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.
About the Author :
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.
Review :
The quality of the scholarship presented in this volume is consistently very high indeed; there is a lot of original and innovative work here on a diverse range of topics. This is a book that will long be mined by scholars working on various aspects of Soviet history.
The authors in this collection have broken much new interpretive ground, and the essays are universally engaging and provocative. 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.
The Secret Police and the Soviet System is an essential read for any scholar interested in the topic. At a time when the archival landscape in eastern Europe is rapidly changing, it is especially important to take stock of the work scholars have achieved and to devise ways to develop the field under these new conditions.
There are many excellent studies of the Soviet political police, but none cover the range of topics, geography, and time span that the essays in this collection do. A number of contributions delve into subjects previously untouched and are based on regional as well as central archives that have long been underutilized. The collection brings together the work of scholars from numerous countries, and an insightful introduction weaves together the strands that run through the essays.
The study of the history of Soviet terror has received a significant new impetus in recent years. Its driving force was the massive opening of the archives of Soviet state security in Ukraine and other countries of the former USSR. This book presents the impressive results of creating a new history of terror in all its manifestations.
This collection of thirteen essays interrogates interrogators, and is the must-read for understanding not only of the Soviet past of Europe and Eurasia but also of Russia’s post-Soviet present.
