Welcome to the Vozmezdie Files
This site presents a small selection of declassified documents from the former KGB archives of the Ukrainian SSR. KGB, or Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, translates as the State Security Committee and is commonly referred to in English as the Soviet security services.
The files gathered here reveal how the Soviet security services monitored, described, and sought to undermine the Ukrainian diaspora in North America.
As part of its broader effort to construct a single Soviet nation from the many peoples brought under Russian imperial and later Soviet rule, the USSR systematically suppressed dissent and resistance to this effort. Formed in North America before the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922, the Ukrainian diaspora continued to advocate for an independent and sovereign Ukraine throughout the twentieth century. Soviet authorities increasingly viewed pro-independent Ukrainian diaspora activities as a threat to Soviet domestic stability and foreign policy.
Following the Second World War and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who refused repatriation to the USSR, resistance to Soviet rule in Western Ukraine continued. As a result, Soviet surveillance and operational activities targeting Ukrainians abroad intensified. Some of these operations were conducted under the code name Vozmezdie.
Through this operation, the KGB sought to undermine émigré organizations, discredit institutions of Ukrainian studies abroad, and weaken public commemoration of the Holodomor. The Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta also appears in these files.
The sixteen documents presented on this site date primarily from the early 1980s and originate from a single archival fond held at the HDA SBU archive in Ukraine. Each document appears in the original Russian alongside an English translation, with the two texts aligned for parallel reading. We invite you to explore both the documents themselves and the analytical tools developed as part of this project.
This site represents an opening step in a broader CIUS initiative that critically re-reads the language of the KGB archives and examines how that language continues to shape contemporary understandings of the people, events, and histories it claimed to describe. Rather than treating archival language as neutral evidence, the project approaches it as part of a broader system of Soviet ideological and epistemic production.
Read on. Explore the files. To learn more about the project and the questions guiding this work, follow the link below to our article and selected reading list.
What you can do here
- Compare how human experts and AI classified the same passages in each document's Human vs AI Comparison Table, including agreement and disagreement on specific details and ideological layers.
- Use the Document Text Illuminator to read English and Russian side by side, highlight segments by category or framing, and search within a file.
- On All Documents, explore corpus-wide charts, the places map, shared terms, and the framework that explains how passages are classified.
- Open any single document for its own illuminator, comparison table, visualizations, and Independent AI Assessment.
- View the Independent AI Assessment in a document when you want passages the model coded on its own, without a paired expert row in the comparison table.
How to use this site (video)
A short walkthrough of the site layout and main analytical tools.
Selected Reading List
The KGB and the Ukrainian Diaspora / КГБ та українська діаспора
- Andrew, Christopher, and Vasili Mitrokhin. The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West. London: Allen Lane, 1999.
- Bertelsen, Olga. “Ukrainian and Jewish Émigrés as Targets of KGB Active Measures in the 1970s.” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 34, no. 2 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1080/08850607.2020.1750093.
- Bertelsen, Olga. In the Labyrinth of the KGB: Ukraine’s Intelligentsia in the 1960s–1970s. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022.
- Bociurkiw, Bohdan R. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State (1939–1950). Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1996.
- Khanenko-Friesen, Natalia. Ukrainian Otherlands: Diaspora, Homeland, and Folk Imagination in the Twentieth Century. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015.
- Ханенко-Фрізен, Наталія. Інший світ або Етнічність у дії: канадська українськість кінця двадцятого століття. Київ: Смолоскип, 2011.
- Kohut, Andriy. “Soviet Deportations of OUN Family Members from Western Ukraine in 1940–1952.” Acta Historica Neosoliensia 23, no. 1 (2020): 72–90. https://doi.org/10.24040/ahn.2020.23.01.72-90.
- Luciuk, Lubomyr Y. Searching for Place: Ukrainian Displaced Persons, Canada, and the Migration of Memory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.
- Lupul, Manoly R. The Politics of Multiculturalism: A Ukrainian-Canadian Memoir. Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2005.
