SRS Newsletter Fall 2019

2015

In: Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev: The Phantom of a Well-Ordered State, edited by Aaron Retish and Immo Rebitschek (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2023), 263-297, 2023

The young Muscovite Sergei Sytov, an officially unemployed man in his early twenties, bought goods from foreigners for resale. Eventu ally, he was summoned to the Moscow KGB Directorate, and in Janu ary 1959 the newspaper Komsomol'skaia pravda published a feuilleton on him based on the data provided by the secret police.1 Sytov was then warned by the militsiia that if he did not find a permanent job within three weeks, he would be expelled from Moscow under the anti-parasite law. Informed by the KGB of Sytov's misconduct, the Party, Komsomol, and the procurator's office jointly decided to bring him to administra tive responsibility and try his case before the people's court visiting session, a form of show triaP Sytov was then detained by the militsiia. On the procurator's order, his fitness for work was determined by the Serbskii Institute, later ill-famed for its abuse of psychiatry. Finally, in January 1962 the Baumann district people's court decided to evict the young man from Moscow for five years and confiscate his property. The case garnered extensive media coverage.3 This story, which appeared in the in-house journal of Soviet coun terintelligence KGB Sbornik, reflects a new approach to ensuring state security and social control that emerged in the USSR after the death of Joseph Stalin and reached full swing in the late 1950s and early 1960s.4 During this period, as Oleg Kharkhordin has argued, "chaotic and punitive terror of the Stalinist years" gave way to "a relentless and rational system of preventive surveillance."5 Generally, this approach was based on a comprehensive and multichannel social control associ ated with a return of mutual surveillance practices in new forms and the congruent transformation of the secret police's ideological tenets and working methods.6 The emphasis was now placed on preventing crime and strengthening secrecy, with novel tacit forms of control and manipulation being introduced. Although, as the above case shows, * This chapter was prepared as part of a research project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), project no. 403506742. The author 's special gratitude goes to the archivists of the Lithuanian Special Archives in Vilnius, the Archives of the Security Service of Ukraine, and personally to the SBU Archives director Andriy Kohut for their assistance and support.

Romanian Journal of Psychoanalysis

The 20th century was marked by multiple anthropogenic historical traumas, constructed by totalitarian regimes, in the context of which certain groups became targets of the death drive. These traumas show similarities, related to the general specificity of the trauma, whether individual or collective, but they also feature significant differences, which are the result of social, political and cultural factors. In this article, I will refer to the fate of the people deported from the Moldovan SSR during the Stalinist regime, analysed from a psychoanalytical perspective, based on oral history testimonies. The results and reflections presented in the article are part of a research dedicated to the deportations from the Moldavian SSR, carried out within the “Recovery and historical exploration of the memory of the victims of the totalitarian communist regime in the Moldavian SSR during the years 1940-1941, 1944-1953” State Programme. As an anthropogenic collective trauma, the deportation...

The Person and the Challenges, 2019

The aim of the article is to present the changes that took place after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 in the Soviet Union and in some countries included in its “external empire”. The “Iron Curtain”, which divided the world in to two parts, began to shift after the Generalissimo’s death and revealed differences in the approach of individual countries to the „newcourse” announced by Stalin’s successors. In some countries, the death of the Kremlin dictator began changes in the policy of the time, in others the methods characteristic of Stalinism were continued, which meant the activity of anall-powerful apparatus of repression seeking real and imagined “enemies”, the central authority of unlimited power with mass terror and striving for total control of citizens and all manifestations of social life. The text presents the most important elements of the policy of the Communist parties in the Soviet Union, GDR, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria in 1953 which were consistent with the process of re-Stalinization, characterized by similarity to governments during the dictator’s life and de-Stalinization, that is, the reversals of methods and tools known in the Stalinism period.

Canadian–American Slavic Studies, 2013

Human Rights Quarterly, 2014

This article examines the impact of the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR, the first Soviet human rights NGO. It argues that this group, which functioned for over six years as the principal public platform of Soviet dissidents, made an important contribution both to the subversion of totalitarianism and to the rise of the Soviet rights-defense movement. The Initiative Group overcame a longstanding taboo on the creation of public structures and spearheaded the resistance to the KGB's most serious crackdown on the movement. It also shaped the methods and the ethics of Soviet rights-defenders. Although its members suffered severe repression, they deserve recognition for their contribution to the global human rights boom of the late 1970s.

2017

April 9, 2015 became a turning point in the field of access to the KGB archives in Ukraine. The law “On Access to the Repressive Bodies of the Communist Totalitarian Regime of 1917– 1991 Archives” was passed by the Ukrainian Parliament on that day. The bill, which was considered by the Supreme Council, was submitted by the Cabinet of Ministers together with three other “decommunization” laws. It is not a new practice to have a specific law that regulates access to documents of the former secret services of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes repressive bodies. Almost all former socialist camp Central and Eastern European countries and some former Soviet republics have similar acts. Prior to that, access to all archival documents in Ukraine was regulated by the general law “On the National Archival Fund and Archival Institutions”, adopted in late 1993. The law “On Access to the Repressive Bodies Archives” is based on the understanding that democratic transit is impossible without respect for human rights and freedoms. In order for the totalitarian regime with its political repressions and other persecutions not to repeat, it must be analyzed and studied. In particular, it relates to archival documents, which often serve as the only source of information about the tragic events of the past. Democratization of the special services and the police cannot properly be implemented if they continue to guard archives containing information on massive violations of human rights and continue to use methods from their predecessors’ archives. Building up new force institutions is, among other things, possible through breaking the chain of succession which, de facto, existed until the spring of 2014. Free access to the communist special services archives not only provides an opportunity to restore the violated rights, but also demonstrates that information about all crimes, sooner or later, will become known to the public. In order not to repeat the totalitarian practices of the past it is important to inform the society of how the repressive regimes are formed and the methods they use. When in early 2014 the Ukrainian government tried to recommence totalitarian governmental methods (“dictatorial laws of January 16”) in order to maintain its position, this led to human casualties and the occupation of part of the state territory by Russian troops. This is a vivid example of the fact that sometimes the right to information prevails over the right to privacy. The right to information ultimately benefits for the right to life ensuring.

Society for Romanian Studies Newsletter, 2019

Kritika, 2022

History, 2010