First Look: Russia's JFK Assassination File
Rep. Luna released a 350-page dossier from the Russian government about JFK's assassination. JFK Facts explains what this document is — and what it is not.
Background to the story:
Last April, Russia’s Interfax news service reported that Russia’s Federal Archival Agency (Rosarkhiv) was “preparing a publication” on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. No more information was forthcoming.
On May 20, at the second hearing of the House Oversight Committee’s Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, Judge John Tunheim, former chairman of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), said the board had sought to obtain “the entire KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald that is maintained in Minsk, Belarus.” He noted the board had been close to acquiring the file in 1995, but the Russian government backed out at the last minute.
Rep. Luna expressed her intention to Judge Tunheim to follow up on the matter of the KGB files, at which point Tunheim told her that the stack of papers “stands about five feet high.”
The task force chair subsequently met with the Russian ambassador in Washington and members of his staff to discuss how the file might be obtained. The Russian diplomats assured her that their government was working on it.
On October 14, Rep. Luna posted to her X account that she had “received a hard copy of the report on JFK’s assassination from the Ambassador of Russia” and would “begin uploading as soon as we can.”
Because the National Archives is unable to facilitate disclosure due to the ongoing government shutdown, Rep. Luna’s office asked JFK Facts to make the document available to the public.
Here it is:
A team of Russian translators working with JFK Facts is assessing the authenticity and significance of the document(s). We trust others will do the same.
What the Russia File Is
The Russian government dossier is a loose-leaf binder of 350 pages, mostly dating from 1959 to 1964, covering the period from when Lee Harvey Oswald defected to the U.S.S.R. to the period of the Warren Commission investigation in 1964.
This digest of relevant Soviet documents, many of which assassination researchers have seen before, does include some original commentary and analysis, including an introduction by Andrey Artizov, the current head of Rosarkhiv. It explains the historical context of Soviet-American relations in the early 1960s and the impact of the assassination on those relations from a Russian perspective.
The chairman of the Archives editorial board is Sergei Naryshkin, a senior official in the Putin government who served as presidential chief of staff and has held the post of chairman of the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament. Since 2016, he has served as the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) of Russia, the equivalent to the CIA. In other words, the file that Rep. Luna received from the Russian Embassy was prepared under the supervision of Russia’s national security apparatus.
To the extent that the KGB is mentioned in the dossier, it is as a party to deliberations at the highest levels of the Soviet Communist Party and state in official communications and reports, not as a surveillant of Oswald.
What the Russian File Is Not
The document is not the file referred to by Judge Tunheim, namely, the KGB’s surveillance records of Oswald when he lived in the USSR. The whereabouts of those records are unknown. The Russian government did not make them available in response to Rep. Luna’s request.
This document is not “the KGB’s Oswald file,” as some (including JFK Facts) have mistakenly called it. The document is more accurately described as the Russian government’s latest dossier on JFK’s assassination.
JFK Facts welcomes articles about the dossier from Russian-speaking readers. If you are interested, see our creators’ guidelines here.
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