The Commission of Investigation of KGB Activity was established in 1991 by the Lithuanian parliament (the Seimas). It consisted of a number of members of parliament, led by the ex-dissident and Soviet political prisoner Balys Gajauskas. As an institution, this commission had various levels: the Commission itself (members of parliament, Balys Gajauskas, Algirdas Endriukaitis) and a Working Group under the Commission. The aim of this Working Group was to carry out research based on KGB files that became available after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although it was intended that the Working Group should recruit professional historians, the staff of the group was made up according to political loyalty to members of the Commission. The leader of the Working Group was Juozas Starkevičius. Based on archive finds, some members of the Commission started to publish KGB material, accusing other public figures of being involved in the KGB’s 'web’. That had a big effect on Lithuanian society, bringing up the need for a de-Sovietisation law, and questions on the proper use of KGB files in the public sphere. 
The institutional transformation of the Commission and its Working Group led to today's Lietuvos gyventojų genocido ir rezistencijos tyrimų centras (Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania), which was established on 16 July 1993.