Soviet authorities had a number for the problem. By January 1946, they had added up to 10,000 soldiers to the force already hunting an underground resistance movement in the Baltic states. A decade later, the approach had changed completely: soldiers gave way to deportation trains, and whole Lithuanian families were removed instead of chased through the forest. A collection of documents released on January 28, 2026, lays out both halves of that sequence. It does not say, in its own words, why one followed the other.
The release
On January 28, 2026, the National Security Archive, a research institute that publishes declassified government records, released a Russian-language collection titled Архивы Прибалтики (Baltic Archives), drawn from GARF, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, and from the Lithuanian Special Archive. The release describes the material as MVD and NKGB operational reports, several of them addressed to Lavrentiy Beria, the head of Stalin’s secret police. It does not give file or case numbers. It does not state how many documents the collection contains. No index or finding aid accompanies the publication. Readers are told which institutions the material came from, not how much of it there is or how it is catalogued.
The Lithuanian Special Archive is itself a large holding, described as the largest cache of KGB documents in the Baltic states. It preserves NKVD, NKGB, MVD, MGB and KGB files from 1940–1941 and 1944–1990, including KGB personnel records, interrogation files of Lithuanian partisans, and testimony gathered in 1986–1990 by a Lithuanian government commission investigating Soviet-era violence. The January 2026 release draws on that archive without identifying which files within it were used.
What the reports describe
According to the documents, the Forest Brothers (Lesnye Bratya), the partisan movement that was strongest in Lithuania, attacked Soviet military units and Communist officials, held territory for short periods, and ran underground publications. The same reports describe the local population as largely sympathetic to the partisans. That is an operational picture written by the MVD and NKGB for their own superiors. It is not an independent account of the resistance.
The timeline
The reports describe Soviet monitoring of the Baltic territories growing year by year after their annexation. By January 1946, authorities had deployed up to 10,000 additional troops against the partisans, a figure the collection presents as a measure of how large the resistance had become. That figure comes from the release itself and has not been checked against an outside archival source for this article. By the 1950s, the files show, tactics had shifted toward mass deportation, with thousands of Lithuanian families forcibly removed. The documents set out that order of events. They do not explain why the second phase followed the first.
The Archive’s reading
The National Security Archive frames the collection as evidence of a systematic repression campaign: a military effort that failed to destroy the Forest Brothers, followed by a turn to deportation as an alternative method of control. That is the publisher’s synthesis of the material, not a conclusion stated inside the files. No single report in the release says the military campaign failed, or that deportation was adopted because it had failed. The reading sits one step above the paperwork it is drawn from.
What the release does not tell you
Four things stay unstated. The collection does not say how many documents it contains or name every author beyond the general attribution to the MVD and NKGB. It does not give casualty or deportation totals. It does not fix a precise founding date for the Forest Brothers movement. And it does not establish whether the turn to deportation was caused by the failure to suppress the partisans by force, or simply followed it in time. These are gaps in the paperwork, not signs of a cover-up, and not evidence either way about what drove the policy change. The record is quiet on the question, and that quiet is the whole of what can be reported.
Later claims, kept separate
Two characterizations of the Forest Brothers circulate outside the documents and are worth keeping apart from them. Pervyi Kanal, Russian state television, reported on January 14, 2019, that the partisans were Nazi collaborators who killed 25,000 people in Lithuania and would be called terrorists by modern standards. EUvsDisinfo, the European Union’s disinformation monitoring project, has identified that broadcast as part of a recurring pro-Kremlin narrative aimed at discrediting the Baltic independence movements and softening the record of Stalin-era crimes. Separately, the National Security Archive’s own framing, that the Forest Brothers expressed a national aspiration for freedom, is an interpretive claim made by the publisher after the fact, not a line found in any MVD or NKGB report. Both statements belong to the argument that has grown up around the archive. Neither is contained in it.
The documents themselves remain held at GARF and the Lithuanian Special Archive. An index that would let a reader match an individual claim to an individual file has not been published.