An Interview with Archivist Andriy Kohut
Andriy Kohut has a background in historical research, digital archiving, and social activism. In 2015 he was appointed director of the historical archive of the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine], which comprises millions of documents produced by the KGB secret police and its predecessor bodies in Soviet Ukraine.
After perusing some of the collection at the SBU’s Kyiv headquarters in late 2018, the editor of the East-West Church Report spoke with Andriy Kohut about his mission to publicize and preserve its invaluable holdings. The original conversation took place in Russian.
When did the archives open to researchers?
In practice, the level of access to the KGB archives available in Ukraine today became possible due to the legislative package on de-Communization. On 9 April 2015 four laws were adopted—the most talked about in the media was probably the one that banned propaganda and symbolism of totalitarian regimes. There was a lively discussion about whether the Communist regime could in fact be compared to the Nazi regime. A second, more or less declarative, law concerned the recognition of people who fought for Ukrainian independence—there was also much discussion surrounding it. Another of these laws was the law On Access to the Archives of Repressive Organs of the Communist Totalitarian Regime of 1917-91, that is, what is well known in the West under the generic title of the KGB archives. Unfortunately, the archival legislation is not as well known, but in fact it is a foundational law because it deals with reassessment of the past—what is called reconciliation in English. In Russian or Ukrainian it is difficult to find such terms; you need to use entire phrases. But if we think about the term reconciliation, then of course a law about access to the archives is crucial, because it offers the chance to figure out what actually took place, what testimony exists, and what the role of the totalitarian state and its secret services was in various spheres of life. When we speak about religion, faith groups, and churches, this is of course a very important resource allowing us to understand what the nature of the Communist regime really was, and how—or even if—it may be compared with others.
Similar efforts have been made, notably by the Baltic States. But open access to KGB archives of this scale seems unprecedented.
The 2015 law stipulates that, “everything is open to everyone.” The law protecting personal data does not extend to documents in the KGB archives. A discussion took place in Ukraine about which human right should take precedence— the right to privacy or the right to information. Strange as it may seem, the war with Russia and Russian aggression against Ukraine played a very important role here, because we see that a hybrid war is being waged—not only with weaponry at the battlefront, but also in the informational sphere. Unfortunately, we have found ourselves in a situation in which the difficult questions of history are being used by the Kremlin in order to manipulate and create various provocations, which then feed into military aggression—direct, harmful aggression against Ukraine. And so we came to the conclusion that the right to access information—and when we speak about the KGB archives, this is the right to access information about human rights violations—turns out in practice to be an important factor in the provision of the right to life. This may appear to be a somewhat convoluted philosophical discussion, of course, but it lies at the foundation of why we believe it is important to open these archives up to everyone, and to exempt the information that is in them from the scope of the law on the protection of personal data.
Were the KGB archives accessible prior to 2015?
There were problems with access to the collection from 2010-14 [i.e. during the Kremlin-backed presidency of Viktor Yanukovych]. During this period, a portion of the documents that had been de-classified began to be classified once again. This was a policy dictated from the Kremlin; it was a political choice.
There are two approaches here. From the perspective of independent Ukraine—and this is now law—the archives pertain to a regime that was to some measure an occupation. In the 1920s the Ukrainian People’s Republic lost its struggle against the Bolsheviks, who then seized Ukraine. This is certainly not experience upon which anything should be built; rather, it is experience of how not to build a state—of how security services should not operate. According to Russia’s view of the situation, however, the opposite is the case: the Soviet Union was a great country, and it was a shame that it fell apart; it is something that should be preserved, restored.
Following this logic, we arrive at two diametrically opposing points of view. According to the view of the Russian FSB [a successor security service to the KGB], this archive contains their experience, and so it should go on being secret. Today’s Ukrainian authorities, meanwhile—including the secret services—wish this experience to be as well known as possible, not as best practice but as bad practice.
From 2010-14, Russian influence over Yanukovych determined practically everything, especially in the sphere of state security, and so there was obviously a different approach to these documents. They tried to limit opportunities to work with them. The archive had a number of academic publishing projects with partners in Ukraine and abroad, which—while not closed down—were frozen.
