Secret archives. How to clear your computer of secret information? Questions for the royal family
On March 13, 1954, the security officers were removed from the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, and a new department was formed: the State Security Committee of the CCCP - KGB. The new structure was in charge of intelligence, operational search activities and state border protection. In addition, the task of the KGB was to provide the CPSU Central Committee with information affecting state security. The concept is broad, to be sure: it includes the personal life of dissidents and the study of unidentified flying objects.
Separating truth from fiction and recognizing disinformation intended for “controlled leakage” is now almost impossible. So, to believe or not to believe in the truth of the declassified secrets and mysteries of the KGB archives is everyone’s personal right.
The current security officers who worked in the structure during its heyday, some with a smile, some with irritation, brush it off: no secret developments were carried out, nothing paranormal was studied. But, like any other closed organization that has influence on people’s destinies, the KGB could not avoid being a hoax. The activities of the committee are overgrown with rumors and legends, and even partial declassification of the archives cannot dispel them. Moreover, the archives of the former KGB were seriously cleaned in the mid-50s. In addition, the wave of declassification that began in 1991-1992 quickly subsided, and now the release of data is proceeding at an almost imperceptible pace.
Hitler: dead or saved?
The controversy has not subsided since May 1945. Did he commit suicide or was the body of a double found in the bunker? What happened to the remains of the Fuhrer?
In February 1962, captured documents from World War II were transferred to the TsGAOR of the USSR (the modern State Archives of the Russian Federation) for storage. And along with them - fragments of a skull and a sofa armrest with traces of blood.
As Vasily Khristoforov, head of the registration and archival collections department of the FSB, told Interfax, the remains were found during an investigation into the circumstances of the disappearance of the former Reich President of Germany in 1946. A forensic examination identified the partially charred remains found as fragments of the parietal bones and occipital bone of an adult. The act dated May 8, 1945 states: the discovered pieces of the skull “may have fallen from the corpse taken from the pit on May 5, 1945.”
“Documentary materials with the results of the repeated investigation were combined into a case with the symbolic name “Myth.” The materials of the said case, as well as the materials of the investigation into the circumstances of the Fuhrer’s death for 1945, stored in the Central Archive of the FSB of Russia, were declassified in the 90s of the last century and became available to the general public,” the agency’s interlocutor said.
What remained of the top of the Nazi elite and did not end up in the KGB archives did not immediately find rest: the bones were repeatedly reburied, and on March 13, 1970, Andropov ordered the removal and destruction of the remains of Hitler, Braun and the Goebbels couple. This is how the plan for the secret event “Archive” appeared, carried out by the forces of the operational group of the Special Department of the KGB of the 3rd Army of the GSVG. Two acts were drawn up. The latter states: “The destruction of the remains was carried out by burning them at the stake in a vacant lot near the city of Schönebeck, 11 kilometers from Magdeburg. The remains were burned out, crushed into ash along with coal, collected and thrown into the Biederitz River.”
It is difficult to say what Andropov was guided by when giving such an order. Most likely, he feared - and not without reason - that even after a while the fascist regime would have followers, and the burial place of the ideologist of the dictatorship would become a place of pilgrimage.
By the way, in 2002, the Americans announced that they had X-rays that were kept by the dentist, SS Oberführer Hugo Blaschke. Reconciliation with fragments available in the archives of the Russian Federation once again confirmed the authenticity of parts of Hitler’s jaw.
But despite the seemingly indisputable evidence, the version that the Fuhrer managed to leave Germany, occupied by Soviet troops, does not leave modern researchers alone. They usually look for it in Patagonia. Indeed, Argentina after World War II gave shelter to many Nazis who tried to escape justice. There were even witnesses that Hitler, along with other fugitives, appeared here in 1947. It’s hard to believe: even the official radio of Nazi Germany on that memorable day announced the death of the Fuhrer in the unequal struggle against Bolshevism.
