During a recent archival reconnaissance expedition to Latvia, in advance of yet another Hoover digitization project in the countries of the former USSR, Stanford history professor Amir Weiner came across an account of a 1967 visit to Stanford by Aleksandrs Drizulis, a high Soviet Communist Party official and historian. The following text is from Drizulis’s presentation to party activists on April 18, 1968.

The Hoover Institution and the National Archives of Estonia have signed an agreement of cooperation for digitizing and sharing records pertaining to Estonia. The first project will be Hoover Archives’ acquiring copies of selected groups of records of the NKVD and of its successor, the KGB of the former Estonian SSSR.

Yuri Yarim-Agaev is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, as well as a scientist and human rights activist. After receiving his degree in 1972 from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, he worked at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He joined the Moscow Helsinki Group (founded in 1976) and became a leader of the human rights movement in Russia, working closely with Andrei Sakharov and other dissidents. As a consequence of his dissident activities, he was forced into exile in the summer of 1980.