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Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania's Secret Police
| Title | Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania's Secret Police |
| Writer | |
| Date | 2025-04-19 15:15:12 |
| Type | |
| Link | Listen Read |
Desciption
Nothing in Soviet-style communism was as shrouded in mystery as its secret police. Its paid employees were known to few and their actual numbers remain uncertain. Its informers and collaborators operated clandestinely under pseudonyms and met their officers in secret locations. Its files were inaccessible, even to most party members. The people the secret police recruited or interrogated were threatened so effectively that some never told even their spouses, and many have held their tongues to this day, long after the regimes fell.With the end of communism, many of the newly established governments―among them Romania's―opened their secret police archives. From those files, as well as her personal memories, the author has carried out historical ethnography of the Romanian Securitate. Secrets and Truths is not only of historical interest but has implications for understanding the rapidly developing "security state" of the neoliberal present.
Review
After I listened to the September 30th episode of the podcast, Invisibilia, titled International Friend of Mystery, I had to read one of Verdery's books on her time in Rumania working as a Sociologist under a dictatorship with secret police and friends informing on friends. This season was about different types of friendship and the examination of the difficulty in finding trustworthy friends in this sort of regime got me interested in learning more. Unfortunately, both of the books on the subject are published by University presses, so they can get pricey. I found this one on eBay used for a fraction of the cover price. I was pretty sure there was something to learn here to inform our current situation in the US. I wasn't wrong.Verdery worked in Rumania for 25 years. It was only after the files of the secret police, The Securitate, were released Verdery was able to learn how the Rumanian government viewed her. She'd assumed they mihght have a couple hundred pages on her. It turned out to be over 2000 and they saw her as a possible spy and enemy of the government. In her evaluation of her files and those of others she examines their practices, including agents, informers, recruits, etc. I won't get too deep into it here, but I found the whole thing fascinating. Even her closest friends informed on her. The odd thing is, the few people who refused to inform on the people around them had no consequences. But that fact was kept secret.The big take away for me is from one of the practices common to most societies that have secret police. They don't see people as individuals, they see them as webs of associations. The people you associate, in part, determine who you are, what you believe. If you remove some of those associations and replace them with informants, you can shift a person's personality- change who you are. So, the Securitate would nudge the target away from certain people in their lives, push them to break ties and insert new people into the target's life. They would even push them to cut ties with family members that might be an influence they didn't like. So, they would break the web of people around you. This reminded me of what's been happening in the US over the past 6 or so years. Families have been separated by their beliefs based on the news sources and social media they consume and the resulting political stands they take. I suspect a Securitate of our own could not have done a better job. Just a little food for thought.This one is definitely worth a read. It's a jam packed 200 pages. A window on life in a dictatorship with secret police.
