A new project came to my attention this week via global voices: The KGB Baltic document project. Decades and decades of secret KGB records and documents about activity in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.
Just glancing through the list of documents, translated to English, there are titles like:
- about the work done to expose Lithuanian and other bourgeois nationalists through the broadcast and print media.
- about the constant attention which should be paid to known writers of anti-Soviet documents written anonymously, and to those who published and distributed them.
- plan of the main KGB agency and operative measures on how to strengthen the KGB’s fight against ideological sabotage aimed at the country’s artists
or
Amazing to see the types of surveillance this secret and wide reaching agency was involved in. Just reading through these kinds of headlines, one might think to oneself “what a strange time that was”.
Yet what if we could get our hands on CIA and FBI documents from the last 2 to 4 years? Reading through info of how agents try to disrupt peace marches, or infiltrate groups organizing against the war. Artists and community leaders that are, as we speak, monitored and tracked.. in the name of “national security.”
For now Ill keep reading through the KGB documents and try not to see the parallels.