By Sophia Kalashnikova Horowitz
The collection The Lives of Soviet Secret Agents: Religion and Police Surveillance in the USSR edited by Tatiana Vagramenko and Nadezhda Beliakova reveals a nuanced story about informers who worked in religious organizations in the Soviet Union. Including articles by eleven experts on religious history and scholars of political policing, the work provides a detailed look into the intersection between individuals’ spiritual life, religious organizations, and political policing. The chapters address sensitive questions about individual informers’ faith and their use of cooperation toward their own personal goals or their community’s overall aims. Some of the informers under discussion—Orthodox Christian “Petrov,” “Glebov,” and “Usov” (Skakun, chapter 2), Greek Catholic “Sova” (Skakun and Moroz, chapter 5), the Baptist “Topsy” (Beliakova, chapter 6)—furthered the state’s aims and, to some extent, those of their respective churches and their own personal career goals. Others, like the Orthodox priest “Spokoinyi” (Skakun, chapter 2) and Lutheran “Kliava” (Krumina-Konkova, chapter 4) played an ambiguous role: while providing information to the political police, they also served as intentional or inadvertent abettors of anti-Soviet activity. As long as they never crossed an implicit line, they were sometimes permitted to hire and associate with disloyal persons (for instance, formerly repressed priests). The MGB/KGB took these informers’ advice into account when considering how to control religious organizations, even when they recommended granting more agency to them. Some informers were open double-dealers, such as Catholics “Alekseev” and “Annus” (Krumina-Konkova, chapter 4) or Muslim “T.” (Shapoval, chapter 8). They concealed important facts or failed to provide information altogether. “Annus,” for instance, refused surveillance work, suggesting that he “could not live with this anguish any longer” and pleading with the police for permission to undertake a professional position in the secular sphere (120).
One of the major questions assessed in this edited collection is that of informer effectiveness in controlling and limiting religious life in the USSR. Informer effectiveness, from the political police perspective, concerns whether informer work satisfied handlers and contributed to the achievement of the goals of the Soviet state. But the authors also discuss how informers purposefully or inadvertently contributed to the growth and development of their communities. Rejecting cooperation, as did “Annus,” or double-dealing by passing information about police activity on to their community, as did “Alekseev” and “T.,” were not the only ways for the faithful to contribute to the growth and development of a religious community. In fact even loyal informers who regularly and willingly reported on their associates could benefit their communities not despite, but actually because of their cooperation. The informer “Sova” offers a particularly complex case to exemplify this practice. In their chapter, Skakun and Moroz illustrate his tortured spiritual journey during his cooperation with the political police and the deep impact of his informer work on the future of the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Mukhachevo. They also, however, assert that “Sova” participated in the work of a clandestine seminary for clergy and emphasize his personal commitment to his Greek Catholic faith. Likewise, the case of “Topsy,” a relatively loyal Baptist informer, is complicated by her leadership of a youth choir. The choir, which the police allowed her to continue organizing, facilitated young people’s participation in faith activities and often set them on a path of a lifelong commitment to religion. Does this “undo” the grave harm that informers’ active participation did to their communities? The authors do not presume to answer this moral question. The collection, however, nuances a simplistic story which sets informers in opposition to their communities.
More broadly, the collection analyzes the role of the church in an atheistic society. In theory, the Soviet state was atheistic, but as the authors show, in practice its campaign against religion was not coherent and its attitude toward particular faiths differed depending on the time period, the political circumstances, and the character of the religious practices in question. While actively persecuting Christians in its eastern territories in the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet state initially took a more tolerant attitude toward Islam in the 1920s: taking a hard line would have been problematic for its international relations with Muslim countries (Shapoval). Similarly, international pressures and the growing role of religion as a domestic propaganda mechanism produced greater tolerance toward Russian Orthodoxy after the Second World War (Skakun). This fact did not mean, however, greater tolerance for the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church or for the Pentecostals, among others. Katya Tolstaya argues in the conclusion that the project of controlling religion as a domestic and international tool of influence was not ideologically and politically systematized. Reading the collection, one wonders whether the lack of a centralized plan is part of the reason that the state was unable to fully control religious groups and, by extension, why religion has thrived in the post-Soviet space. This argument has broader implications for the understanding of cultural and social control in the USSR, and may serve as a starting point for continuing research.
Finally, the collection confronts the problematic nature of sources on informing as means to learning about informers’ lives and intentions. Some of the chapters provide detailed information about a particular informer’s activities and the resulting contribution to specific anti-religious operations, whereas other chapters contain but a few facts and mostly focus on the official, non-surveillance work of an informer. This discrepancy can be explained by the extreme unevenness of the available documents. Some authors, like Nadezhda Beliakova, can refer to an informer’s file that includes not only personal reports but also other details about that informer’s work with the police, such as requests made to the KGB for moving or housing assistance or rewards obtained. Other scholars, like Yulia Shapoval or Renat Bekkin, have access only to investigative files, which means that they get only a partial picture of an informer’s work in a specific investigative case. The conversation about the trustworthiness of all these documents is ongoing in the field (see, for instance, the panel at ASEEES 2022 “Stalin-era Interrogation Protocols: Coercion, Torture, Falsification, and the Case of A.V. Putintsev”; see also Katherine Verdery, My Life as a Spy, 2018; see also Tatiana Vagramenko, “KGB Photography Experimentation” in The Secret Police and the Soviet System, ed. Michael David-Fox, 2023). Investigative files often muddle evidence received from informers, witnesses, and targets of investigation. To what extent can one trust assertions about an informer’s work that originate in interrogation protocols, and can one assume anything about which defendants or witnesses may also have been informers? As a basis for her chapter Yulia Shapoval found two separate cases in which the same person figured as an informer in one and a defendant in the other, but such documentation is rarely available. Individual investigative cases mix evidence obtained from secret preliminary investigations, from voluntary denunciations, and from post-arrest interrogations, which obscures which facts may have been accurately recorded and which were explicitly distorted by specific interested parties. This makes it even more difficult to attempt to discern what may have actually happened. This edited collection, and the field of informing studies in general, has yet to engage in a broader discussion about how sources about informing may mischaracterize informers’ loyalty to Soviet power, their commitment to their work, the pervasive “double-dealing” of some persons, and the importance of specific individual contributions to a case. Yet these questions are essential to the determining of an informer’s responsibility and of the effects of his denunciations, as opposed to the role of chance in people’s fate under Soviet power (which Tolstaya emphasizes, for instance). The question of sources on informing remains a subject for future inquiry.
Sophia Kalashnikova Horowitz is a PhD candidate at Harvard University. She is currently working on a dissertation titled “The Development of the Informer Network of the NKVD-NKGB-MGB-KGB: Agent Work as Practice and Experience, 1934-1965” on the social and institutional history of informing to the Soviet political police. Working with documents from Ukraine, Lithuania, Moldova, Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, and Germany, she examines the role of informers and their political police handlers in the construction of the Soviet state and society over thirty years, as they struggled to determine how state policy should be implemented, who were the “enemies” of the Soviet community, and what patriotism and loyalty (to country, friends, and family) meant to the Soviet citizen.
The Lives of Soviet Secret Agents: Religion and Police Surveillance in the USSR
Edited by Tatiana Vagramenko and Nadezhda Beliakova
Publisher: Lexington Books / Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 9781666938456
