The Secret Police and the Soviet System: New Archival Investigations

by Michael David-Fox (Editor)

Overview

Even more than thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the role of the secret police in shaping culture and society in communist USSR has been difficult to study, and defies our complete understanding. In the last decade, the opening of non-Russian KGB archives, notably in Ukraine after 2015, has allowed scholars to explore state security organizations in ways not previously possible. Moving beyond well-known cases of high-profile espionage and repression, this study is the first to showcase research from a wide range of secret police archives in former Soviet republics and the countries of the former Soviet bloc—some of which are rapidly closing or becoming inaccessible once again. Rather than focusing on Soviet leadership, The Secret Police and the Soviet System integrates the secret police into studies of information, technology, economics, art, and ideology. The result is a state-of-the-art portrait of one of the world’s most notorious institutions, the legacies of which are directly relevant for understanding Vladimir Putin’s Russia today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822990185
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	10/10/2023
Series:	Russian and East European Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Michael David-Fox is professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of History, Georgetown University. He is the author of Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union; Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941; and Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929. David-Fox is also coeditor of Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914–1945 and The Holocaust in the East: Local Perpetrators and Soviet Responses.

Table of Contents

Contents List of Abbreviations Introduction. Into and Beyond the Stalinist Model of Secret Policing | Michael David-Fox 1. The Origins of Stalin’s Mass Operations: The Extrajudicial Special Assembly, 1922–1953 | Marc Junge, Andrei Savin, and Aleksei Tepliakov 2. The NKVD and the Political Origins of Socialist Realism: The Persecution of the Boichukisty in Ukraine | Angelina Lucento 3. KGB Photography Experimentation: Turning Religion into Organized Crime | Tatiana Vagramenko 4. The Gulag’s “Dead Souls”: Mortality of Released Invalids in the Camps, 1930–1955 | Mikhail Nakonechnyi 5. Deciphering the Stalinist Perpetrators: The Case of Georgian NKVD Investigators Khazan, Savitskii, and Krimian | Timothy K. Blauvelt and David Jishkariani 6. “Conflicts Are the Core of Social Life”: Fomenting Mistrust at the Tallinn State Conservatory in the 1940s–1960s | Aigi Rahi-Tamm 7. Constructing Guilt and Tracking the Enemy: The Hunt for “State Criminals” in Soviet Lithuania, 1944–1953 | Emilia Koustova 8. The Mug Shot and the Close-Up: Identification and Visual Pedagogy in Secret Police Film | Cristina Vatulescu 9. The Soviets Abroad: The NKVD, Intelligence, and State Building in East-Central Europe after World War II | Molly Pucci 10. The Black Sea Coast as a Landscape of Cold War Intelligence | Erik R. Scott 11. Recidivism, Prophylaxis, and the KGB | Edward Cohn 12. Human Rights Activism as International Conspiracy: Iurii Andropov, Soviet Dissidents, and “Ideological Sabotage,” 1967–1980 Douglas Selvage 13. Cybernetics and Surveillance: The Secret Police Enter the Computer Age | Joshua Sanborn Contributors Index

Editorial Reviews

The study of the history of Soviet terror has received a significant new impetus in recent years. Its driving force was the massive opening of the archives of Soviet state security in Ukraine and other countries of the former USSR. This book presents the impressive results of creating a new history of terror in all its manifestations.

Oleg Khlevniuk

The authors in this collection have broken much new interpretive ground, and the essays are universally engaging and provocative. The result is a state-of-the-art portrait of one of the world’s most notorious institutions, the legacies of which are directly relevant for understanding Vladimir Putin’s Russia today.

New Books Network

The Secret Police and the Soviet System is an essential read for any scholar interested in the topic. At a time when the archival landscape in eastern Europe is rapidly changing, it is especially important to take stock of the work scholars have achieved and to devise ways to develop the field under these new conditions.

EuropeNow

This collection of thirteen essays interrogates interrogators, and is the must-read for understanding not only of the Soviet past of Europe and Eurasia but also of Russia’s post-Soviet present.

Serhii Plokhy

The quality of the scholarship presented in this volume is consistently very high indeed; there is a lot of original and innovative work here on a diverse range of topics. This is a book that will long be mined by scholars working on various aspects of Soviet history.

The Russian Review

There are many excellent studies of the Soviet political police, but none cover the range of topics, geography, and time span that the essays in this collection do. A number of contributions delve into subjects previously untouched and are based on regional as well as central archives that have long been underutilized. The collection brings together the work of scholars from numerous countries, and an insightful introduction weaves together the strands that run through the essays.

David Shearer

This collection of thirteen essays interrogates interrogators, and is the must-read for understanding not only of the Soviet past of Europe and Eurasia but also of Russia’s post-Soviet present.”
—Serhii Plokhy, author of The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story 

“There are many excellent studies of the Soviet political police, but none cover the range of topics, geography, and time span that the essays in this collection do. A number of contributions delve into subjects previously untouched and are based on regional as well as central archives that have long been underutilized. The collection brings together the work of scholars from numerous countries, and an insightful introduction weaves together the strands that run through the essays.” —David Shearer, coeditor of Stalin and the Lubianka: A Documentary History of the Political Police and Security Organs in the Soviet Union, 1922-1953 

“The study of the history of Soviet terror has received a significant new impetus in recent years. Its driving force was the massive opening of the archives of Soviet state security in Ukraine and other countries of the former USSR. This book presents the impressive results of creating a new history of terror in all its manifestations. Researchers are paying more and more attention to victims and perpetrators of terror, secret police institutions and practices, and traditions of violence that have persisted down until the present day.” —Oleg Khlevniuk, author of Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator. 

From the Publisher