Secret Police Files Research Articles

Verdery , Katherine My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File (review)

REVIEWS 385 on dismissing and delegating nationalism to bourgeois capitalism, only to reverse its cause, as demonstrated by Lučić’s examination of the role of the partyleadershipanditsmembers,intellectualsandordinarycitizens.Reactions from other parts of the country and verification through a federal system was as important if not more so, than local dynamics. Lučić’s contextualization shows once again how methodologically and factually limited, if not utterly wrong, recently acclaimed studies in ‘Croatian tourism during Socialism’ or ‘ethnic relations in Socialist Macedonia’ have been, all of which tried to avoid the overarching Yugoslav framework. While not entirely necessary to enhance her argument, Iva Lučić’s reliance on the theoretical framework of social movements in terms of mobilization, structures, resources and conceptual framing by political actors, turns out to be very useful in organizing and formulating her arguments. While her archival investigation is limited to the most important but relatively narrow timeframe of 1956–71, when the question was deemed resolved, Iva Lučić’s meticulous study goes further, offering a detailed and systematic, theoretically- and methodologically-layered analysis of Muslim nation-building in all aspects of Socialist Yugoslavia. With recent studies by Armina Omerika and Xavier Bougarel, the history of Bošnjaks as a nation in the twentieth century is finally emerging, based on solid factual and theoretical foundations, able to resist political manipulation and myth making. Finally, Iva Lučić’s meticulousness is echoed by Uppsala University’s publishers, who have produced a superb looking volume that includes an index, several tables, a lengthy English summary and only two errata found in a book of over 330 pages. This book is a feast of scholarship and publishing, of the kind that now rarely appears from more commercialized English-language university presses. UCL SSEES Bojan Aleksov Verdery, Katherine. My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File. Duke University Press, Durham, NC and London, 2018. xvi + 323 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $27.95: £20.99 (paperback). ‘There’snothinglikereadingyoursecretpolicefiletomakeyouwonderwhoyou really are’ (p. xi). With this conclusion Verdery, a distinguished anthropologist and author of seminal studies that have offered a fresh understanding of Communist Romania and its past (Transylvanian Villagers: Three Centuries of Political, Economic, and Ethnic Change, Berkeley, CA, 1983; National Ideology under Socialism, Berkeley, CA, 1991; What was Socialism and What Comes Next?, Princeton, NJ, 1996; The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 386 Postsocialist Transylvania, Ithaca, NY, 2003), opens her interrogation of her own file, compiled by the Romanian Securitate. It offers a remarkable example of introspection, notable for its candour. It is at once a work of oral and personal history, as well as an anthropological study. The author stands both outside and within her past, addressing it with the persistence and incisiveness of an inquisitor, comparing her file with her case-notes. As such, Verdery provides a unique contribution in English to analyses of the intrusion by the totalitarian state into the daily lives of its citizens and the methods employed to do so. Verdery visited Transylvania in 1973 to conduct anthropological research on village life. She returned for further study several times in the 1970s and 1980s, totalling more than three years. Her presence and activity attracted the close attention of the Securitate, generating almost 3,000 pages of informer reports, surveillance logs and transcriptions of telephone conversations. In 2006, Verdery requested a copy of her file, the dissection and exegesis of which forms the basis of this stimulating and riveting book. ‘Stimulating’ because by subjecting her file to an anthropological analysis, Verdery challenges the conventional reading of secret police files, thereby inviting us to reconsider the values accorded them; ‘riveting’ because she uses her file to show how the Securitate’s fears of espionage dogged her research and how she unwittingly fed those fears. On reading her file, she discovered that she was considered a spy, a CIA agent, a Hungarian agitator, a friend of dissidents. As she studied the Securitate officers’ views of her, she admits, ‘I came to question my work, my intentions, and my very identity […] the file made me contemplate what it means to be suspected of spying and to what extent...

Verdery, Katherine. My life as a spy: investigations in a secret police file. xvi, 323 pp., map, illus., bibliogr. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2018. £20.99 (paper)

Verdery, Katherine. My life as a spy: investigations in a secret police file. xvi, 323 pp., map, illus., bibliogr. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2018. £20.99 (paper)

My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File. Katherine Verdery. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 344 pp.

My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File. Katherine Verdery. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 344 pp.

My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File. By Katherine Verdery. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. xvi, 323 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Maps. $27.95, paper.

My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File. By Katherine Verdery. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. xvi, 323 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. Maps. $27.95, paper.

