Beyond transparency: the communist-era secret police archives in postsocialist Eastern Europe

Abstract

ABSTRACT The communist-era secret police archives have a peculiar afterlife in postsocialist Eastern Europe. On the one hand, those archives have become the site to articulate different visions of justice and social transformation and harboured the modernist promise of transparency, and, on the other, the secret police archives, especially in Poland, have become the object of popular suspicions of treachery and secrecy, with respect to their informational content, political instrumentalization, and highly restricted public access. This article focuses on the contentious popular cultural-political life of the communist-era secret police archives in postsocialist Poland. It examines the way those archives have come to produce such ambivalent desires and attachments across social groups and classes, and become part of hegemonic political struggles. Specifically, I focus on Poland’s state-run Institute of National Remembrance, which manages those archives and prosecutes the ‘crimes against the Polish nation.’ By drawing on my ethnographic research at this Institute and analysing popular cultural productions, especially, the ‘documentary-play’ called ‘Files,’ performed by the well-known ex-dissident ‘Theater of the Eighth Day,’ my article shows how this Institute and theatre performance seek to popularize different understandings of the archive and forms of knowing, feeling, and doing.