Secrets and truths : ethnography in the archive of Romania's secret police

Bibliographic Information

Secrets and truths : ethnography in the archive of Romania's secret police

Katherine Verdery

(The Natalie Zemon Davis annual lecture series)

Central European University Press, 2014

Available at  / 2 libraries

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 255-269) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

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, especially her own voluminous one, as well as her personal memories and interviews with acquaintances that turned out be informers, 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.

Table of Contents

List of Figures Preface and Acknowledgments Note on Pronunciation Introduction: What Was the Securitate? Chapter 1.An Archive and Its Fictions Chapter 2.The Secrets of a Secret Police Chapter 3.Knowledge Practices and the Social Relations of Surveillance Conclusion: The Radiant Future? Bibliography Index

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