The secret police and the Soviet system : new archival investigations / edited by Michael David-Fox.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

David-Fox, Michael, editor.

Series:

Russian and East European Studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

History.

Soviet Union--Politics and government.

Soviet Union.

Genre:

History

Physical Description:

1 online resource (438 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Pittsburgh, Pa. : University of Pittsburgh Press, [2023]

Summary:

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.

Contents:

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.

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Print version: David-Fox, Michael The Secret Police and the Soviet System

ISBN:

9780822990185

0822990180

OCLC:

1396061485