Marshal Georgy Zhukov was the first to question the fact of Hitler's suicide. A month after the victory, he said: “The situation is very mysterious. We did not find Hitler’s identified corpse. I cannot say anything affirmative about Hitler’s fate. At the very last minute he could have flown out of Berlin, since the runways allowed this.” It was June 10th. And the body was found on May 5, the autopsy report was dated May 8... Why did the question of the authenticity of the Fuhrer’s body arise only a month later?
The official version of Soviet historians is as follows: on April 30, 1945, Hitler and his wife Eva Braun committed suicide by taking potassium cyanide. At the same time, according to eyewitnesses, the Fuhrer shot himself. By the way, during the autopsy, glass was found in the oral cavity, which speaks in favor of the version with poison.
Unidentified flying objects
Anton Pervushin, in his author’s investigation, cites one illustrative story characterizing the KGB’s attitude to the phenomenon. The writer and assistant to the chairman of the committee, Igor Sinitsyn, who worked for Yuri Andropov from 1973 to 1979, once loved to tell this story.
“Once, while looking through the foreign press, I came across a series of articles about unidentified flying objects - UFOs... I dictated a summary of them to the stenographer in Russian and took them to the chairman along with the magazines.... He quickly leafed through the materials. After thinking a little, he "I suddenly took out a thin folder from my desk drawer. The folder contained a report from one of the officers of the 3rd Directorate, that is, military counterintelligence," Sinitsyn recalled.
The information conveyed to Andropov could easily become the plot of a science fiction film: the officer, while on a night fishing trip with his friends, watched as one of the stars approached the Earth and took the form of an aircraft. The navigator estimated the size and location of the object by eye: diameter - about 50 meters, height - approximately five hundred meters above sea level.
"He saw two bright rays emerge from the center of the UFO. One of the rays stood vertically to the surface of the water and rested on it. The other ray, like a searchlight, searched the expanse of water around the boat. Suddenly it stopped, illuminating the boat. Shining several more on it seconds, the beam went out. Along with it, the second, vertical beam went out,” Sinitsyn quoted the counterintelligence report as saying.
According to his own testimony, these materials later came to Kirilenko and over time seem to have been lost in the archives. This is roughly what skeptics reduce the KGB's probable interest in the UFO problem to: pretending that it is interesting, but in reality burying the materials in the archives as potentially insignificant.
In November 1969, almost 60 years after the fall of the Tunguska meteorite (which, according to some researchers, was not a fragment of a celestial body, but a crashed spaceship), there was a report of another fall of an unidentified object on the territory of the Soviet Union. Not far from the village of Berezovsky in the Sverdlovsk region, several luminous balls were seen in the sky, one of which began to lose altitude, fell, and was then followed by a strong explosion. In the late 1990s, a number of media outlets obtained a film that supposedly captured the work of investigators and scientists at the site of an alleged UFO crash in the Urals. The work was supervised by “a man who looked like a KGB officer.”
“Our family lived in Sverdlovsk at that time, and my relatives even worked in the regional party committee. However, even there, almost no one knew the whole truth about the incident. In Berezovsky, where our friends lived, everyone accepted the legend about the exploded granary "Those who saw the UFO chose not to spread the word. The disk was taken out, presumably, in the dark, in order to avoid unnecessary witnesses," contemporaries of the events recalled.
It is noteworthy that even ufologists themselves, people initially inclined to believe in stories about UFOs, criticized these videos: the uniform of Russian soldiers, their manner of holding weapons, cars flashing in the frame - all this did not inspire confidence even among susceptible people. True, the denial of one particular video does not mean that adherents of the belief in UFOs are abandoning their beliefs.
Vladimir Azhazha, a ufologist and acoustic engineer by training, said this: “Does the state hide any information about UFOs from the public, we must assume that yes. On what basis? Based on the list of information that constitutes state and military secrets. Indeed, in "In 1993, the State Security Committee of the Russian Federation, at the written request of the then president of the UFO Association of Pilot-Cosmonaut Pavel Popovich, handed over to the UFO Center, which I headed, about 1,300 documents related to UFOs. These were reports from official bodies, commanders of military units, messages from private individuals."
