Agents and Believers

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.

Canadian–American Slavic Studies, 2013

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...

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.

History, 2010

Historians.in.ua, 2020

The shorter typewritten version has the title "Razvedyvatel'naia i kontrrazvedyvatel'naia deiatel'nost' v tylu protivnika (Ibidem, ark.269-353). War and transferred to the USA following the defeat of the Third Reich). 4 The limitations of the source base correspondingly limited research agendas. In line with ideological orientations of different eras, these gravitated either towards the nature of the Soviet governance, the conflict between the "state" and "society," and mass repression (at the height of the Cold War) or towards the structures of the perceived legitimacy of the Communist government and the social dimensions of the Soviet Union's violent modernization (during the years of the Détente). 5 The ideological and historiographical differences between adherents of the "totalitarian model" and "revisionists" aside, the systematic exploration of the inner workings of the Soviet government and its coercive apparatus was hardly an option until the 1990s. A few specialized studies that did appear before or shortly after the collapse of the USSR suffered from significant empirical and conceptual limitations. 6 The reason was quite prosaic: access to relevant Soviet archives was limited to Communist Party officials, security professionals, and trusted historians and journalists with appropriate credentials. 7 Within the USSR, mass repression was an ideological taboo until the late 1980s, which, if violated, would immediately place the transgressor beyond the pale of "Soviet society." 8 At the same time, security and intelligence agencies were not absent from the Soviet public discourse. Indeed, while Western scholars skirmished over defining the fundamental parameters of the Soviet system, the number of celebratory publications on the history of the Soviet security service kept rising, reaching a few thousand by the end of the Soviet era. 9 Novels and cinema offered additional opportunities for institutional commemorations, particularly after the

Europe-Asia Studies, 2011

In hierarchies, agents' hidden actions increase principals' transactions costs and give rise to a demand for monitoring and enforcement. The fact that the latter are costly raises questions about their scope, organisation, and type. How much control is enough? The paper uses historical records to examine Stalin's answers to this question. We find that Stalin's behaviour was consistent with his aiming to maximise the efficiency of the Soviet system of control subject to the loyalty of his inspectors and the risk of a "chaos of orders" arising from parallel centres of power.

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8: 4, 2007

Cahiers du monde russe, 2001

This paper examines the origins of mass repression during the 1930s by focusing on the evolving policies of the People's Commissariat of Internal affairs, the NKVD (Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del). The NKVD included both the regular police--the militsiia-- ...