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ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- "It wasn't easy," artist Kirill Gorodetsky wrote on Facebook on December 20: It took years for him to gain access to the documents of the NKVD, Stalin's secret police, and finally "read the story of the destruction of my great-grandfather's family."
"Someone really doesn't want me to know my family's history," he added.
December 20, a date on which Russia each year marks a professional holiday celebrating the "organs of state security," is the anniversary of the 1917 founding of the Soviet secret police by Bolshevik official Feliks Dzerzhinsky. Gorodetsky noted that in the corridor of the building where he read the file of his family's case there hung a banner celebrating decades of "protecting law and order."