“That file is extremely interesting, because it could allow us to determine the reasons behind his arrest,’’ Prokopenko said, while acknowledging he had only a few minutes to flip through hundreds of pages of documents.
As Sweden’s envoy to Nazi-occupied Hungary, Wallenberg saved 20,000 Jews by giving them Swedish travel documents or moving them to safe houses, and managed to dissuade Nazi officers from massacring the 70,000 inhabitants of the city’s ghetto. The 32-year-old diplomat was arrested by the Soviets in January 1945 when the Red Army stormed Budapest, and imprisoned in Moscow.
The Soviets had stubbornly denied that Wallenberg was in their custody before issuing a 1957 announcement that he had died on July 17, 1947, in his prison cell of a sudden heart attack. They stonewalled international demands for information about his fate, and rejected allegations that Wallenberg could have lived as a prisoner under a different identify as late as the 1980s.
Prokopenko said that in the fall of 1991, on an inspection tour of the main KGB archive in a tightly guarded facility outside Moscow, he came across a hefty dossier on Count Mikhail Tolstoy-Kutuzov, a Russian aristocrat who left Russia after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and worked alongside Wallenberg in Budapest.
Prokopenko said that he only had a few minutes to peek at the dossier, but he saw Wallenberg’s name mentioned repeatedly in what appeared to be Tolstoy-Kutuzov’s reports to his handlers in Soviet intelligence.
“I realized that he was following every step Wallenberg made,’’ Prokopenko said.
Prokopenko was fired just over a year later and deprived of his access to the archives — a move Prokopenko attributes to his efforts to reveal secret Soviet archives to the public.
He said he advised Guy von Dardel, Wallenberg’s half-brother who spent years searching for clues to his fate, to ask the KGB successor agency for permission to see the files on Tolstoy-Kutuzov. They turned him down, saying that no such files existed.
