Police Talk: The Culture and Practices of the Secret Police in the Soviet Bloc

Abstract

As historians of imperial Russia and the USSR have long been aware, characteristic of the country’s development has been the arrival of influences from elsewhere in unexpected juxtaposition. So, the rise of Enlightenment scientism in the second half of the 18th century coincided with the spread of Freemasonry and other ideologies that in Enlightenment parlance would have been termed “enthusiastic,” while, in the late Soviet period, private citizens who modeled their attitudes to sexuality on the “progressive” West included not just the pioneers of free love in the hippie movement but the covert readers of foreign erotica such as Hugh Heffner’s Playboy.1 As far as the writing of history is concerned, a similarly contradictory moment was the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, when excitement about sudden access to formerly closed archival resources, the legitimating fetish of the positivistic historian, was challenged by what might retrospectively be described as “the textual turn.” Scholars of the Soviet past were not by intention looking for what Natalie Zemon Davis in a landmark book of 1987 termed “fiction from the archives.”2 But many were sensitive to the fact that the materials they retrieved might not only answer questions—and indeed, that the apparently most “objective” data might in some cases be the least reliable. The