Occult interests
In the 1920-30s, a prominent figure in the Cheka/OGPU/NKVD (predecessor of the KGB) Gleb Bokiy, the same one who created laboratories for the development of drugs to influence the consciousness of those arrested, became interested in studying extrasensory perception and even searched for the legendary Shambhala.
After his execution in 1937, folders with the results of the experiments allegedly ended up in the secret archives of the KGB. After Stalin's death, some of the documents were irretrievably lost, the rest ended up in the committee's basements. Under Khrushchev, work continued: America was worried about rumors periodically coming from overseas about the invention of biogenerators, mechanisms that control thinking.
Separately, it is worth mentioning another object of close attention of the Soviet security forces - the famous mentalist Wolf Messing. Despite the fact that he himself, and later his biographers, willingly shared intriguing stories about the outstanding abilities of the hypnotist, the KGB archives did not preserve any documentary evidence of the “miracles” performed by Messing. In particular, neither Soviet nor German documents contain information that Messing fled Germany after he predicted the fall of fascism, and Hitler placed a bounty on his head. It is also impossible to confirm or deny the data that Messing personally met with Stalin and he tested his outstanding abilities, forcing him to perform certain tasks.
On the other hand, information about Ninel Kulagina, who in 1968 attracted the attention of law enforcement agencies with her extraordinary abilities, has been preserved. This woman’s abilities (or lack thereof?) are still controversial: among lovers of the supernatural she is revered as a pioneer, and among the scientific fraternity her achievements cause at least an ironic grin. Meanwhile, video chronicles of those years recorded how Kulagina, without the help of her hand or any devices, rotates the compass needle and moves small objects, such as a matchbox. During the experiments, the woman complained of back pain, and her pulse was 180 beats per minute. Its secret was supposedly that the energy field of the hands, thanks to the superconcentration of the subject, could move objects falling within its zone of influence.
It is also known that after the end of World War II, it came to the Soviet Union as a trophy, made on Hitler’s personal orders: it served for astrological predictions of a military-political nature. The device was faulty, but Soviet engineers restored it, and it was transferred to the astronomical station near Kislovodsk. Knowledgeable people said that FSB Major General Georgy Rogozin (in 1992-1996, the former first deputy head of the presidential security service and who received the nickname “Nostradamus in uniform” for his studies on astrology and telekinesis) used captured SS archives concerning occult sciences in his research.
Historical site Bagheera - secrets of history, mysteries of the universe. Secrets of great empires and ancient civilizations, the fate of disappeared treasures and biographies of people who changed the world, secrets of intelligence agencies. Chronicle of the war, description of battles and battles, reconnaissance operations of the past and present. World traditions, modern life in Russia, the unknown USSR, the main directions of culture and other related topics - everything that official science is silent about.
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It happens that someone travels to dubious sites, and then wants to find out whether well-behaved members of his family are doing the same.
It happens that you need to hide your “work” from a boring network administrator or boss.
Sometimes, on the contrary, you need to find out what the people to whom you are paying money for some reason are doing.
Let's play spy a little.
Why a little? Because if you, say, seriously interest special services in you, they will recognize the color and consistency of your stool even before you go, excuse me, to the toilet.
So, now you're a bit of Agent 007...
1. Browser history
There is a spy "magazine" button in the top bar of Internet Explorer. How to get into it?
"View" "Browser Panels" "Journal".
When you open the Journal, you will be horrified. All the links to recently visited places on the Internet... they're all there! And more than that. At the bottom there is a “my computer” icon. And what's there? And there is a detailed list of all the files you have opened recently...
If you decide to play spy... right-click on an unnecessary folder or link in this magazine... See? A sentence appeared: “Delete”. Take action...
2.List of recently opened documents.
In XP, the list of recently used documents was easily accessible to you and you at least knew that it was there... It is also required in the latest versions of Windows, you just don’t think about it!
From the Start menu, click left mouse button once on the "Properties" line. After this, a window will appear in front of you with the properties of the Taskbar and the Start menu. 
In the window that opens, activate the Start Menu tab by left-clicking on it once.
Next, click on the “Customize” button, which is located opposite the line with the selected Start menu style. After this, a window with menu settings will open. In this window, activate the “Customize” tab. Find the "Recent Documents" block and check the box.