Review of Verdery's My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File

Review of Verdery's My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File

Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis, and Corina L. Petrescu (eds), Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing

Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis, and Corina L. Petrescu (eds), <i>Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing</i>

Book Review: Alison Lewis, Valentina Glajar and Corina L. Petrescu (eds): Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing

Book Review: Alison Lewis, Valentina Glajar and Corina L. Petrescu (eds): <i>Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing</i>

Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis and Corina L. Petrescu, eds, Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing

Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis and Corina L. Petrescu, eds, <i>Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing</i>

Glajar, Valentina, Alison Lewis and Corina L. Petrescu (eds.). 2016. Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc – Between Surveillance and Life Writing. Rochester, NY: Camden House, Boydell and Brewer. 237 pp.

Glajar, Valentina, Alison Lewis and Corina L. Petrescu (eds.). 2016. Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc – Between Surveillance and Life Writing. Rochester, NY: Camden House, Boydell and Brewer. 237 pp.

Men of Paper: Polish Lustration Law and Its Faulty? Biographical Basis

This article describes how, in contemporary Poland, the questionable nature of the materials in the formerly secret police files is sometimes forgotten, most significantly in the process of lustration. It attempts to explain why the public would support lustration laws and/or engage in gossip stemming from the files, despite knowing their shortcomings. After briefly summarizing the long process by which agreement was reached concerning the Polish lustration bill, and describing some of the unique qualities of Polish lustration, the article presents arguments for why the formerly secret police files might be popularly accepted as the foundation used for the judicial process. The main justification discussed is found in literary and scholarly attempts to read the files biographically and to use them as inspiration for new biographies. The article shows that scholarly queries into secret police files as historically useful sources coincide with Polish popular interest in non-fiction literature and memoirs. I propose that fitting the police files within the already popular genre of biography offers entertainment value, while at the same time offering the documents legitimacy. This article shows that whereas scholars and authors of popular memoirs treat the files within a range of possibilities, the lustration process has room only for a straight forward reading of a file as a truthful story about an individual.

Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis, and Corina L. Petrescu, eds. Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing

Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis, and Corina L. Petrescu, eds. <i>Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing</i>

Review of Glajar, Lewis, and Petrescu’s Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing

Review of Glajar, Lewis, and Petrescu’s Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing

Translation, Transition, Transgender

Abstract This article discusses the anglophone reception of the life and work of the East German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf following the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Particular attention is paid to the translation and marketing of von Mahlsdorf's memoir against the backdrop of Eastern Europe's purported transition to Western capitalist democracy. Using the concept of framing developed first by Erving Goffman and adapted to the study of translation by Albrecht Neubert and Gregory Shreve, and then Mona Baker, the author analyzes the ways in which the presentation of von Mahlsdorf's life in the translated memoir reflects a specific Western framing of queer lives, which is later altered in Doug Wright's award-winning play about von Mahlsdorf following the release of von Mahlsdorf's secret police file and the troubled progress of the so-called transition. The article demonstrates how the careful study of translations can challenge the universalizing of Western conceptual and temporal frames by highlighting the historical and contingent nature of our sexual selves.

The Muslim uprising in Ajara and the Stalinist revolution in the periphery

In 1929, local officials in the mountainous region of upper Ajara in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) pursued aggressive policies to force women to remove their veils and to close religious schools, provoking the Muslim peasant population to rebellion in one of the largest and most violent of such incidents in Soviet history. The central authorities in Moscow authorized the use of Red Army troops to suppress the uprising, but they also reversed the local initiatives and offered the peasants concessions. Based on Party and secret police files from the Georgian archives in Tbilisi and Batumi, this article will explore the ways in which local cadres interpreted regime policies in this Muslim region of Georgia, and the interaction of the center and periphery in dealing with national identity, Islam, gender, and everyday life in the early Soviet period.

Secret Police Files, Tangled Life Narratives: The 1.5 Generation of Communist Surveillance

The opening of the archives in the former Eastern European bloc has led to heated political debates in the ex-communist countries, lustration, and the reassessment of the Cold War experience, both east and west. This essay focuses on the significance of accessing the secret police files in life writing produced by the 1.5 generation of communist surveillance. I read Carmen Bugan’s Burying the Typewriter and Kati Marton’s Enemies of the People to consider what happens to communist life narratives of an oppressive state apparatus when taken up by children of communist dissidents, how transnational identities and life stories emerging from post-Cold War Eastern Europe impact the genre, and what the implications of this new autobiographical form are for life writing from and about Eastern Europe within the post-communist and global contexts. By mapping the range of relationships between such autobiographical writing and the secret police files it incorporates, I show the numerous changes life narratives undergo in the aftermath of communism in Eastern Europe, illustrate the ever increasing complexity of life writing in global contexts, and point to new routes of memory with regard to communist oppression.

