KGB and the Ukrainian Diaspora

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.