Exploring former KGB informants: where to start and where to go?

Presentation by Artjoms Ivlevs (University of the West of England and IZA) as part of the Economics Department seminar series at the IOS.

In 2018, Latvia’s government decided to disclose/make publicly available information about all secret KGB informants that were present in Latvia when it was part of the USSR. The information contains names, addresses, and several other characteristics of the former informants, a large number of whom are still alive. These data are publicly available and the government allows/welcomes the use of the data for research. In this talk, Artjoms Ivlevs would like to present and discuss the following: (i) The reasons behind disclosing this information (transitional justice/lustration in the former communist countries); (ii) Ethical implications of doing research that would use this dataset; (iii) Potential research projects that might draw on this dataset; (iv) Initial exploration of the dataset.