Friday: A Searchable Archive of Declassified Cold War Documents on Soviet espionage
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Declassified files on Soviet espionage

Records of Soviet intelligence and Communist activity in the United States: the Venona decryptions, Alexander Vassiliev’s KGB notebooks, FBI case files on the Rosenberg, Hiss, Silvermaster and Bentley networks, MI5 files and congressional hearings. Every answer and every search result links back to the scanned page.

Mostly the 1930s to the 1950s. Later years appear mainly in the FBI’s SOLO files (1952–1980) and in HUAC hearings and reports into the 1960s.

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Both read the same collections, and you can switch between them at any time.

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Ask a question

Friday reads the files and writes an answer, linking every statement to the scanned page it came from.

A written answer, every statement linked to its page.

Best for
Open questions, overviews, and weighing what different sources say.
Not for
Finding every mention of a name. Answers draw on the most relevant pages, not all of them.

Best for open questions and overviews.

For example
Search

Find every page

Friday lists every page that matches your terms, numbered so you can work through them, and exports the list as a spreadsheet.

Every page that matches your terms, numbered and exportable.

Best for
Names, cover names and exact phrases, and building a complete list.
Not for
Questions. Search matches your words; it does not read or interpret the pages.

Best for names, cover names and phrases.

For example

Guide to Friday

Concordance index

Proper names, cover names and organizations across twenty-one volumes of Vassiliev notebooks and Venona cables, cross-indexed to the real names behind the codenames.