Russia declassifies files on victims of Stalinist purges
Files on millions of victims of Stalinist repression, including those who perished in the Soviet Union's infamous gulags, have been declassified, Russia's federal security service announced yesterday.
The documents, dating from 1920 to 1950, are expected to shed new light on some of the most notorious excesses of the post-revolutionary and Stalinist eras, including Stalin's forced collectivisation of agriculture in the early 1930s, in which up to 10 million people died.
The archives, which include some two million documents, also cover the political purges of the late 1930s, which saw hundreds of thousands of party members executed as counter-revolutionaries or shipped off to gulags.
Read entire article at Guardian
The documents, dating from 1920 to 1950, are expected to shed new light on some of the most notorious excesses of the post-revolutionary and Stalinist eras, including Stalin's forced collectivisation of agriculture in the early 1930s, in which up to 10 million people died.
The archives, which include some two million documents, also cover the political purges of the late 1930s, which saw hundreds of thousands of party members executed as counter-revolutionaries or shipped off to gulags.