“Silent Lustration”: Public Disclosures as Informal Lustration Mechanisms in Bulgaria and Romania

Romania and Bulgaria have lagged behind other countries in Central and Eastern Europe in coming to terms with their communist pasts, thwarting or failing to implement lustration and public disclosure programs. However, starting in earnest in 2006–2008, their secret police file repository agencies began reviewing the former secret police files of tens of thousands of public and semi-public employees and publicly disclosing the findings. The disclosures cover a range of political and social positions, revealing the former regime complicity of many current bureaucrats, business leaders, office holders, and public personalities. There is evidence that the disclosures are catalyzing bureaucratic and moral changes similar to lustration, prompting preemptive employment vetting by employers, selective voluntary resignations by individuals to avoid disclosure, as well as an increase in citizen engagement with the secret police files. The breadth and transparency of the public disclosures suggest a type of informal lustration.

U.S. Restitution of the Iraq Secret Police Files from Saddam Hussein’s Regime Regarding the Kurds in Iraq

More than twenty years after Kurdish forces captured mass quantities of Iraqi secret police files chronicling the Anfal genocide and other events in their March 1991 uprising, a digital copy of these documents has been repatriated to Iraqi Kurdistan. Following the military transport of the documents to the U.S. and their scanning by the Defense Intelligence Agency, both a copy of these digital documents and the original files were acquired by the Archives at the University of Colorado-Boulder (CU-Boulder) in 1997. The files were thereafter made available to researchers and investigators from around the world searching for evidence to bring Saddam Hussein and his senior leadership to justice for grave violations of international humanitarian law. In 2012, Prof. Ferdinand Hennerbichler, an Austrian historian and former diplomat, and Prof. Bruce P Montgomery, director of the CU-Boulder Archives, commenced nearly two years of negotiations with the aim of restoring this archive of atrocity to the Iraqi Kurdish people. On September 30, 2014, in a formal high-level ceremony at CU-Boulder, a copy of the digital Iraqi secret police files was handed over to a visiting Kurdish delegation representing the Zheen Archive Center in Sulaimaniyah, which assumed custody of the files, and the regional government in Iraqi Kurdistan. The repatriated archive will be used to further reconciliation and democratization of the Kurdistan region and Iraq as a whole.

Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil

Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil

Fascist voices: an intimate history of Mussolini's Italy

Christopher Duggan's new history of fascist Italy explores how the movement became embodied in the person of Benito Mussolini who occupied for many an almost divine status and gave millions of men and women a sense of pride and hope, offering the prospect of national regeneration after decades of disappointment. A work of exceptional authority and originality, Fascist Voices makes use of rarely examined sources - letters and private diaries, newspaper reports and secret police files - to uncover how ordinary people experienced fascism on a daily basis and how its ideology influenced their beliefs, values, language and lifestyle. Tracing fascism from its conception to its legacy, Christopher Duggan unpicks why the regime enjoyed so much support among the majority of the Italian population. He examines the extraordinary personal relationships that millions of Italians had with Mussolini, explores the religious dimensions of totalitarianism, and discusses why the 'cult of the Duce' still resonates in contemporary Italy. Fascist Voices is a fresh and disturbing look at a country in thrall to a charismatic dictator.

From the bullet to the ballot: the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and racial coalition politics in Chicago

In this comprehensive history of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party (ILBPP), Chicago native Jakobi Williams demonstrates that the city's Black Power movement was both a response to and an extension of the city's civil rights movement. Williams focuses on the life and violent death of Fred Hampton, a charismatic leader who served as president of the NAACP Youth Council and continued to pursue a civil rights agenda when he became chairman of the revolutionary Chicago-based Black Panther Party. Framing the story of Hampton and the ILBPP as a social and political history and using, for the first time, sealed secret police files in Chicago and interviews conducted with often reticent former members of the ILBPP, Williams explores how Hampton helped develop racial coalitions between the ILBPP and other local activists and organizations. Williams also recounts the history of the original Rainbow Coalition, created in response to Richard J. Daley's Democratic machine, to show how the Panthers worked to create an antiracist, anticlass coalition to fight urban renewal, political corruption, and police brutality.