By Tengo Gogogtishvili | 2024-02-23

KYIV -- By limiting access to archives and historical documents, the Georgian government is paying tribute to the old Soviet mentality of secrecy and to the "red intelligentsia" (the artistic and cultural leaders of Soviet times), researchers and analysts warn.

Access to Georgia's archives remained virtually unchanged from Soviet times until the Rose Revolution in 2003.

When the pro-Western government headed by President Mikheil Saakashvili came to power, it started declassifying and opening former KGB and Communist Party archives, making most documents accessible to researchers.

But after 2012 the process went into reverse, according to Sovlab, an association of scholars who research the Soviet past.

Immediately after Georgian Dream, the current ruling political party, came to power, it "began to introduce a wide range of restrictive measures, both formal and informal, which ended up significantly limiting access to Georgia's Soviet past," Sovlab said in a blog post published January 12.

Sovlab has even appealed to the European Union with a request to include this matter in its general dialogue with the Georgian government.

Museum of the Soviet Occupation

The limitations extended to the Museum of the Soviet Occupation.

At the end of October 2012, the Foundation for the Unity of Russians and Georgians, headed by Russian businessman Vladimir Khomeriki, sent an open letter to Patriarch of Georgia Ilya II and Guram Odisharia with a request to close the Museum of Occupation. Odisharia was the pro-Russian government's incoming culture minister.

Khomeriki, who is an ethnic Georgian and known for his Kremlin connections, argued that doing so would help restore Georgia's territorial integrity.

The museum was not closed, but workers removed a video collage from its exhibition.

The collage had depicted Georgia's political milestones over the past 100 years and highlighted Saakashvili, one of those who spearheaded the museum's opening.

The official explanation provided for the video's removal was to cease political advertising of Saakashvili and others.

Roadblocks to research

The government is restricting access in less obvious ways as well, Sovlab's Irakli Khvadagiani told Kontur.

Researchers complain about the high cost of services -- up to €8 to copy a single photograph and much more to copy videos. The average monthly salary in Georgia is $671.

"We calculated it: the money [billed to researchers] ... represents only 0.003% of the budget of the National Archives," Khvadagiani said. "We've now turned to the Constitutional Court. We filed two lawsuits at the Tbilisi court. But we lost one earlier."

It is common practice worldwide for researchers to use their own equipment, such as a camera or phone, to copy documents without charge, said Anton Vacharadze, who was the director of Georgia's Historical Archive from 2012 to 2018.

"Even in Russia, this is how they work. If, of course, anyone is allowed into the archive," he told Kontur.

Georgia's Institute for Development of Freedom of Information (IDFI), Sovlab and other organizations sought to have parliament reduce the costs charged to researchers, he said, "but the state is inflexible."

Elsewhere, archives are moving towards digitization, but the opposite is true for the Archive of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (AMIA) of Georgia, which combined the archives of three institutions in Soviet Georgia: its KGB, Interior Ministry (MVD) and Communist Party Central Committee.

Even documents that were published online 10 years ago are in many instances unavailable today.

When asked about the high fees and concealment of documents, the National Archives said in a letter to Kontur that in 2023 it digitized 1,743,792 pages from the archives, and these pages may be viewed for free.

"The service fee is determined by a [government] resolution from 2011," it said. "High school students, college students, retirees and holders of an academic degree get a 50% discount."

However, "a single archive or single file is never enough to study an issue -- documents from other archives are needed," said Tamar Belkania, former director of the AMIA.

"The fragmentation of the [AMIA] began in 2012, when the collected archive began to be dragged away to different buildings, to make the work more difficult for researchers," she said.

Abusing the law

The deliberate obstruction is easy to verify: the website of the AMIA has not been updated since January 2018.

The state is abusing the law, says Sovlab. Any information about personnel of the KGB and of Soviet Georgia's MVD, even from the 1970s, has been classified since 2013.

AMIA employees tell researchers they will be punished for retrieving documents that the researchers request.

"Everything is controlled by the State Security Service [the KGB's successor] employees ... who also work in archives," said Khvadagiani, speaking from personal experience.

"A 75-year data retention rule applies to all materials. Even those without any personal data," noted Vacharadze.

"Imagine -- the archive for April 9, 1989, will become public only in 2064!" he said, referring to the day that Soviet troops violently put down a pro-independence demonstration in Tbilisi, resulting in 21 deaths and hundreds of injuries.

"A new law on the protection of personal data comes into force in March," he said. "It has elements that are slightly more positive. We'll see how it will be used."

Denying requests

Foreign scholars also face problems, say Georgian researchers.

"[Archive employees] often don't even respond to emails [from the foreign scholars]," said Vacharadze. "After the pandemic, dozens of foreign scholars were not allowed into the National Archives under various pretexts."

The problem extends far beyond the archives. The government violated the law some years ago when it stopped publishing decrees on its website and in the Legislative Herald (Matsne), the parliament's publication of record, according to iFact, a Georgian team of investigative journalists.

"Out of 7,582 requests sent to 374 [Georgian] public institutions in 2022, IDFI received answers to only 4,385 (58%)," IDFI said in a study published last March.

It was the worst result since 2010.

"This trend is only gaining strength over time," said Belkania, the former AMIA director.

"Carrying away all the intelligence files from the Tbilisi KGB to Smolensk, Russia, during the putsch [the internecine Georgian conflict of December 1991-January 1992] turned out to be an insufficient safeguard," she told Kontur.

"Many first and last names also appear in other archives, which makes it possible to identify both the officially acknowledged and clandestine employees and agents of the security agencies until 1990. There one will find many famous people who are respected even today," said Belkania.

"By closing access to archives and documents, the government is paying tribute to the old Soviet establishment and 'red intelligentsia' so as not to lose the support of their children and grandchildren," said Belkania.