Soviet Political Police Informer Statistics and the Study of Informing as a Social Experience

• In Event: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Soviet Statistical Records as a Source: Uses and Methodological Challenges

Abstract

Though statistics on the quantity of informers have been available to researchers since the 1990s, they have not received much attention from historians due to the complexity of systematizing this data and the inconsistencies within it. My paper, “Soviet Political Police Informer Statistics and the Study of Informing as a Social Experience,” will examine informer statistics collected by the political police (MGB/KGB) between 1941 and 1965 in two Soviet republics, the Lithuanian SSR and the Ukrainian SSR. This paper, which is based on two projects on informer statistics conducted between 2022 and 2023 with funding from the Harvard Davis Center and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, will attempt to answer the question: what can be learned from various types of statistics about the realities of the informer experience? Did the average informer stay in the network long? Were more people excluded from the network for deliberate sabotage of their work, or for reasons that may not have involved any intentional opposition to the police or objection to the work? How many people, relative to the size of the population, were recruited at any given time or were in the network in a given month or year? In the course of exploring these questions, I will investigate the reliability of the statistical data as a source and describe further possibilities for work with it.

Author

• Sophia Kalashnikova Horowitz, Harvard U