Exhibit Views 'Double Secret Probation' at KGB-Era Tallinn Tech
An exhibition at the Tallinn University of Technology marks the 20th anniversary of the disbanding of the school's departments set up to collaborate with the security services during the Soviet era.
The exhibition, its title reading in styled Cyrillic lettering, "СЕКРЕТНО: TPI special department 1944-1991," runs through September 9 and examines the workings of the not one but two special departments responsible for sounding out the ideological leanings of students - and even checking up on each other.
The first department of the then Tallinn Polytechnical Institute worked with the KGB, and supervised the activities of the second department, which was in charge of counterintelligence, probing mindsets in the student body and working with internal security bodies.
The first department also was in charge of keeping secrets throughout the institution. Based on the small number of documents extant, it may have done that part of its job well, but what files do survive are used by the curators - archivists Katrin Müürsepp and Ilmar Ermus and librarian Marita Paas - to sketch out how the system established by the Soviet authorities operated in a higher institution of learning.
Kristopher Rikken