Then click the "OK" button located at the bottom of the window. And "apply" 
After this, the list of recent documents will be available when you hover the cursor over the line “Recent Documents”, which is located in the “Start” menu
Important!!! There is always a list of the latest documents. You just don’t think about it... And having made these settings, you will at least know what’s hidden in this list. And you can delete everything from this list: by right-clicking on the “recent documents” item, you can see the “clear list of recent items” item
3.List of recent documents in the application.
I’ll never forget how I copied all sorts of photographs from my friend’s floppy disk. Then I just looked through them. I saw dirty porn... closed the editor... didn't immediately delete it in the trash... I just turned off the computer and went to work.
How could I know that my child draws flowers in the same editor in which I looked at the photos?
And, of course... Any editor has a list of the latest documents opened... Children are curious... they open everything... Many years have passed, but I am still ashamed...
Since then... if I come across similar materials, I delete them mercilessly and immediately.
And if you had to save something like this...how can you hide it from the graphics editor?
Just open a dozen normal files with the same extension in the same editor, and they will fill the list.
Or find an editor who doesn't remember anything.
4.Kukki.
In the depths of any browser there is always a mysterious Cookies folder. When you surf the Internet, it is there that the servers you visit have the right to record all sorts of registration data on your home computer. Often they write something there without your knowledge. Therefore, if you do not want to leave traces of visiting something forbidden on the Internet, then feel free to look for this data and mow down what you do not need. There will definitely be no harm, but you will get pleasure... here's where they sit:
Google Chrome
Windows XP C:\Documents and Settings\(Your_profile)\Application Data\Chromium\
Windows 7 C:\Users\(Your_profile)\AppData\Local\Chromium\User Data\Default\Cache\
Opera
Windows XP C:\Documents and Settings\(Your_profile)\Application Data\Opera\
Windows 7 C:\Users\(Your_profile)\AppData\Local\Opera\Opera\cache\
Firefox
Windows XP C:\Documents and Settings\(Your_profile)\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\\
Windows 7 C:\Users\(Your_profile)\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\\
Internet Explorer
Windows XP C:\Documents and Settings\Cookies\\
Windows 7 C:\Users\(Your_profile)\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies\\
Unfortunately, I don’t recommend blocking writing to this folder in your browser settings. The fact is that many serious servers will simply refuse to work with you if they do not write their settings in the Cookies folder. Let them write to themselves. All the more pleasant it will be for you to mow down the contents of this “spy center” again.
5. Temporary Internet files
Different browsers create different folders in their root file systems to store temporary data.
Let's see who stores them where:
Internet Explorer - C:\Documents and Settings\(Your_profile)\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files - (Windows XP),
C:\Users\(Your_profile)\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary internet Files - (Windows Vista, 7)
Opera - C:\Users\(Your_profile)\AppData\Local\Opera\Opera\cache
Mozilla Firefox - C:\Users\(Your_profile)\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\\Cache
Google Chrome - C:\Users\(Your_profile)\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache\
(if some folder is not visible, make it visible by going to point 7 of this article)
6. File names.
By clicking the "Start" button, you can go to "Search for files and folders." Using the search service that opens, an advanced user can find anything on your computer. Simply by specifying the expected file name or line of text within it. In addition, there are special hacking utilities that search even deeper.
What to do? Don't store games at work in a folder with an easy-to-guess name. Store terribly secret texts in a compressed, archived form and give the files meaningless names. But...if they take you seriously, this will not help.
It is better to live calmly, openly, and not trust paper or a computer with your secrets. By the way, don’t trust people with secrets even more so.
7. Hidden and system files.
If you just want to protect important files or folders from accidental destruction?
Click on the file name with the right mouse. There is a properties panel at the bottom... go there.
And specify the "hidden" attribute. If you already have the “do not show hidden files and folders” checkbox in your “my computer” settings, then such files will no longer be visible.
How to get there and see these magical settings?
Open My Computer or File Explorer. Press Alt to return the control buttons (in XP they would have been by default, but now you have to call them with a key)
On the top panel, select “Tools” from the menus, and then “Folder Options”.