We are now trying to renew all of that. We have already finalized some projects, and among those we hope to realize in the near future is the publication of a book about the repression of the Greek Catholic Church in Transcarpathia. Another project in conjunction with the Institute of Church History [at the Ukrainian Catholic University in the western city of Lviv] is publication of manuscripts written by Cardinal Josyf Slipyj, a church history preserved as evidence in his criminal file.
How are the conditions here for researchers?
We are seeing constant growth in the number of researchers, both Ukrainian and foreign, who come to familiarize themselves with these archival documents. We are working to digitize our collection, and the increasing number of visitors is one of the factors stimulating this process. You worked in the readers’ room—it is not large, unfortunately; we have only nine desks there. Yet every day we receive between 12 and 20 applications to work in the archive. Digitization is a solution for us, because those who are interested in the documents can copy items and then work with them somewhere more convenient, thus giving someone else the chance to work in the reading room.
We also have case files that are in high demand, and if 10 people examine such a file, it requires repair work. This particularly occurs with documents from before 1960, when there was a paper shortage and people wrote on whatever was at hand. Digitization is therefore also among the best solutions to ensure preservation into the future. To date, we have digitized around five percent of our collections. This is not much, but we are not doing badly in comparison with other Ukrainian archives.
Do you plan to digitize everything, and make the collection accessible online?
The law says that these materials must be digitized, and we are continuing this process. By law, our task is to create an archive under the auspices of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance [a state-funded national historical research institution formed in 2006]. This would gather together materials from all repressive organs, that is, documents preserved in our archive here at the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine], at the Interior Ministry, the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine, and in the collections of the Prosecutor’s Office and various courts. Once this archive is created, we hope it will be a more civilized arrangement than under the auspices of the SBU. Here, we have to abide by security requirements that are significantly greater than for civilian institutions. Therefore for us the priority is to get these archives in order, to create the necessary indexes and continue digitization.
Unfortunately, this all means that the question of making the material public online must remain a later stage of our work, or it will happen with the future archive at the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance. However, we do work with some local organizations with websites where digitized copies of our documents have been published. One is the Center for Research of the Liberation Movement in Lviv. Perhaps half of the documents on the Center’s website are from our archives. [See http://avr.org.ua. Two sections are devoted to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic and Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Churches.]
What interest is there in researching the Soviet regime’s treatment of Christianity and other faiths in Ukraine?
Thanks to the fact that the Greek Catholic Church supports a university and other institutions engaged in church history, the Greek Catholics have the most advanced historical research. The Institute of Church History at the Ukrainian Catholic University [re-established in Lviv in the early 1990s] has done an immense amount of work. Unfortunately, that is probably an ideal beyond the reach of representatives of other denominations. That does not mean that we do not have information about the repression of other faith groups—we do, of course. But if we were to draw a graph of who researches church repression most actively, then the Greek Catholics would lead far ahead of all the others.
The Orthodox would probably be next, but significantly behind. As a rule, they are more interested in local histories: particular bishops or monks who were repressed, or individuals identified as KGB agents. There is no meta-narrative, while Greek Catholics are engaged both in history at the grassroots level and also in speaking about the history of the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine in the Soviet period more generally, about it being banned and its experience underground. The Church has supported this research, and also considers it important from the point of view of confessional identity: “We suffered for our faith as Greek Catholics, we endured repression, and we continue to follow Christ.” They had this sense of mission, and this helped them to develop their historical research.
Work by Protestants is generally very weakly developed, unfortunately, although we do not have any less material about them: perhaps more in some cases. Even the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation somehow did not prove an impetus for Protestant historians to come and work with these documents. Much work is needed in this field. Research is also done on Jews and Muslims, but very rarely. We hope this will change.
Do many researchers come from outside Ukraine?
From abroad, we do have a researcher from Austria studying Protestantism in southern Ukraine. Orthodoxy is more interesting to people in Russia. We have a situation in which researchers come here from Russia who do not have the opportunity to work with this type of document there. Their number is growing steadily. If we speak of all researchers visiting from abroad, then in 2017 we had 94. The year before that we had around 80, and 41 the year before that. So the number is constantly increasing. [Editor’s note: In 2019, it was 118.]
It is difficult for me to say precisely how many of those researchers focus just on the topic of religion, probably about two or three percent of the total—a handful of people. But the scale of the material is huge. The main challenge facing researchers who come to our archive is the quantity of material. Sometimes historians find that everything is interesting, and they want it all!
