The Secret Police and the Soviet System
New Archival Investigations
Published on 24. October 2023
438 pages
978-0-8229-9018-5 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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10/2023
University of Pittsburgh Press
€53.50
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Person
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.
Content
- Intro
- 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
