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by BENJAMIN HEIN via STANFORD REPORT
English-language overall guide
This collection contains digitized copies of thousands of pages of Estonian KGB files relating to secret police and intelligence activities, dissident and anti-Soviet activities, and repatriation and nationalism issues in Estonia. These documents were selected from the records of the Eesti NSV Riikliku Julgeoleku Komitee (Committee of State Security of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, ESSR KGB), 1920–91, held at the Eesti Riigiarhiiv in Tallinn, Estonia.
Detailed finding aids created by the Eesti Riigiarhiiv are available on this website. The finding aids include a list of each file's title, inclusive dates, and number of pages. They were compiled using data from the Eesti Riigiarhiiv's Arhiivi Infosüsteem.
The material listed in the finding aids below may be available only in part, though additional material arrives regularly. For more information, please contact the Archives before you visit. Researchers must sign a user agreement to be granted access to this collection.
"The Estonian KGB records"
Robert Service, Professor of Russian History, Oxford University
Fourteen thousand pages have been added to the Estonian KGB digital collection at Hoover representing sixty-one folders of documents of the KGB Intelligence Service pertaining to Estonian refugees.
This collection contains digitized copies of thousands of pages of Estonian KGB files relating to secret police and intelligence activities, dissident and anti-Soviet activities, and repatriation and nationalism issues in Estonia.
Stanford historian Amir Weiner recently examined the newly accessible KGB files housed in the Hoover Institution Archives. Weiner found that “a system of checks and balances in today's Western-style democracies prevents agencies like the FBI from engaging in domestic surveillance at the same invasive scale as the KGB” (Stanford Report). The collection is composed of tens of thousands of documents, including informants' reports, interrogation minutes, and official internal correspondence. Nearly two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the KGB archives are the largest accessible holdings (Russian and Ukrainian holdings are, for all practical purposes, closed) of the Soviet political police, which were left almost intact in Vilnius, Lithuania, after the Soviet Union disintegrated.
The Hoover Institution and the National Archives of Estonia have signed an agreement of cooperation for digitizing and sharing records pertaining to Estonia. The first project will be Hoover Archives’ acquiring copies of selected groups of records of the NKVD and of its successor, the KGB of the former Estonian SSSR.
