Interfax's Interview

Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) archives containing data on employed secret security agents and people confidentially assisting them cannot be declassified, FSB registration and archive department chief Vasily Khristoforov told Interfax.

 The files on people suspected of anti-Soviet propaganda have been destroyed, he said.
 "We keep information on forces, resources, sources, methods, and plans used in conducting clandestine operations, on their results, on people who infiltrated organized criminal groups, on employed clandestine security agents, on people assisting security agencies on confidential basis, and also on the organization and tactics of search operations," Khristoforov said.
 All this information constitutes state secrets, as is the case with any "efficient special service in the world," and such records can never be declassified, he said.
 "Information on people who infiltrated organized criminal groups, employed clandestine security agents, and people who assisted security agencies on confidential basis can be made public only with their written consent," Khristoforov said.
 "The archive files on those who were suspected on dissent [during the Soviet era] at the FSB Central Archive have been eliminated," he said.
 At the same time Khristoforov said that "since 1994, 60,000 pages of documents dealing with Nazi crimes during World War II, kept at the FSB's Central Archives, had been handed over to the United States".
 Cooperation between American and Russian law enforcement and judiciary agencies led to a court ruling to deprive a Nazi accomplice in the extermination of the Warsaw Ghetto of American citizenship, he said.
 Copies of trophy documents dealing with the Travniki training center have been sent to the American judiciary to be used in a trial of former Soviet and now U.S. citizens Stadnik and Dmitrenko as part of the work to investigate crimes against humanity, Khristoforov said.
 FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev, while addressing the Senate's Intelligence and Security Committee in June 2005, made special mention of the FSB's humanitarian cooperation with U.S. state and non- governmental organizations, he said.
 Khristoforov also said that some documents of the FSB's Central Archives were published by Europe Publishing House in 2006 in releases about the crimes committee by Baltic collaborators during World War II.
 On the initiative of the Russian envoy to the European Court of Human Rights, archives materials are used when Russian citizen's suits against Latvia are heard, he said.
 Khristoforov's also said that FSB's de- classified archives wer accessible to all who seek access to them.
 "Anyone can file a request with the archives, indicating what materials he needs to read and for what purpose," Khristoforov said.
 "The request will be processed and if the materials requested are declassified, they will be made available to the applicant," he said
 Last year, 3,500 requests were processed and 1,500 persons were allowed to read archives materials in an open reading room, Khristoforov said.
 Private individuals and organizations are free to file their requests with the FSB's Central Archives at 2, Bolshaya Lubyanka, or come to the FSB's reception office at 22, Kuznetsky Most.
 Regarding the archives documenting mass political reprisals, Khristoforov said that access to these archives was opened after they were declassified by a 1992 presidential decree.
 Since then, official security classification has been removed from laws and regulatory acts, that were passed between the 1920s and the early 1950, and dealt with political reprisals in the former Soviet Union.
 The Law on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Reprisals says that rehabilitated citizens, as well as their relatives and other authorized persons, have the right to read the records of declassified criminal cases.
 To prevent incursions into convicted persons' private life, applicants - researchers or journalists - are requested to produce a notarized permit, provided by the convicted person's relatives.
 "If details of a person's private life are involved, which should not be made public, we ask the relatives to examine the documents first and then decide whether researchers should be allowed to study them and whether they can be published," Khristoforov said.
 "Some unscrupulous authors seek access to declassified archives in search for shady sensations, rather than the truth," he said.
 "It is easy to imagine what irreparable moral damage this so-called research work can deal to the relatives of the victim, and, ultimately, to the cause of restoring the truth. It is our duty to rule out such occurrences. The legislation in action gives us this right and even obliges us to do so," said Khristoforov.

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