The Development of the Soviet Political Police Informer Network: Agent Work as Practice and Experience, 1934-1965

Abstract

To those who feared the surveillance of the Soviet state, informers—citizens solicited by the political police to report on coworkers, neighbors, acquaintances, and sometimes even friends and family—were despicable denouncers. And some informers and candidates for recruitment agreed with this moral condemnation of their work—they skipped meetings with their handler, concealed information, or refused directly to be recruited. Many, however, saw their work in a different light—they felt they were doing the right thing, or they used their relationship with the handler to protect the people closest to them, or perhaps they reflected little on the subject altogether. This dissertation examines Soviet political police informer work from 1934 to 1965 as a social institution as well as a policing tool. The first part of the dissertation examines the development of the network as a mechanism of political police surveillance and law enforcement. It argues that the mass informer network was a necessary tool for political police work throughout the period under study; the attempt between 1951 and 1958 to create a targeted informer network was ultimately a failed experiment. The first part of the dissertation also shows that the network had not only a primary function as a tool of social control, but also a secondary one as a means of coopting alleged anti-Soviet elements and transforming them into Soviet citizens. The second part of the dissertation explores informer motivations and rewards, as well as their eventual exclusion from the network for various reasons. It examines informer recruitment and work as a process of uneven negotiation between informer and handler. Informers had some leverage, especially since informer work was an open secret in Soviet society, and many people understood how the system worked. New recruits set conditions on their effective cooperation, and handlers came to recognize the need to obtain informer consent and to provide desirable rewards. This dissertation develops these ideas on the basis of a large body of published and archival political police files from across the former Soviet space, including Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Moldova, as well as Russia. Comparing different types of police documents with one another allows one to discern reality from exaggeration, falsification, and aspiration in the files. For instance, a report summarizing a department’s work for superior officers (a positive representation of work completed) can be contrasted with one drafted by an inspector from the regional center to assess the effectiveness of the department’s performance (often an ambivalent discussion of achievements and mistakes). Through comparing different types of documents, as well as files from different republics, this dissertation presents a comprehensive view of the development of the mass informer network in the USSR as policing tool and as lived experience under Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev.