The FSB departments in several Russian regions refuse to disclose the minutes of the meetings of the special troikas of the NKVD, which contain information about the victims of repression. On Monday, November 1, writes about this Kommersant…
According to the newspaper, we are talking, in particular, about the departments in the Ivanovo and Tula regions. So, researcher Sergei Prudovsky filed lawsuits against the FSB of these regions with the requirement to declassify the NKVD protocols stored in them from the period 1937-1938 and provide access to them. At the same time, at a court session in Ivanovo, which began on October 28, a representative of the regional FSB department explained that the expert commission of the service, in the process of declassifying documents, considered that they contained information the dissemination of which could “entail incitement of national, racial or religious hatred or enmity” ( Clause 6 of Article 10 of the Federal Law No. 149 “On Information”). In this regard, it was decided to restrict access to these documents.
As a lawyer of the Memorial International Society told Kommersant (included by the Ministry of Justice in the register of organizations performing the functions of a foreign agent) Arseny Levinson, the Tula FSB department adheres to a similar position. According to him, such a position contradicts the current law in Russia on the rehabilitation of victims of repression and the presidential decree on the creation of a single base of the repressed. “The FSB commission does not have a function to evaluate materials on incitement to hatred … Nevertheless, the expert commission on declassification decided that even the access of researchers to familiarize themselves with these documents – not even to copy them – threatens the security of Russia,” Levinson emphasized.
At the moment, it is known that the Tula FSB department stores eight NKVD protocols. How many such documents can be in the Ivanovo region is not specified. According to the researchers, in fact, the protocols of special triplets can be stored in a number of regions that claim they do not have them. We are talking about Chechnya, Kabardino-Balkaria, Ingushetia, as well as the Oryol, Kursk, Nizhny Novgorod and Samara regions: it is known that special troikas of the NKVD once worked in these territories and made decisions about the fate of about 2.3 thousand local residents.
In addition, Prudovsky noted, the situation with such documents in Buryatia and Bashkiria also raises questions. The Bashkir UFSB stated that all the protocols “are in the archival criminal cases against the repressed.” In the Buryat administration, the special services explained that they only have a part of such documents in storage. At the same time, in the Central Archives of the FSB, in response to a researcher’s request about where these protocols could have gone, they replied that these documents had not been transferred anywhere.
Special troikas of the NKVD operated in the USSR for two months – from September 17 to November 17, 1938. The minutes of their meetings are considered one of the main sources of information on the number of victims of political repression in 1937-1938. It is assumed that in two months of work, special troikas examined the cases of about 108 thousand Soviet citizens, almost 70 percent of the defendants were sentenced to be shot. In 1989, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR recognized the troikas as unconstitutional and overturned their court decisions.
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