reports, and so forth). It was open for around a year and was closed at around 2oo pages. The typical operational case file in opis 45 was of similar length (but length was much more variable). It contained many personal records not of KGB origin. A few were opened long before Soviet rule reached Lithuania, and many remained open for decades (at the extreme, one file ran from 1926 to 1985). To focus on the routine management of the Lithuania KGB and place some limits on heterogeneity in the data, we leave opis 45 out of the analysis, keeping opisi 2,3,10, and 14 in. In the text, I call these the “management files.”
It would be hard to make sense of this material without paying close attention to time variation. More files were opened in just one decade, from 1944 to 1953, than in all other years taken together. There were sharp increases in the rate of file creation in 1943 and 1983, and sharp declines in 1953 and 1985.
Specifically, from 1940 to 1953 Lithuania was a theater of conflict, including armed resistance to Soviet rule in 1940/41 and from 1944 to 1953. KGB activity was dominated by the need to suppress the armed resistance. In the KGB archive this is reflected by a torrent of paperwork devoted to counterinsurgency operations. From 1954 the flood subsided to a trickle that was limited to concerns over historic offences and offenders.
From 1983, the quantity and balance of KGB records present in the archive were increasingly affected by the disorderly end of the KGB’s presence in Lithuania in 1991. It became the KGB’s priority to remove to Moscow or destroy many records of current operations that would normally have been archived, to prevent their ultimate disclosure. At the same time, many records deemed to be neither current nor important were retained, because it was not a priority to destroy them.
For the purposes of this chapter, therefore, I discount the data provided by the early and late years of KGB activity in Lithuania. That leaves the 29 years in between, from 1954 to 1982, which (for ease of reference) I call the period of “Soviet postwar normality.” These “normal” years yield 1,003 management files containing more than 160,000 pages of reports, minutes, letters, speeches, and similar material.
The spirit of the exercise is to assign files to topics, based on analyzing the terms used to describe them. The topics are found from keywords and keyword clusters in the file descriptions reported by the Hoover Archive’s electronic catalogue. The first step reduces the catalogue to words and numerals. When numerals are dropped, just over 86,000 words are left. At the second step, “stop” words are eliminated—all words of one or two letters, and conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, and numbers—leaving words that may be considered substantive. The language of the documentation is Russian, and in Russian nouns decline and verbs conjugate, so substantive words must be reduced to their invariant word stems by deleting the variable word endings, while managing the risk of ambiguity arising from word stems with multiple meanings. This is done by hand. The final list comprises 1,400 unique keywords.
| TABLE 3A.2. Lithuania KGB management files, 1940-1991: Top ten operational, organizational, and procedural terms by frequency | |
|---|---|
| Rank | Frequency |
| Operational terms | |
| 1 partizan- (partisan) | 2373 |
| 2 bor'b- (struggle) | 1404 |
| 3 antisov- (anti-Soviet) | 955 |
| 4 podpol- (underground) | 616 |
| 5 natsionalist- (nationalist) | 567 |
| 6 nastroen- (mood) | 460 |
| 7 prover- (verification) | 421 |
| 8 LNDR- (Lithuanian Popular Movement) | 308 |
| 9 inostran- (foreign) | 228 |
| 10 avtor- (author) | 204 |
| Organizational terms | |
| 1 NKGB, MGB, KGB- (People's Commissariat, | |
| Ministry, Committee of State Security) | 4398 |
| 2 LSSR- (Soviet Lithuania) | 3094 |
| 3 otdel- (department) | 1909 |
| 4 MVD- (Ministry of Internal Affairs) | 1774 |
| 5 rabo- (worker, employee) | 1430 |
| 6 upravlen- (administration) | 1353 |
| 7 uezd- (rural district) | 1205 |
| 8 lits- (person) | 1059 |
| 9 agentur- (agent network) | 813 |
| 10 proiavl- (manifestation) | 794 |
| Procedural terms | |
| 1 dokument- (document) | 1667 |
| 2 otchet- (report) | 1154 |
| 3 sprav- (reference report) | 1116 |
| 4 soobshch- (communication) | 991 |
| 5 del- (file) | 868 |
| 6 spis- (list) | 523 |
| 7 akt- (deed) | 521 |
| 8 perepis- (correspondence) | 465 |
| 9 svod- (briefing) | 424 |
| 10 danny- (data) | 414 |
| Source: Statistical appendix to Harrison, “Accounting for Secrets,” https://warwick. ac.uk/markharrison/data/secrets/jeh2013appendix.pdf. | |