We are interested in the middle tab "View". Go almost to the very bottom... See?
This is where hidden opportunities exist to make hidden and system files accessible or invisible!
Of course, after reading all this, you yourself will already guess to delete unnecessary correspondence from Skype, a social network account, if you need to press the “exit account” button after working with your account, and maybe even delete unnecessary correspondence from email... one of my friends was looking for a hacker to look through his wife’s mail - judging by the fact that they soon divorced - apparently this friend finally got access to the mail :-)
And having gone through this little training on the safe storage of information, we still remember that spying on our neighbors is not good, and the intelligence services already know everything about you and me. We live calmly and joyfully and do not create secrets around ourselves...
But what if you urgently need to clear your computer of traces of your visit and give it to someone?
If you use a computer with someone else?
Perhaps some of these tips will be useful to you...
Search secrets. How to find the required document.
Hello everyone, this is the next lesson on how to properly search for information on the web using Google. There is one trick, which, however, as always, is no secret. Few of us think about it, but everyone understands this logically - the Internet is far from just web pages of resources. These are video, photo and audio files, these are documents of various formats and much more. Due to some circumstances (including due to an oversight of the file owner), we do not always have access to it via a direct download link on a particular resource. But they exist on the Internet and Google sees them perfectly. The files are indexed by the search engine, which means they are available to us. So finding the right document can be easier than each of us thinks. Let's find them!
Before moving on specifically to the search, it is worth mentioning a special Google service, which, it turns out, few people know about. This is the advanced search page:
https://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=enI will deliberately leave this without comment, everything is in Russian. Learn and use. This is, say, an advanced search page without knowledge.
Each file has its own extension, which determines the type of program with which it is supposed to open. By default, the type is hidden from the user's view. But not for Google. Even without knowing the full name of the document, you can (theoretically) try to find the document you need, knowing that it looks like, for example, a Word document from the Microsoft Office suite. In general, Google understands these extensions:
Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) Adobe PostScript (PS) MacWrite (MW) Microsoft Excel (XLS) Microsoft PowerPoint (PPT) Microsoft Word (DOC) Microsoft Works (WDB, WKS, WPS) Microsoft Write (WRI) Rich Text Format (RTF ) Text (ANS, TXT)
And some others, more specific. If you are going to find the desired document, for example, it must be in Word format with the .docx extension, then you can try setting this parameter (without a dot before the extension) in the search line. It should look like this:
Document_name\file\movie\song filetype:file_type
For example:
Cactus purchase and sale agreement filetype:docx
By analogy with the exclusion of unnecessary information from search results that you know, you can, on the contrary, exclude unnecessary extensions from it and work only with certain types of them. We thus use the exclusion operator “-”. For example:
Cactus purchase and sale agreement -filetype:docxAll. There will be no pages with the agreement in Word format in the search results. There will be PDF, TXT, but not Word.
How to find the desired document on a specific website or domain.
Often, some users are faced with the task of finding the right document or simply looking at some information only on resources that have a higher degree of trust compared to others. For example, the domains .com, .edu, .org belong to government or educational institutions, which have greater information weight. Or we need to find out information or news from the original source. And it’s better to learn about the collapse of quotes on the English stock exchange not from the Israeli website, isn’t it? Therefore, it was better to probe English sources of information - this is the domain zone british.uk. Or Canadians – .ca. Or the French - fr. And so on.
So, to search only for a specific domain zone, specify the domain type in the search query using the “site:” operator. For example:
Site:.edu (don't forget the dot before the domain name)
And when typing information in a certain zone:
Do it yourself.:ru
Google will search results only on the Russian-language Internet (Runet).
By analogy with a domain zone, you can reduce the search location to a specific website. For example, if you need to read help about a particular event in the Windows operating system, it makes sense to turn to the original source. Search within the limits of only the official help from Microsoft on the official website. To do this, use the same operator in this form:
Error 000240767 site:www.microsoft.com (you cannot put a period before the address!)
All results found will only apply to this site.
