Moderated by Tatsiana Astrouskaya, HURI Research Fellow. Attendees are invited to enjoy an informal lunch.
This event is organized by HURI as part of the Ukraine Study Group public event series.
This talk examines the development of the Soviet informer network and of the practices of informer work both from the perspective of police and informers. Between 1934 and 1965, the political police continually optimized their information gathering systems, moving through different models of informer work: a mass of little-trained informers, recruited primarily coercively; a small group of well-trained informers, recruited primarily on a voluntary basis (with elements of coercion); a mass of little-trained loyal citizen assistants supporting a small group of trained informers, recruited on either a coercive or a voluntary basis.
The shifting goals of the political police and of Soviet political police conceptions of dissent required ongoing mass surveillance. Informers adapted quickly to the shifting goals and mechanisms of political police recruitment and instruction. While some informers used their position to harm others or extract various benefits for themselves, participation in political policing could also be used otherwise. Sometimes, they meant to protect the people on whom they reported, or to learn about the investigation. Informer work was an ongoing, uneven negotiation between informer and handler: informers set if not explicit, then implicit conditions on their participation in return for effective and efficient cooperation.
Sophia Kalashnikova Horowitz is a PhD candidate at Harvard University. Her dissertation “The Development of the Soviet Political Police Informer Network: Agent Work as Practice and Experience, 1934-1965” examines the social and institutional history of political police informing under Stalin and Khrushchev. On the basis of files from the archives of Ukraine (State Security Service archive), Lithuania (Special Archive), Latvia (National Archive), Estonia (National Archive), Moldavia (National Archive), Georgia (National Archive), and Germany (Stasi Archive), it argues that a mass informer network was an inherent part of the Soviet system of political policing and that over time, more informers were recruited using a complicated incentive system rather than through coercion (though this latter remained a constant aspect of recruitment on some level). Sophia is a past winner of the U.S. Fulbright grant, the U.S. Fulbright-Hays grant, the ASEEES Cohen-Tucker grant, and the Harvard Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Travel Fellowship.