Just over two years ago, on April 9, 2015, Ukraine’s parliament adopted a historic law on opening up the country’s Soviet-era secret-police archives. In the new law’s first full year in effect, requests for information and access boomed by 138 percent.
“It is very important for us that everyone has the chance to look at the complex history of the 20th century through the prism of their own family,” says Andriy Kohut, director of the historical archives of Ukraine’s SBU security service. “It is one thing when they speak of enormous historical events without any connection to real people. It is something else entirely when you see how these historical events are connected to you.”
