Metadata: Secretariat of the Lithuanian SSR Committee for State Security (KGB)
Collection
- Country:
- Lithuania
- Holding institution:
- Lithuanian Special Archives
- Holding institution (official language):
- Lietuvos ypatingasis archyvas
- Postal address:
- Gedimino pr. 40/1, 01110 Vilnius
- Phone number:
- +370 5 264 9024
- Web address:
- http://www.archyvai.lt/en/news.html
- Email:
- lya@archyvai.lt
- Reference number:
- K-51
- Title:
- Secretariat of the Lithuanian SSR Committee for State Security (KGB)
- Title (official language):
- Lietuvos TSR valstybės saugumo komiteto (KGB) Sekretoriatas
- Creator/accumulator:
- Secretariat of the Lithuanian SSR Committee for State Security (KGB)
- Date(s):
- 1940/1996
- Language:
- Lithuanian
- Russian
- Extent:
- 858 files
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Physical condition:
- good
- Scope and content:
-
The collection of the Secretariat of the Lithuanian SSR Committee for State Security (KGB) includes orders and instructions of the KGB USSR and the KGB LSSR on operational matters; KGB LSSR reports and notices to various communist party bodies (CPSU), the local party infrastructures in Lithuania, and different KGB departments; work plans of the KGB LSSR units; proposals and complaints of residents; lists of documents to be destroyed; and various accounting registers.
The collection contains Jewish-related records which are included in general messages, summaries and reports of the KGB LSSR. Information about underground Jewish organisations and groups in Lithuania are included in special messages and reports from 1941 and 1948-1951 (inventory 1, files 4, 62). The KGB special messages of 1946 contain censored postal materials from Eretz Israel to Soviet citizens in Lithuania, as well as from Soviet citizens to their relatives in the United States, other countries, and to the Joint office in Tehran (inventory 1, file 39). These special messages emphasised that the letters from these Jewish individuals requested help to leave the USSR due to difficult material conditions and inadequate assistance from the Soviet authorities. The special messages contain excerpts from the letters.
The KGB reports for 1947 contains report on the detention of a group of Jews by Polish border guards when illegally crossing the Soviet border into Poland (inventory 1, file 46). The collection also includes materials about KGB undercover operations to identify the activities and arrest alleged anti-Soviet activists and Zionists. For example, the reports for 1948 contain data on the KGB operation against Haim Finkelstein who in 1941 was arrested for Zionist activity and sent to a labour camp (inventory 1, file 55). After returning to Lithuania in 1946, he was suspected of planning to flee abroad, conducting anti-Soviet conversations, and having [Zionist?] connections in the United States and Eretz Israel. The operation planned to lead to the disclosure of the Zionist secret routes through the Soviet border (Bricha).
The collection also includes reports on the Lithuanian underground, their leaflets and other antisemitic propaganda (for example inventory 1, file 82). The collection also contains records on the Holocaust in Lithuania, including materials about the mass killing of Jews at Ninth Fort in Kaunas. A file from 1953 contains a report on KGB operations inside Lithuanian medical institutions against Jewish doctors relating to the “Doctors’ Plot”. These documents contain information about the arrest of the head physician in the Tuberculosis Institute, Leon-Moshel Koganas (inventory 1, file 149). He was accused of denying communist party officials priority medical attention. In addition, documents in the file deal with the KGB operation against Viktoras Mitselmakheris, who until February 1953 held the position of Deputy Minister of Health of the Lithuanian SSR. The papers mention his contacts with relatives in Eretz Israel and the USA, as well as his anti-Soviet conversations. The KGB operation was supposed to show Mitselmakheris’s loyalty to a foreign power. Materials of 1953 also contain reports on attitudes among the Jewish population of Lithuania (inventory 1, file 156).
- Archival history:
- In 1990, following the collapse of the USSR, the KGB of the Lithuanian SSR exported massive amounts of archival materials for destruction in Russia. Many of the materials were sent to the archives of the KGB Administration in the Omsk Region and were partially destroyed at the Omsk Cardboard Factory. Consequently, by the autumn of 1990 only a small number of the files remained in the Archives of the KGB of the LSSR. The Lithuanian Special Archive in Vilnius was established in 1995 and the preserved records of the former Lithuanian SSR division of KGB, dating from 1940 to 1991, were transferred to this newly created archive. Around the turn of the 21st century, the Lithuanian Special Archives renamed many of the fonds and the inventories (opisi) and assigned them numbers. Previously the materials of the collection were part of the archival fonds K-1, Lietuvos SSR Valstybės Saugumo Komitetas (Committee of State Security of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, LSSR KGB), 1926-1991, inventory (opis) 10.
- Administrative/biographical history:
- The main tasks of the Secretariat of the Lithuanian SSR Committee for State Security (KGB) were: recording and accounting of documents of the KGB LSSR; destroying documents; controlling secret materials and assisting KGB units with classified documents; registering applications, complaints and proposals of the population to KGB figures and other state bodies, as well as a generalisation of these materials.
- Access points: locations:
- Lithuania
- Access points: persons/families:
- Finkelstein, Haim
- System of arrangement:
- The collection consists of three inventories.
- Finding aids:
- Detailed inventories are available for free online access on the website of the Lithuanian Chief Archivist Service.
- Links to finding aids:
- https://eais-pub.archyvai.lt/eais/faces/pages/forms/search/F3001.jspx
- Yerusha Network member:
- Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People
- Author of the description:
- Ilya Vovshin, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, 2019. Edited by Aaron Lasaine, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, 2019
