The State Archive of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance
The State Archive of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance (which we simply call the Archive of National Remembrance) is an institution where in a few years the documents of the secret police, special services and other repressive bodies of the communist and national-socialist totalitarian regimes will be collected.
Our vocation is to concentrate the whole array of historical data for 1917-1991 from all law enforcement agencies, which still keep the documents of the non-existent state. These include the Security Service, the Foreign Intelligence Service, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of the Interior, the National Police, the National Guard, the State Border Guard Service, prosecuting authorities and courts.
In total, up to 4 million archival documents will be stored in the repositories of the Archive of National Remembrance. And all this data will be freely available to everyone - to a historian, journalist or just a citizen who wants to study the history of their country and family.
Why does Ukraine need such a fundamental institution? How, for what and for whom was it created? Why can the Archive of National Remembrance become a real pride for Ukrainians and a revolution in working with archives?
In the best European traditions
The creation of such a single large-scale archive is not Ukrainian know-how. Such institutions have existed for decades in European countries that have also experienced a communist influence that turned to wide totalitarian practices. In particular, it is Germany, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary.
In Ukraine, the need for such an archive was discussed in the 1990s, but only in 2009-2010 such a possibility first began to emerge in practice.
At that time, the establishment of such an institution was hampered by the coming to power of Victor Yanukovych, and the creation of such an archive opposed to the policy of returning to the Soviet past. The desire to restore the USSR practices during 2010-2014 further demonstrated the need to create a specialized archive in order to prevent the restoration of the totalitarian past in Ukraine in the future.
The Revolution of Dignity in 2014 gave new life to the idea of creating the Archive. The real impetus was the adoption on May 21, 2015 of the Law "On Access to the Archives of the Repressive Agencies of the Communist Totalitarian Regime of 1917-1991", which created a separate institution - the State Archive of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance.