Report about error

On the morning of Thursday 6 September the website that published lists of city and district staff of the KGB for the first time was disrupted due to a higher level of online traffic, delfi.lt reports.

“It indeed ‘cracked’ under the weight of the huge level of traffic. Visitors today [6 September] simply besieged the website. We hope this issue will be rectified within the hour,” stated Teresė Birutė Burauskaitė, Director of the State Genocide Research Centre of Lithuania, to BNS.

It was announced on Wednesday that 628 documents had been uploaded to the website “KGB activities in Lithuania” (www.kgbveikla.lt). This website reveals activities of various KGB divisions in Lithuanian cities and districts, their specific tasks, and contains the agency’s lists from the 9^th decade of the 20th century.

In Soviet-occupied Lithuania there were in total five KGB divisions in the biggest cities, and forty four subdivisions in other towns and districts. Their distribution was in line with Lithuania’s territorial administrative division.

T. B. Burauskaitė said she could not say exactly how many people were in the lists, but could be counted in the hundreds. According to BNS calculations, the lists contain 53 names of KGB staff in Vilnius, around 300 in Kaunas and 98 in Klaipėda.

Between 1954 and 1967, the KGB had city and district representative offices. Then in 1967 more KGB city divisions and district subdivisions were established. A special division for Vilnius itself was only established as late as 1984. Until then, the territory of Vilnius belonged to the central KGB division of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Town divisions and district subdivisions organised their activities along counter-intelligence and ideological counter-intelligence lines, not to mention specific targets (industrial companies, organisations, and transport and military-industrial complexes).

Translated by Silvija Guzelytė
Edited by Rachel Croucher