Getting to Know You: Soviet Surveillance and Its Uses, 1939-1957

2012
Author(s)
Amir Weiner
Publisher
Kritika
Getting to Know You: Soviet Surveillance and Its Uses, 1939-1957

“Getting to Know You: Soviet Surveillance and Its Uses, 1939-1957,” Kritika 13:1 (Winter 2012): 4-45

“Violence is the midwife of history,” observed Marx and Engels. One could add that for their Bolshevik pupils, surveillance was the midwife’s guiding hand. Never averse to violence, the Bolsheviks were brutes driven by an idea, and a grandiose one at that. Matched by an entrenched conspiratorial political culture, a Manichean worldview, and a pervasive sense of isolation and siege mentality from within and from without, the drive to mold a new kind of society and individuals through the institutional triad of a nonmarket economy, single-party dictatorship, and mass state terror required a vast information-gathering apparatus. Serving the two fundamental tasks of rooting out and integrating real and imagined enemies of the regime, and molding the population into a new socialist society, Soviet surveillance assumed from the outset a distinctly pervasive, interventionist, and active mode that was translated into myriad institutions, policies, and initiatives.