Having conducted research in more than two dozen archives located in five countries on three continents, I’ve had my fair share of related adventures. Some of the most hilarious ones involved military and secret service archives. This is the second episode of a series on my archival escapades, now it’s the turn of the three-letter agencies.
KGB
In Belarus, the KGB was not one to jump on the bandwagon of its sister agencies, most of which swiftly rebranded themselves after the Soviet collapse. Standing strong in the face of such fads, The main Belarusian three-letter agency is still called the KGB (KDB in Belarusian) and it still is the KGB, really. Perhaps my least successful attempt to get in to a secret service archive is related to this fine organization.
In my previous post, I briefly recalled how I set my sights on Minsk on my archival trip in the summer of 2014. With my visit to the Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense Archive postponed, I decided to hop over to Minsk from Odessa. Belarus, of course, is notoriously difficult to get into. Worse yet, since Ukrainian nationals did not need a visa, there was no travel agency in Odessa that would have been in the business of selling Belarusian invitations and visas.
Not wanting to schlep back to Kyiv for the dubious prospect of procuring an invitation and visa there, I figured out that my best chance was to go through the Belarusian State University (BSU). The university offered – and apparently still offers – short research visits for international students. The program description promised that, for a reasonable fee, they would send me an invitation. Since Belarus maintained a consular mission in Odessa at the time, I could have just presented my invitation there and obtained a visa without ever having to leave the shores of the Black Sea.
However, BSU informed me that due to the summer break it might take a while to process my request – but also advised that the consul can grant me a visa at his own discretion. Thus, I took my chances and strolled in to the consulate. After convincing the consular staff that my intentions were serious, I was let in to see the consul. Standing in the middle of his office, open laptop in hand, I began showing him the emails from BSU, trying to come off as confident as possible, while thinking to myself that the whole scene was utterly ridiculous and could not possibly work.
To my pleasant surprise, the consul did not immediately kick me out. Instead, he said he would need to look into the issue, and asked me to come back the next day. And lo and behold, upon my return he agreed to provide me with a visa without any formal invitation or any payment to BSU. I left with a Belarusian diplomatic visa adorning my passport.
The very day I arrived in Minsk, I went to the KGB headquarters, which also houses the Central Archive of the KGB. An officer led me to a side room, and listened with a poker face as I explained my intention of doing research in their archives. He made me fill out a form with my personal information – which made me slightly queasy – then let me off with a promise that if my request is granted, they would call me. Of course, they never did.
The entrance of the Felix Dzerzhinsky KGB Officers’ Club. Photo by the author, 2014.
FSB
During my archival research year in 2012-2013, I wanted to visit the archives of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Russia’s main KGB successor agency. I knew that researchers – especially foreigners – were by default not allowed access, and foreigners even then usually only within the framework of international research collaborations. But I had quite a few months’ worth of research to do in Moscow anyway, so thought would give it a try.
I had no contact information to Central Archive of the FSB (they still only provide a mailing address), but found a phone number to the archive on some aggregator website and made the call. If my memory serves me well, the call went something like this (in Russian):
- Hello.
- Hello, FSB?
- Yes.
- Hi, I’m Mihály Kálmán, a PhD student from Harvard. I’m looking to do research in the
Central Archive of the FSB.
- What? We don’t have an archive!
- But there’s the Central Archive…
- Where did you get this number?!
- I found it on this website called…
- Don’t ever call this number again. [Hangs up.]
I figured that from a personal freedom and life expectancy perspective it was indeed better not to call back. Instead, one day I took my letter of reference from Harvard’s Davis Center and ventured into the belly of the beast, the FSB headquarters in the infamous Lubyanka building.
As soon as I opened one of the heavy front gates, I found myself blocked by a turnstile. I turned to the young armed guard sitting in his bulletproof booth to my right, and tried my best to explain him as cordially as possible that I was looking for the archive. I hardly finished my first sentence, when jumped up from his seat in surprise, shouted at me to leave immediately, and told me to go to FSB’s reception office, just a few blocks away.
The reception office was a middle-sized room in a semi-basement, with one guard behind bulletproof glass and another walking around, Kalashnikov in hand. They were quite uninterested in what I had to say, and bluntly ordered me to drop my letter of reference into a collection box in the back of the hall. I parted with my piece of heavy, embossed paper, never to hear from the FSB again.
SBU
Compared to the two cases above, my dealings with the archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) were quite uneventful. Eager to shed its Soviet past, Ukraine and the SBU opened their archives to a significantly greater extent than either Russia or Belarus.[1] Two weeks after a short registration procedure I received a call, and was told that my assigned “handler” would be Colonel Kokin, at the time deputy director of the archive.
I had to rely on the colonel every step of the way: when I arrived to the building in the morning, I called him to let me in. He whisked me through security, walked me to the reading room, and walked me out once I was done. Although most files in the SBU Archive are declassified, the file lists are not. Thus, I described my research topic to the historian-officer, and he brought me bundles of files he thought might be useful to me. Although my success rate was very low, the surveillance reports on Jewish self-defense activists and organizations I found in the files were still very much worth my while.
[1] The Nadav Foundation's J-Doc project has an amazing collection of scanned archival documents on Jews under the USSR, including hundreds from the SBU Archive.
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