- Martynowych, Orest T. Ukrainians in Canada: The Formative Period, 1891–1924. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1991.
- Satzewich, Vic. The Ukrainian Diaspora. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
- Tromly, Benjamin. Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
- Viatrovych, Volodymyr, and Lubomyr Luciuk, eds. Enemy Archives: Soviet Counterinsurgency Operations and the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement — Selections from the Secret Police Archives. Translated by Marta Daria Olynyk. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023.
- Zhuk, Sergei I. KGB Operations against the USA and Canada in Soviet Ukraine, 1953–1991. London and New York: Routledge, 2022.
- Сіромський, Руслан. «„Посіяти недовіру до еміґрантських центрів“: заходи КДБ з дискредитації української діяспори в Канаді». Україна Модерна, no. 32–33 (2022). https://doi.org/10.3138/ukrainamoderna.32.067.
Reading the Archives of Repression / Як читати архіви репресій
- Averbuch, Alex, Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, and Jelena Pogosjan, eds. Postal Censorship, Surveillance, Resistance: Twentieth-Century Ukraine and Letter Writing. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, forthcoming 2026.
- Blouin, Francis X., Jr., and William G. Rosenberg. Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
- Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
- Funder, Anna. Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. London: Granta, 2003.
- Garton Ash, Timothy. The File: A Personal History. London: HarperCollins, 1997.
- Ketelaar, Eric. “Archival Temples, Archival Prisons: Modes of Power and Protection.” Archival Science 2, no. 3–4 (2002): 221–238. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435623.
- Kohut, Andriy, et al. Open Access to the KGB Archives in Eastern Partnership: Analytical Report. Edited by Anna Oliinyk. Kyiv: Center for Research on the Liberation Movement, 2017.
- Schwartz, Joan M., and Terry Cook. “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory.” Archival Science 2, no. 1–2 (2002): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435628.
- Skultans, Vieda. “Arguing with the KGB Archives: Archival and Narrative Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia.” Ethnos 66, no. 3 (2001): 320–343. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141840120095122.
- Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
- Vatulescu, Cristina. Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.
- Vatulescu, Cristina. Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and Their Challenges. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024.
- Verdery, Katherine. Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania’s Secret Police. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014.
- Verdery, Katherine. My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.
Language, Ideology, and the Totalitarian State / Мова, ідеологія і тоталітарна держава
- Fairclough, Norman. Language and Power. London: Longman, 1989.
- Gorham, Michael S. Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003.
- Klemperer, Victor. The Language of the Third Reich: LTI — Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook. Translated by Martin Brady. London: Athlone Press, 2000.
- Kozlov, Vladimir A. “Denunciation and Its Functions in Soviet Governance: A Study of Denunciations and Their Bureaucratic Handling from Soviet Police Archives, 1944–1953.” The Journal of Modern History 68, no. 4 (1996): 867–898. https://doi.org/10.1086/245397.
- Wodak, Ruth, and Michael Meyer, eds. Methods of Critical Discourse Studies. 3rd ed. London: Sage, 2016.
- Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
The Holodomor and Its Commemoration / Голодомор та його вшанування
- Applebaum, Anne. Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. New York: Doubleday, 2017.
- Graziosi, Andrea. “The Soviet 1931–1933 Famines and the Ukrainian Holodomor: Is a New Interpretation Possible, and What Would Its Consequences Be?” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 27, no. 1–4 (2004–2005).
- Klid, Bohdan, and Alexander J. Motyl, eds. The Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine. Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2012.
- Makuch, Andrij, and Frank E. Sysyn, eds. Contextualizing the Holodomor: The Impact of Thirty Years of Ukrainian Famine Studies. Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2015.
- Serbyn, Roman, and Bohdan Krawchenko, eds. Famine in Ukraine, 1932–1933. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1986.
- United States Commission on the Ukraine Famine. Investigation of the Ukrainian Famine, 1932–1933: Report to Congress. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988.
