Anti-Soviet Svodki from the Civil War: Surveillance as a Shared Feature of Russian Political Culture

Abstract

Summary #309-The and economic situation of the workers at the Russian-Baltic plant. The of workers of the Russian-Baltic plant depends strongly on economic conditions and hopes for their improvement. When hopes [for improvement] rise, the rises and strengthens. And vice versa, with the worsening of the economic situation hostility to the government rises and its measures are subjected to petty carping... Workers' productivity likewise depends upon their mood.1 Students of twentieth-century Russian history will immediately recognize the nature of this information. This citation is from the ubiquitous on the population's mood (svodki o nastroenii naseleniia) which have become nearly de rigueur for any study of the Soviet period. Yet, while this report's genre may be familiar, the agency generating it is not. For this is not a Soviet on the population's mood, but a nearly identical surveillance report generated by the anti-Bolshevik, emphatically nonsocialist All-Great Don Host (Vsevelikoe voisko Donskoe).2 Clearly, during the Russian Civil War both White and Red engaged in surveillance. And, for White and Red alike, surveillance encompassed two related tasks: first, to report on the population's mood; and second, to sculpt popular sentiment or, more precisely, to raise popular consciousness to the level desired by state authorities. These reports provide much rich material on popular attitudes in this period. But they also cast light on something perhaps more important. The existence of a non-Soviet surveillance project reveals how state tools forged during the First World War and a revolutionary shift in the nature of politics intersected to produce surveillance as an essential aspect of Russian politics. Fortunately, most of these antiSoviet on the population's mood from the Don Territory are still extant. But they are dispersed among more than a dozen collections in four archives on two continents: the Wrangel Military Archive, Hoover Institution, Stanford; the Russian State Military Archive, Moscow; the State Archive of the Russian Federation, Moscow; and the State Archive of the Rostov Territory, Rostov-na-Donu. Just as for the Soviets, surveillance under the Whites was a highly bureaucratized and routinized pursuit. During the course of the Civil War, the Don Territory (a province in Russia's South) was under the direct administration of a self-styled