The files provide just a window into the workings of the Soviet security state. The 4,000 cards in the “Cheka bags” represent a fraction of the more than 24,000 KGB agents recruited in Latvia between 1953 and 1991. Their unveiling, in an online database, was supposed to be cathartic, a kind of national exorcism. “For some, it is experienced as a tragedy, this opening,” a historian told me. But the hope is that publishing the documentary detritus of the KGB will act as a cautionary tale, preventing any similarly repressive surveillance apparatus from rising again.
Source : ‘A Partial Freedom’: What Latvia Found in the KGB Archives
