If secrets are revealed, does it become clearer in the country?

Access of the broadest possible sections of the public to the still classified Cheka-GPU-NKVD-KGB archival materials is an indispensable condition for building a civil society in Ukraine (the documents that constitute a legislatively approved state secret are an exception). The presence or absence of this access is quite a precise indication of whether governmental structures in general and security services in particular are democratic.

The Departmental State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), now headed by Svitlana Liaskovska, with Serhii Kokin as her deputy, is doing considerable and, what is more, increasingly systemic work to this end. An essential part of this work is international cooperation, particularly with European counterparts, which is aimed at spotting, researching, and publishing secret archival documents of the former Soviet and East European security services. Of great importance in this context are joint publication projects that involve Ukrainian experts (from the SBU Departmental State Archive and the Ivan Kuras Institute for Political and Ethno-National Studies) and Polish archivists and academics, as a result of which eight volumes of a unique series, “Poland and Ukraine in the 1930s-1940s. Unknown Documents from Secret Service Archives,” have been published.

On March 1 Kyiv hosted the launching of an English-language master volume of this series, a digest or extract of sorts, which generalizes the content of all the previous volumes. Ms. Liaskovska and Mr. Kokin visited The Day’s editorial office, where they presented a new English-language volume. Then there was a frank debate on the meaning and prospects of this interstate publication project, the most high-profile one on the territory of the former USSR and European “socialist camp,” and on the problem of the declassification of Soviet-era secret documents.

Larysa IVSHYNA: “The immediate reason why we are meeting is publication of the English-language volume of a new Ukrainian-Polish series, Poland and Ukraine in the 1930s and 1940s. But I hope our contacts will reach wider ‘horizons’ and touch the big overall problems of the openness of our secret service’s archives. In the beginning, I would like to ask the respected guests to tell about themselves in brief. Ms. Liaskovska, how long have you headed the SBU departmental archive?”

Svitlana LIASKOVSKA: “Since December 2011 – a little more than a year. It is, of course, a very short period of time. A historian-cum-archivist by profession, I had been doing research and teaching for many years in the field of history and political science, but the current appointment was completely unexpected for me.”

L.I.: “I know for sure that the ‘shock’ you are talking about passed off very quickly, for the SBU Departmental State Archive has achieved quite a lot in the past year.”

S.L.: “I will confess that the past year has been very important in my life. The point is I got used to a teaching job, while in this case I have to mingle with people all the time. Yet working at an archive revealed a lot of interesting things to me as a professional historian.”

L.I.: “But every interesting person makes any, at first, superficial, glance, dullest work really interesting. And you proved this. Now please tell us about your new book, the immediate reason why we are talking now. What preceded it, what is the scholarly and public significance of the publication series?”

S.L.: “The SBU Departmental State Archive and the Ministry for the Interior and Administration of Poland have been carrying out a joint project since 1996 on the publication of secret documents of the Soviet and Polish secret services. A task force was formed. What united all of its members was mutual understanding that this work serves the interests of Ukrainian and Polish societies.”

Serhii KOKIN: “Publishing all the eight current volumes, our Polish colleagues and we tried to adhere to the following concept: a harmonic combination of the chronological and subject-oriented approaches to the selection of materials. As a result, we published separate volumes (in the chronological order) on the Polish underground in Western Ukraine in 1939-41, the Polish-Ukrainian resettlements in 1944-46, the Volyn tragedy, the 1932-33 Holodomor in Ukraine, the Great Terror of 1937-38, and the ‘Polish operation.’ I’ve only named the main thematic blocks of the multilingual edition. One of the main initiators of this project was Professor Yurii Shapoval. The now late General Volodymyr Prystaiko also made a major contribution to the implementation of this project. I will add that it was very difficult to search for archival materials (especially about Ukrainian-Polish relations) on the territory of Poland proper. This required certain additional ‘impulses.’ Indeed, Volume 4 about the Volyn tragedy spotlights very sensitive matters, such as reciprocal cruelty and wiping out of villages – the memory of all this is still alive (particularly on the grassroots level) and is very traumatic for both sides.”

L.I.: “And how would you, Mr. Kokin, assess the work you did from the viewpoint of public demand and response in Ukraine and Poland? What effect do you think your joint work with the Polish colleagues will produce?”

S.K.: “At first we set ourselves rather a modest goal: just to ‘let all these documents live.’ And we thought that if even one out of ten future researchers referred in their dissertations to the documents we made public, our mission would be accomplished. This has really occurred.”

L.I.: “And can any of the things you fond during your joint work be called scientific discoveries in the field of history?”

S.K.: “Let me give an example. We differentiated two events which are often confused in mass awareness: the consequences of the Lublin Agreement between the Polish National Liberation Committee and the Ukrainian SSR government (transfer of population, for example, the resettlement of Lemkos, Boykos, and other Ukrainian subethnoses in 1944-46) and, on the other hand, deportations as part of Operation Vistula in 1947. These are different things. Incidentally, the latter was researched by the Polish Ukrainian Eugeniusz Misylo who was denied access to the necessary documents for a long time but, finally, managed to receive it.”

L.I.: “I recently felt, acutely enough, the ‘human dimension’ of this tragedy. When we were preparing a glossy supplement to our newspaper on Ukraine’s best opera houses, there was a material about Stefan Turchak, the great Ukrainian music conductor of modern era, who departed this life tragically early. And I discovered for myself that Turchak had been born near Przemysl and was later forcibly resettled.”

