The Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, has ordered that the secret documents concerning the former Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin, should be declassified.

Mr Yeltsin's spokesman, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, said the documents would be moved from a closed presidential archive to a special government commission which has regularly released information on the decades of political repression in the Soviet Union.

Among the documents are letters from the secret police to the Communist Party asking approval for their actions, transcripts of interrogations, list of victims and notes made personally by Stalin.

Millions perished in purges

Historians estimate that up to 20 million Soviet citizens perished under Stalin's rule in waves of purges which began with the Soviet peasantry and continued to include intellectuals and military leaders.

Stalin died in 1953, but it was not until his famous denunciation by Nikita Kruschev in 1956 that the process of rehabilitation of his victims slowly began.

Archive material deflating the cult of Stalin began trickling out when the Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, launched his programme of greater openness, glasnost, in the 1980s.

President Yeltsin turned the trickle into a flow by opening up former KGB archives.

A BBC correspondent in Moscow says the new material will doubtless further assist the process, as well as helping historians fix exactly what was carried out under Stalin's direct orders.
 

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