The Secret Police and the Soviet System

New Archival Investigations

Michael David-Fox

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2023
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822990185
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction. Into and Beyond the Stalinist Model of Secret Policing
• 1. The Origins of Stalin’s Mass Operations: The Extrajudicial Special Assembly, 1922–1953
• 2. The NKVD and the Political Origins of Socialist Realism: The Persecution of the Boichukisty in Ukraine
• 3. KGB Photography Experimentation: Turning Religion into Organized Crime
• 4. The Gulag’s “Dead Souls”: Mortality of Released Invalids in the Camps, 1930–1955
• 5. Deciphering the Stalinist Perpetrators: The Case of Georgian NKVD Investigators Khazan, Savitskii, and Krimian
• 6. “Conflicts Are the Core of Social Life”: Fomenting Mistrust at the Tallinn State Conservatory in the 1940s–1960s
• 7. Constructing Guilt and Tracking the Enemy: The Hunt for “State Criminals” in Soviet Lithuania, 1944–1953
• 8. The Mug Shot and the Close-Up: Identification and Visual Pedagogy in Secret Police Film
• 9. The Soviets Abroad: The NKVD, Intelligence, and State Building in East-Central Europe after World War II
• 10. The Black Sea Coast as a Landscape of Cold War Intelligence
• 11. Recidivism, Prophylaxis, and the KGB
• 12. Human Rights Activism as International Conspiracy: Iurii Andropov, Soviet Dissidents, and “Ideological Sabotage,” 1967–1980
• 13. Cybernetics and Surveillance: The Secret Police Enter the Computer Age
• Contributors
• Index