Amir Weiner Getting to Know You

Forum: The Soviet Order at Home and Abroad, 1939–61
Getting to Know You
The Soviet Surveillance System, 1939–57
Amir Weiner and Aigi Rahi-Tamm
“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.
Students of Soviet information systems have focused on two main
features—denunciations and public mood reports—and for good reason.
Soviet law criminalized the failure to report “treason and counterrevolutionary
crimes,” and denunciation was celebrated as the ultimate civic act. 1 Whether
a “weapon of the weak” used by the otherwise silenced population, a tool by
the regime to check its bureaucracy, or a classic feature of the totalitarian state
franchising itself to individuals via denunciations of their fellow citizens—and
quite likely all three—denunciations were critical in shattering old and forming
For their invaluable comments and suggestions we extend special thanks to Alain Blum,
Catherine Gousseff, David Holloway, Hiroaki Kuromiya, Norman Naimark, Ben Nathans,
Yuri Slezkine; the participants in the Russian–East European workshops at the University
of California, Berkeley; the Hoover Archive at Stanford University; Humboldt Universität,
Berlin; and the readers and editors of Kritika.
1 Simon Wolin and Robert M. Schlusser, eds., The Soviet Secret Police (New York: Praeger,
1957), 194.
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13, 1 (Winter 2012): 5–45.