S.K.: “Yes, the tragedy of human losses visibly runs through our publication. And, as for mutual understanding with our Polish colleagues, the fourth, Volynian, volume was a Rubicon of sorts, when we finally opted for a three-dimensional vision of the documents. We dropped the no-go approach, when one side supplies documentary evidence of the witnesses who try to prove that it is their adversaries at the time, Poles or Ukrainians, not they, who shed blood, while the other side makes a still larger number of its own claims.”

Vadym LUBCHAK: “The book you presented was prepared on the basis of the archival documents made public by the Security Service of Ukraine. Researchers still call some of the unpublicized archival materials as ‘highly explosive.’ What is the current situation with the declassification of SBU documents?”

S.L.: “We systematically revise the categories of classification. The Cabinet instructed all archives, including those of the SBU, to review their classified information. Besides, in accordance with a 2009 presidential decree, we declassified documents of such subjects as the Holodomor, repressions, and the national liberation movement. And 2010 saw the beginning of a planned revision of the classification status of absolutely all the Soviet-era documents kept at the SBU archive. It should be noted that, as far as criminal cases are concerned, this process has been underway since 1991. We provide access to practically all documents now. Naturally, there are some restrictions imposed by the current law. For example, under the law, we can loan criminal cases to researchers 75 years after the document was made or earlier with permission of the persons in question or their relatives. Incidentally, we have a lot of 1960s criminal cases opened against Ukrainian dissidents, and some of them strictly forbade researchers to work with their criminal dossiers.”

V.L.: “You told us in detail about the Polish-Ukrainian task force. And is there a similar task force that consists of Ukrainian archivists and historians and their Russian colleagues?”

S.L.: “We have an agreement with Russia on exchanging criminal cases. We can also request them to give us copies of some archival documents, especially personal files. But there is no intensive research cooperation that we have with the Poles.”

S.K.: “De facto, we are co-participants in several projects with the Russian FSB archive. For example, there is an organization in Dresden, Germany, which studies the question of honoring the memory of the victims of political terror. This entity has concluded cooperation agreements with the SBU, Russia’s FSB, and the KGB of Belarus. It is about a joint study of documents and supply of information about Soviet prisoners of war. The bulk of them found themselves in encirclement pockets here in Ukraine. As of today, we have supplied information on 49,000 people to this joint data base, while we have received information from our counterparts on 150,000 people born in Ukraine. I must say that Russia began to cooperate with Poland in the same key as Ukraine. Even the themes were almost the same. They published three volumes and... discontinued cooperation. Poland has also published two similar volumes of archival documents together with Belarus. In our case, all the eight volumes were funded by the Polish side. The print run is 1,000 copies of each volume. The book series is bilingual. When a volume has been published, we send books to Ukraine’s all regional scholarly libraries. SBU regional archives also have these publications. Incidentally, we have added a disc to Volume 8, on which we posted photocopies of the documents that authorized repressions against thousands of people.”

Nadia TYSIACHNA: “What research publication plans does the joint Polish-Ukrainian group have for the future?”

S.K.: “Themes have already been approved for the next volumes of this publication series. One will focus on anti-Polish operations in Western Ukraine from the ‘golden September’ of 1939 until 1941. Another will deal with deportation of the Polish population in 1940-41. We are also planning to make public the documents on liquidation of the UPA frontier armed underground. Incidentally, they posed considerable threat to the NKVD border security force. We have even traced some facts of cooperation between the Ukrainian and the Polish underground. In a word, if we publish a volume a year, we will have enough work until 2016.”

Ihor SIUNDIUKOV: “Did you raise the painful problem of Katyn in your work? Are there any documents on Katyn in Ukrainian archives?”

S.K.: “The Polish side believes that Bykivnia is also a place where the Poles were killed. They would like to see this place as an analogy to Katyn. But we cannot prove this with documents. There is only a covering letter of Soviet Ukraine’s NKVD to Moscow, which says that all the prisoners and their investigation files were being sent to Moscow. The FSB of Russia says they have no information at all.

“The Polish side has carried out archeological excavations in Bykivnia and allegedly found some artifacts that confirm the version that Polish POWs were also buried there.

“As is known, the recently-built Bykivnia Memorial has a Polish segment. Polish POWs were really buried in Piatykhatky, 12 kilometers from Kharkiv. Those people were held at the Starobilsk camp which was reportedly intended for senior officers – the ‘cream’ of the Polish Army, so to speak. Many of them had been transferred from the Ostashky and Kozelets NKVD prison camps.”

I.S.: “As we can see, the next stage of your work is a scholarly analysis, generalization, and putting into academic circulation what has already been made public.”

S.K.: “I am convinced that one talented documentary or feature film can do more than ten doctors of history in their debates. But, for want of a film, we have to do this.”

The Day’s journalists went on speaking with Svitlana Liaskovska and Serhii Kokin for a long time about the duty of Ukrainian historians and archivists to give society correct “impulses” from the past, also by way of “revitalizing” and actualizing the secret services’ archival documents. We also noted the lack of high-quality media outlets that could professionally put the leading academics’ opinions across to the populace, while, according to The Day’s guests, there is a huge public demand for this kind of information. We are grateful to the management of the Security Service of Ukraine’s Departmental State Archive for a frank, sincere, and informal conversation. The Day is certain to raise this subject over and over again.