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Identifying the Enemy: Secret Policing and Censorship in a Frontline Soviet Republic

Fri, November 20, 3:45 to 5:30pm, Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Grand Ballroom Salon H

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The panel addresses the question of how the discourse and practices of KGB and Soviet censorship ensured state security and protected Soviet ideology and party regulation. We look at how state security officers and censorship officials classified deviations from “the Party line”, how they attributed the deviations to various types of activity, and how they formalized the persecution of persons responsible for and suspected of organizing and executing anti-Soviet and nationalistic events. These things show how exh the Soviet regime perceived and qualified such events. While following centralized guidelines drawn up by Moscow, the Chekist and Glavlit machines inevitably had to manage local peculiarities. Therefore the question arises: how did state agencies justify their actions to the centre in balancing between the requirements of Moscow and the actual situation in the Republic? This allows us to discuss 1) how “formalization” of persecution and control facilitated the display of “local peculiarities” in the context of Soviet universalism and 2) whether the limits of persecution and control drawn by the Soviet system were adequate or surplus justifying expansive interests of the KGB and Glavlit as bureaucratic systems rather than existential needs of the system.

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