Angående öppnandet av KGB-arkiven i Lettland finns en intressant
parallell till de stora arkiven i Ryssland. Det hävdas att västländer
försökte få Jeltsin att inte öppna arkiven för att undvika blamage.
Galina Starovojtova sköts på öppen gata 1998.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...=.ce1ff4ca0b9c
"It seemed that Russia, too, would follow this path. In September 1991,
shortly after its victory over a hard-line coup attempt, the government
of President Boris Yeltsin agreed to an international commission of inquiry
that would “objectively and comprehensively” study Soviet archives, with
subsequent publication. During the 1992 proceedings in Russia’s
Constitutional Court that became known as “the Communist Party case,”
hundreds of documents from the Central Committee archive were made
available to Vladimir Bukovsky, a Soviet-era dissident invited as an
expert witness by Yeltsin’s legal team.
At the conclusion of the trial, Russia’s highest court ruled that “the
governing structures of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had been
the initiators of repression ... directed at millions.” A nationwide poll
the same year showed a majority of Russians backing the idea of excluding
former Communist Party apparatchiks from positions of power. The proposal
was codified in a bill introduced that December in the Russian parliament
by Galina Starovoitova, a prominent liberal lawmaker from St. Petersburg.
The bill never passed; the commission was never formed; the Soviet archives
were never fully opened. “Yeltsin categorically refused,” recalled Bukovsky.
“On the one hand, I think he understood that if such a process began, it
would be difficult for him [as a former communist] to remain in power.
... On the other hand, Yeltsin came under tremendous pressure from the West not
to open the archives. Western leaders had too many connections to the Soviet
regime; they had made too many secret deals with the Kremlin that they did
not want to become known.”
One episode illustrates how well-founded those fears were. Among the
documents made available to Bukovsky during the trial was a confidential
Central Committee memo dated Dec. 11, 1980. It described the leader of
Finland’s Social Democrats, Kalevi Sorsa, as a “trusted collaborator”
of the Kremlin. Sorsa, a three-time prime minister of Finland, was
considered the front-runner for the country’s 1994 presidential election.
The publication of the memo spelled the end of Sorsa’s political career;
he issued a public apology and withdrew from the race. One wonders how
many political careers in the West would have come to a close had the
Russian government decided to go ahead with a full declassification."
