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Russia's FSB Declassifies Hundreds of 'Top Secret' Stalin-Era Documents

Josef Stalin / Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R80329 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) on Thursday declassified more than a thousand “top secret” documents dating to the early years of the Soviet Union. 

The ten-volume collection, comprising documents from the years 1922-1934, was released in celebration of the 100-year anniversary since the founding of Cheka, the Soviet Union’s first secret police apparatus, the state-run TASS news agency reported.

Read more: Stalin's Shadow: How a Gulag Historian Fell Victim to Russia's Dark Past

“This is a very important and objective source,” the editor of the collection Vasily Khristoforov was cited as saying by TASS. 

“When you read the documents, you can imagine what was actually happening in the country.” 

The FSB presenters said that the collection recreates a “fairly complete picture of the political and economic situation in the country,” the Interfax news agency reported, and “contributes to countering attempts to falsify domestic history.”

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