Pedra Branca, Singapore ceded by the Government of the State of Johore or in any other way disposed of". The Acting State Secretary of Johor replied on 21 September that "the Johore Government does not claim ownership of Pedra Branca". This correspondence indicated that as of 1953 Johor understood it did not have sovereignty over Pedra Branca, which had therefore vested in the United Kingdom. The Colony of Singapore became a self-governing state in 1959, and left the British Empire to join the Federation of Malaysia in 1963. Two years later, in 1965, Singapore became a fully independent republic. In 1959, in an
State Archive of the Russian Federation State Archive of the Russian Federation The State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) () is a large Russian state archive managed by Rosarkhiv (The Federal Archival Agency of Russia), which preserves some official (mostly concerning activity of police) and personal (including archives of some Romanovs imperial family members from early 19th century to 1918) documents on history of the Russian Empire, official documents of the supreme national legislative and executive institutions of the Russian Provisional Government (1917), Soviet Russia as independent state (1917-1922) and as territorial entity of the USSR (1923-1991), Soviet Union (1922-1991), Russian Federation (since 1992) as