Russia's Archives suffer from the "Unconstitutional prohibition on access to information"

Have you wondered what happened to the archives of the former Communist Party in Russia? Russian law on state secrets requires a 30-year period of secrecy for most documents and 50 years for documents of intelligence services relating to the Soviet nuclear program. That means documents created before 1979 should be available to the public. But according to Nikita Petrov, a Russian historian and activist at Memorial, a Russian organization dedicated to Soviet political repression, the Russian State Archives has not released many of those documents. Ironically, as we've learned about records, there can and usually is more than one copy. When the Soviet Union broke up, Ukrainian and Baltic officials declassified copies of KGB documents left behind. Several of those reports have made it to the World Wide Web. Read more.