TATIANA VAGRAMENKO
My interest in secret police surveillance of religion was first aroused in the Russian Arctic. In 2006—then a social anthropology student at the European University at St. Petersburg—I traveled to northern Siberia, to the lands of nomadic indigenous people who lived in the tundra as reindeer herders and hunters. The focus of my fieldwork in the Far North was the growth of international Protestant missionary movements throughout Russia.
“Every foreign missionary coming here is under the surveillance of the FSB [ex-KGB],” a government official in the snowbound YamalNenets District told me. Threats and antireligious media campaigns were the reality for those vernacularly known as “sectarians.” One Baptist believer was dismissed from his job: “I don’t need problems here,” his boss explained. Police detained and interrogated a Pentecostal minister in the middle of the night; he was forced to walk home through bitter cold of minus 20 Celsius in his slippers.
A few years later I came across a document from the recently opened KGB archives in Ukraine (access to the FSB historical archives in Russia is very limited and increasingly complicated). It came from a file about a secret operation in the 1950s against those known in Soviet Ukraine as the “religious underground”: illegal communities of various Protestant denominations, Greek Catholics, and dissident Orthodox. I realized that similar strategies of intrusion, intimidation, and control that had determined the lives of religious minorities during the Soviet era were still being used by the FSB today. The KGB archives in Ukraine became a natural extension of my field of research.
In 2018 I spent several months in Kyiv and other regions—including Odessa, Lviv, Chernihiv, and Transcarpathia—sifting through thousands of pages of what used to be top-secret material for stories of KGB operations against religious dissent. I wanted to find out what was concealed behind official anti-religious propaganda, and how the image of “destructive foreign sects”—still prominent in public discourse in Russia today—was constructed. A paragraph, phrases, or just a few notes in the margin of a document; a person looking straight at the camera in a surveillance photograph (an agent?); the quotation of an informer’s voice: all these traces of a bigger story are dispersed through separate files and even archival collections in Ukraine.
Regardless of its provenance, the materials that found their way into the KGB archives—including diaries, art, manuscripts, and personal photographs—were subordinated to a single dominant interpretation. They were all transformed into incriminating evidence of crimes against the Soviet state. Photographic and other visual material illustrates particularly well how this took place.
The Soviet security services photographed targeted persons and alleged evidence of criminality. Largely following standard judicial procedure, in-house photography laboratories produced mugshots of people in custody, and police officers photographed crime scenes during investigations. Photography was also commonly used in so-called “agent-operational measures”: KGB officers used concealed cameras to take pictures of targets during surveillance operations, as well as of intercepted or confiscated materials. In-house manuals instructed officers on how to photograph surveillance targets, arrestees, and crime scenes.
KGB photography went far beyond the standard functions of crime detection and personal identification, however. Unlike classic judicial photography, it did not pursue accuracy or objectivity as its main principle. To this end, photographs were subject to material intervention, including cropping or retouching. The aim was to mold the image of the enemy, such as by pasting together a collage of numerous individual mugshots in order to reinforce the notion of a subversive organization.
Such collages were also published in KGB internal instruction manuals, or featured as exemplary case materials in internal KGB periodicals. Eventually, photographs were “recycled” in the exhibitions, films, and media publications that were vehicles for antireligious propaganda campaigns throughout the Soviet period. Here, religion was considered a weapon of the class enemy: believers were alleged to be counter-revolutionaries who hid their political subversion behind the mask of religious belief. They were therefore punished not as believers, but as members of organized political or even terrorist groups.
One example comes from the late 1920s and early 30s. Over two thousand priests, monks, and ordinary peasant believers were tried as members of a terrorist “ecclesiastical-monarchist” organization called the True Orthodox Church (also known as the Catacomb Church). The True Orthodox movement in fact did not form any theologically or organizationally unified phenomenon. Instead, it was constituted of dispersed communities and individual priests, monastics, and wanderers, united by a shared apocalyptic vision of the world. Yet a powerful image of them as a centralized and networked political organization took shape on the pages of KGB documents. The KGB’s photographic and graphic experimentation played a crucial role in the construction of this image.
Such visual material is the focus of Hidden Galleries, a new research project led by Dr. James Kapaló of University College Cork, Ireland. In addition to my research from Ukraine, this includes material from secret police archives in Hungary, Romania, and Moldova: http://hiddengalleries.eu.
Alongside visual materials, I am interested in the narratives of believers, informers, and KGB officers found in the Ukrainian archives, as these shed light on the complex ambiguities of secret police activity. As a social anthropologist, I wish to go beyond the simple dichotomy of “victim” and “traitor,” and to understand why people collaborated. When you assemble disparate pieces of information from the KGB archives, more nuanced stories of negotiation and non-institutionalized encounter emerge. For example, religious communities might delegate someone to become an agent or collaborator in order to learn something about secret operations, as well as to misinform the KGB. The relationships between the watchers and those who were watched were remarkably complex.
Tatiana Vagramenko is a post-doctoral researcher, most recently at the Kennan Institute (Washington, DC) and University College, Cork (Ireland).
