REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

Anka IGNATOVA: Archival Documents as a Tool in the Hands of the Communist … 251
The activity of the state archives in serving the Ministry of Interior continued in the
next decades, regardless of changes in the departmental subordination in November 1,
1961. It turned out that a number of documents that have been seized from
enterprises, organizations and individuals by the authorities of the MO were
destroyed by operational services after completion of work on them. At the insistence
of the archive management measures were taken to prevent similar cases. The
"Inspectorate" of the Ministry of Interior issued letter I-197 of 6 February 1961 to all
individual units in the country. The letter ordered to the operational services and
county administrations to keep the documents that were in need of SS or the People’s
militia or to send these documents to the local archives after work on them was
finished. Moreover, operational services were obliged to inform the Archive
department of the MI or a public archive if specific documents with no present use
were encountered during performance of their duties 65 . Early in 1954 the
management of archives proposed to Deputy Interior Minister Maj. Gen. St. Gurov
the archive collections of V. Radoslavov, V. Dimov, I. Bagryanov, Prof. Katzarov,
part of the Archive fund of the Monarchy Institute and some other documents to be
committed to State archives. They were stored in the Archive of 8 th department of
State Security and by that time they didn’t have any operational significance 66 . The
proposal was accepted and inventorying was started 67 , followed by commiting of the
documents to CSHA. Although the documents provided by the archives of the
Ministry for temporary use, were an integral part of the National Archives many
remained in the archives of the DS for a very long time. After the fall of the
communist regime in late 1989, the management of records raised the question of
their return 68 , but this was a very long following process. Some of these documents,
State archives get back in 2012.
According to the presented facts based primarily on documents from CSA following
conclusions can be drawn. It is well known that establishment of the Communist
regime was accompanied by persecution and repression not only of those who openly
oppose its policies, but also of those who were guilty before the party before
September 9, 1944. The discovery of documentary evidence for this appeared to be
one of the important tasks of the SS, which in 1951 created for this purpose a special
unit to archive "Card indexes and Аrchive" 69 which started to collect such documents.
The centralized network of state archives, directly subordinated to the Ministry of
Interior also assisted in finding such documents. One of the tasks that the newly
established archive system had was to inform immediately the SS for archive
documents compromising any individuals to the Party. This activity during the period
was rated as not effective enough. That’s why the assistance of the SS was required.
Indications for using data stored in the special archive documents by SS was for the
sentencing of Bulgarian citizens.
Undoubtedly, the subject of this release deserves attention and should be followed in a
chronological plan fully to highlight this previously unexplored part of the history of
archives in Bulgaria. This will help to clarify the fate of the documentary heritage used
for the needs of the repressive communist government.
References
1 Държавен вестник, бр. 177 от 30.08.1949 г. [State Gazette, issue 177 of 30 August 1949.]