For the “secret” classification to actually appear, the state needs compelling reasons. Most of these cases are state secrets.
But many personal archives of famous people become secret at the request of their heirs, who do not regret making their ancestors appear in an unflattering light.
The most secret documents became in 1938
A radical change in the matter of classifying information occurred in 1918, when the Main Directorate of Archives was organized under the People's Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR. The brochure “Save the Archives” published by Bonch-Bruevich was distributed through “ROSTA Windows” to all government institutions, where, in particular, there was a provision on the secrecy of certain information.
And in 1938, management of all archival affairs passed to the NKVD of the USSR, which classified a huge amount of information, numbering tens of thousands of files, as secret. Since 1946, this department received the name of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, and since 1995 - the FSB.
Since 2016, all archives have been reassigned directly to the President of Russia.
Questions for the royal family
The so-called famous Novoromanovsky archive of the royal family has not been fully declassified, most of which was initially classified by the Bolshevik leadership, and after the 90s, some of the archival documents were made widely public. It is noteworthy that the work of the archive itself was strictly confidential. And one could guess about its activities only from indirect documents of employees: certificates, passes, payroll records, personal files of employees - this is what remains of the work of the secret Soviet archive.
But the correspondence between Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra Fedorovna has not been fully disclosed. Palace materials concerning the relationship between the court and ministries and departments during the First World War are also not available.
KGB Archives
Most KGB archives are classified on the grounds that the operational investigative activities of many agents can still cause damage to counterintelligence work and reveal the methodology of its work. Some successful cases in the field of terrorism, espionage, and smuggling have also been mothballed.
This also applies to cases related to intelligence and operational work in the Gulag camps.
Stalin's affairs
1,700 files compiled in the 11th inventory of the Stalin Foundation were transferred from the archive of the President of the Russian Federation to the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, of which about 200 cases were classified as secret.
The cases of Yezhov and Beria are of considerable interest, but they were published only in parts, and there is still no complete information on the cases of “executed enemies of the people.”
Confirmation that many more documents remain to be declassified is the fact that in 2015, at four meetings of the Interdepartmental Expert Commission on the Declassification of Documents under the Governor of St. Petersburg, 4,420 cases for the years 1919-1991 were completely declassified.
Party archives are also “secret”
Of considerable interest to researchers are the resolutions of the Council of People's Commissars, the resolutions of the Council of Ministers, and the decisions of the Politburo.
But most of the party archives are classified.
New archives and new secrets
The main task of the archive of the President of the Russian Federation, formed in 1991, was to combine documents from the former archive of the President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev, and then the subsequent period during the reign of Boris Yeltsin.
The Presidential Archives contains about 15 million different documents, but only a third of them, five million, are in the public domain today.
Secret personal archives of Vladi, Vysotsky, Solzhenitsyn
The personal funds of Soviet leader Nikolai Ryzhkov, Vladimir Vysotsky and Marina Vladi are closed to the general public.
Do not think that documents are classified as “secret” only with the help of government officials. For example, the personal fund of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, stored in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, is in secret storage because the heir, the writer’s wife Natalya Dmitrievna, personally decides whether or not to make the documents public. She motivated her decision by the fact that documents often contain poems by Solzhenitsyn that are not particularly good, and she would not want others to know about this.
In order to make public the materials of the investigative case in which Solzhenitsyn ended up in the Gulag, it was necessary to obtain the consent of two archives - the Ministry of Defense and the Lubyanka.
Plan for "secrets"
The head of Rosarkhiv, Andrei Artizov, said in one of his interviews: “We declassify documents in accordance with our national interests. There is a declassification plan. To make a decision on declassification, we need three or four experts with knowledge of foreign languages, historical context, and legislation on state secrets.”
Special Commission on Declassification
In order to declassify materials in each archive, a special commission was created. Usually - from three people who decided on what basis to give or not give wide publicity to this or that document.
Secret materials are of unconditional interest to a wide range of people, but historians warn that working with archives is a delicate matter and requires certain knowledge. This is especially true for secret archival materials. Not many people have access to them - thousands of documents from the times of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union are classified for various compelling reasons.