Interesting how long this took. Poland cleaned house almost immediately after they kicked the russians out.

orbital-decay a day ago | parent | next [-]

And in Russia itself it turned out to be one of the biggest subversions: in August 1991, Yeltsin famously and inexplicably stopped his followers on their way to the KGB building where all the archives were stored. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKpEu-62BBc

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holgerschurig 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Same in East Germany. They made a government agency on 3. October 1990. This agency collected all the files related to people from the Stasi that weren't shredded.

And then any person (east or west) could file a request "Tell me anything the Stasi knew about me". "Stasi" being the abbrev of the political secret police of east germany.

But truth be told: no one kicked the russians out. Sure, economically the FRG was "kaputt". But with a stalinist USSR they could have continued to keep the status quo. Maybe even without help: North-Korea is way more "kaputt" than east germany was. And they keep up the system since decades without soviet help. And also without much chinese help. NK is pretty isolationist, with few bridges going over the border river to China. So it's entirely possible that socialist states 1) stay in their self-selected prison due to internal forces.

It was to a good part the goodwill of the then-USSR (lead by Gorbatchev) that made the USSR troops return. I think west-german money also helped --- they asked west-germany to build housing areas in USSR for the soviet soldiers.

1) And here I mean real socialism, centered around the ideas that the "means of production" not in private hand. Uneducated US people often confuse a simple unemployment insurance with "socialism". And call countries like Denmark, Sweden or France "socialist". This only tells all of us that the general education in some countries leaves to be desired ...

	▲	jacquesm 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And they did a fantastic job putting shredded documents back together, that was one of the most interesting stories of the day. Unfortunately the project seems to have stalled at the 91,000 document mark for automatic re-assembly (many more were done by hand).

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lifestyleguru 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Poland cleaned house almost immediately after they kicked the russians out.

lol what? Quite the opposite. Nowadays they even use the modern "techniques" to prevent information becoming public - privacy laws, and "hate speech" laws. Part of archives were torched and many highest figures kept archives in their private houses and garages. Those deepest in the structures became oligarchs during privatizations.