individuals against whom accusation and/or prosecution was dropped.
        Of special interest, parts of which started to be declassified in 1987, are the archival-investigatory files (19 vols., 1929–1967) regarding the so-called “Academy Affair” (1929–1931), involving extensive repression in the Academy of Sciences and other intellectual circles of some 115 individuals, including S.F. Platonov, E.V. Tarle, N.P. Likhachev, and M.K. Liubavskii, among others. These involve records of the political “show” trials staged during 1929–1931 and include investigatory files and later rehabilitation proceedings, including records of the commission to investigate the Academy of Sciences, inventories of archival materials seized from BAN and Pushkinskii Dom and other related materials.
        Another special category of records are those from the so-called “filtration” camps with materials regarding repatriation processing after World War II (1944–1949) of individuals who were taken to Germany or other countries and/or incarcerated or otherwisedetained in displaced-person camps (ca. 100,000 files). There are some “trophy” Nazi files from concentration and other detention camps found by the Soviet Army relating to such cases. These include files on ethnic Germans (the so-called Volksdeutsche)and others suspected or accused of being Nazi sympathizers during the war. There are also report files on state employees of the Russian Empire who served in penal and police or security organs and files on White Army officers.

N.B. As of 1993 and 1994, records of the “filtration” camps in the Leningrad area and some other files were designated to TsGA SPb (D–15), but inadequate storage facilities and other problems have delayed the transfer; hence they remain under FSB administration.


ABB ArcheoBiblioBase Archeo Biblio Base Patricia Kennedy Grimsted