31 How would you read the surveillance file?
The “surveillance file” is a public document organized as a montage that includes intimate private details alongside the banal and ordinary. The surveillance officer is tasked with interpreting the raw material and constructing a narrative from it. Interpretation involves re-reading, analyzing, and divining a sense in the data collected. A good case file, for example, constructs a story whose author remains invisible. To read oneself as a speculative fiction spans the unspeakability of trauma as well as a horrifying fascination of the eerie. Ontological displacement renders the text both art and authority.
Christina Vatulescu has written about the way police state archives problematize the documentary form. “The surveillance file was articulated at the intersection of two conflicting practices : that of the informer, denouncer, literary reviewer, and mail censor, who shared an inclination for writing, collecting, and collating and produced a collage portrait of the subject, and that of the investigator, who wrote a synthetic portrait that reduced the cacophony of the collage to one incriminating conclusion,” writes Vatulescu. As such, the surveillance file is a collaborative text authored by an informer and an officer of the secret police. The audience is the leadership of the police state, and the file is written to please this audience. The tone of the surveillance file is matter-of-fact.
Taking the tone as part of the text’s communicative action, we can say the way one asks a question reveals the sort of answer one desires. Sarcasm, for example, indicates a disbelief that the question can be properly answered. Tone marks language as meter marks a sonnet. Likening tonality to gesture, Svetlana Boym describes tone as “irreversible notation.” It is written, interpreted, and read. She traced the rise of expertise and authority in tonal interpretation in the U.S.S.R. Under Stalin, the untruth wasn’t in the content of statements—everyone complied, lied, recited fake news to survive—but in the intonation, in the tone of their utterance. Formally, officially, and aesthetically, Stalinism turned satire, curiosity, and inquisitiveness into facets of the criminal mind.
The Stalinist surveillance file emerged from Stalin’s war-time directive to isolate the eternal enemy within by imprisoning entire groups based on demography, employment, education, religious affiliation, etc. Romania’s Securitate (or secret police) modeled its arrests and surveillance on the Stalinist precedent, building an infrastructure of surveillance based on status, class, and elective affinities.
Directive 7, issued by the Ministry of Internal Affair, ordered entire demographics to be surveilled as threats to national security. These threats included people with relatives abroad, people who had been liberal lawyers in the past, academics, the pious, the groovy, those associated with artistic avant-gardes, and so on. As the lists of potential criminals grew, the number of Securitate employees needed to process and interpret the surveillance files increased. Soon, Securitate started relying on the archival material itself as well as the network of informers to open new files. Gossip, vendettas, and personal issues often became reasons for which someone informed on another person, this in addition to the ability to secure resources for children and family.
After Stalin’s death, arrests were reduced, and prisoners began to trickle back in from the gulag. Some were rehabilitated, or officially rendered employable by the government; many were not. What many have called The Red Terror continued for a decade, until 1962 and 1964, when most surviving political prisoners were amnestied.
In line with Soviet policies and decrees, the Romanian regime also amnestied political prisoners during this period. After 1962, the idea of surveillance expanded to include an apparatus of constant technological surveillance within the home and workspace. Although police states focus on providing content for the textual propaganda, Vatulescu adds that “an army of words and images occupying thousands of miles of archives supported and documented the activity of the secret police.” Each personal file revealed the way secret police “tracked, investigated, wrote, edited, and archived a life.”
They “archived a life.” The limits of my language mark the limits of the archive.
In 1965, Nicolae Ceaușescu rose to prominence in the Romanian Communist Party and became the head of state. He promised a golden age of Romanian prosperity and plenitude, which he evidenced with a relaxation of Securitate terror and an open critique of the carceral excesses of the past. But the Securitate didn’t reform its Soviet model. Nor did it reduce ties between two secret police services. For example, Romania often held dissidents from other countries that had upset the Soviets. Even after Ceaușescu broke away from the Warsaw Pact, the commitment to Stalinist surveillance continued.
Securitate files essentially copied the mechanisms of Stalin’s secret police. In its early years, the Romanian surveillance file assembled by the Securitate resembled a montage which mixed “found objects” with gossip, overheard quotations, and statements from others.
Who is the author of a surveillance file? And who is the author of a signed confession found in a police file? Is the final product a literary collaboration, an instance where power differentials permit strong editing, or an example of the dangers inherent in literary criticism that approaches interpretation from a bias?
Signed confessions under Stalinism were tinged with hysteria—Vatulescu describes their language and form as “increasingly histrionic”—making it difficult to discern whether the interrogator or the suspect had authored the confession. For example, Isaac Babel’s signed confession admitted to tainting young writers with his worldview, but it’s still unclear whether he hoped to atone for his disloyalty by absorbing the official discourse. In his confession, Babel admitted to being a decadent individualist writer, a French spy recruited by Andre Malraux, an Austrian spy, an associate of Yzekhov, a co-conspirator in Yzekhov’s wife’s plot to assassinate Stalin, and a terrorist Trotskyist. Because association itself is a crime, Babel is potentially guilty of all possible crimes, and so he is a threat to the Soviet Union.
Did Babel actually believe this? Or was he merely collaborating in his most absurdist fiction to date for the purpose of posthumous didacticism? Why do storks build their nests at the top of concrete poles where lightning will strike them? And what is the difference between propaganda and art?
Writers from Eastern Bloc countries return to this question repeatedly. For them, the answer is personal.