“So That No Citizen Is Punished Unreasonably”: The KGB Concept of Profilaktika as a Tool for Suppressing Soviet Society, 1954–1991

Abstract

Since the mid-1950s, the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB) developed the concept of profilaktika, aimed to ideologically discipline the masses and prevent them from aligning with the “malicious West” through “gentle,” supposedly nonantagonizing modes of coercion. Based on newly discovered Soviet primary sources, this article describes the intellectual and organizational efforts of the KGB Moscow headquarters to breathe life into this society-designing tool, as well as the actual inability to implement it successfully, demonstrated by the organization’s field structures. It is argued that, faced with growing popular unrest triggered by the deepening crisis of the entire Soviet system, these structures imitated the fruitful use of profilaktika’s “soft” methods, in fact widely practicing, without reporting, classic brutal suppression. The article discusses the possible relevance of this phenomenon in Putin’s Russia and other nondemocratic countries and suggests its further academic investigation.