Introduction for Reading the Archival Revolution

INTRODUCTION

Challenges of Reading the Archival Revolution

The historic opening of miles of classified archives following the fall of the Berlin Wall was the most dramatic archival revolution of the twentieth century. Long defined by bureaucracy and secrecy, the Eastern Bloc spectacularly spilled its gargantuan paper guts. Introduced to audiences worldwide through video footage of German protesters storming the Stasi archives in January 1990, this archival revolution is still unfolding throughout the region, gradually or in fits and starts. This book brings together some of the most compelling stories I have encountered over the past decades of working in the declassified archives. Michel Foucault honey-trapped by the Polish secret police with the help of his lover. A Romanian secret police reenactment movie of a bank heist, with the Jewish intellectuals accused of the crime acting their own parts before police cameras. The contentious secret police files of a recent Nobel Prize–winning author, Herta Müller, complete with the literal and figurative origins of her writing. The story of the Cold War’s defining metaphor—the Iron Curtain—from its origins as Churchill’s brainchild, through Stalin’s own tendentious translation into Russian, to a veritable war of words and translations that reaches all the way to today’s war in Ukraine.

These stories are captivating in their own right, yet I chose them primarily as case studies that illuminate the enormous challenges posed by the declassified archives. Indeed, after the initial rush of excitement caused by archival access, we have gradually discovered that these archives pose myriad reading challenges, to the point of threatening illegibility. My book identifies and takes on these key reading challenges: their troubling silences and fictions, their overwhelming volume, and their cacophony of languages, mediums, and technologies. I show how attending to these challenges offers alternatives to dominant textual, monolingual, and disembodied models of reading expertise, even to the point of redefining what reading can mean and do. Indeed, this book asks not only: What have we learned from reading these declassified archives for the past three decades? It also asks: What have we learned about reading from all the reading we have done in these archives? I traded reading beloved novels and poems for secret police documents for a good part of my career as a literary scholar because I wanted to put my belief in reading to the hardest test I knew. What can reading do when faced with these documents?

Reading the Archival Revolution is ultimately about the limits and potential of reading documents, fictions, and each other. I posit that reading unfolds over a continuum: across documents and fictions, people and their filed representations. We read words and images and faces and silences in ways that deeply intermingle and inform each other.¹ For instance, the ways in which secret archives circumscribed the reading of personal files had an impact on how people viewed each other in the past. They continue to have an impact on how we read these people, and maybe people in general, in the present. Important scholarly and public debates have addressed the complicity between reading and power, while grappling with records designed to control, misrepresent, silence, or disappear their subjects. Seismic shifts in individual and societal reading practices brought on by digitization and artificial intelligence render these debates all the more urgent.² On one extreme, we have the sinister image of reading as a key tool in Big Brother’s repertoire. On the other, we have the nostalgia-tinged image of cultured reading that is breathing its last under the attack of new media and technologies. My book offers alternatives to both critiques of reading, as either outmoded cultural practice or sinisterly powerful political weapon.

These are difficult challenges, but we are far from helpless. In fact, there is a lot of help both in contemporary work around archives and in the long history of reading practices honed in literary studies and neighboring disciplines. There are also inspiring alternatives to reading secret police archives even inside these very archives: wiretapped conversations on cultural topics, confiscated autobiographies, and even fiction. As we will see in chapters 3 and 4, sometimes these multilingual writings were translated and analyzed at length not just by expert informers but also by the writers themselves or members of their literary circles. People whose life depended on what was written about them in these archives thought deeply about them: thus, some of my most helpful guides to reading in the archives are their very subjects. More recently, the work of rethinking our reading practices has been most urgently conducted by scholars attending to “hostile archives” and their long-suppressed records and subjects, most notably in the postcolonial context.³ My book puts the insights of this influential scholarship in dialogue with the less well-known yet dynamic scholarship and artistic practices emerging around Eastern European archives. Produced over a century and across the vast territories under Soviet influence, the masses of documents declassified during the Eastern European archival revolution have so far been largely left out of the theoretical conversations occasioned by the archival turn in Western academia. Rather than simply viewing Eastern European materials through existing theoretical lenses, I test the fit of these lenses to the challenges of this massive archival revolution. In the process I adjust, rework, and supplement these methodologies in ways that expand the contemporary search for new modes of reading.

My choice of the term “archival revolution” deliberately echoes critical terms such as “archival turn” and “archival impulse,” yet it speaks most directly to the specificity of the phenomenon under our consideration: the declassification of the Eastern European archives after the collapse of the Iron Curtain.⁴ “Archival revolution” was introduced by historians of the Soviet Bloc to describe the “quantum leap” in access to archives of the party, government, and secret police in the 1990s.⁵ In the meantime, we have come to understand that the archival revolution was rooted more deeply in the Perestroika changes of the 1980s, and continues to this day despite the uneven and sometimes regressive measures affecting different, but especially Russian, archives under the Putin regime. While access to secret police archives in Russia has become progressively more challenging, the secret police archives from the former Soviet republics and satellites opened refreshingly decentered vistas onto the archival revolution. In his exhaustive review of the topic, Michael David-Fox argues that the opening of such repositories in Ukraine in 2015 can be seen as the latest “phase of the ‘archival revolution’ begun in the 1990s . . . in Moscow and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) but has now shifted to former union republics that became independent states.”⁶ He adds that “from today’s perspective, we can perceive that the first, post-1991, archival historiographical ‘opening’ in the study of the Soviet secret police was not only partial in its focus but largely domestic or national in its preoccupations, as opposed to international, comparative, or transnational.”⁷ This book—based on archival materials emerging after 2000 in Romania, Poland, and in lesser measure the former Soviet Union—attempts to join recent research in offering a comparative perspective deliberately rooted in the periphery. The ongoing war in Ukraine has made salient the need to understand peripheral perspectives in a region whose study has long privileged Russia. Since March 2022, the call to question that privilege and decolonize our scholarship has emerged with unprecedented urgency.⁸Reading the Archival Revolution is my answer to that call.

A standard term in the field of Eastern European, Russian, and Eurasian studies, “archival revolution” sounds oxymoronic outside of its context, especially if we think—as we have long done—that archives are either stuffy or sinister institutions that preserve the writing of power. From this point of view, what can be less revolutionary than archives, as power and past ossified? And if some archives may not fully deserve this bad rap, the Eastern European secret police archives surely do provide myriad illustrations for this critique, often with the clarity of caricature. Indeed, these archives did not merely record the workings of the secret police over a century—they were instrumental to those workings. The secret police archives kept the writing of power away from public scrutiny; they also framed these documents as objects of fascination, intimidation, and fear, routinely wielding them as weapons. It is indeed a proof of these archives’ heightened imbrication with power that even the start of archival declassification required watershed political change—Perestroika and the downfall of the Iron Curtain. The history of the incomplete and uneven declassification over the last three decades proves once again that archival access is not just illustrative of political change but also at the heart of such change. Besides the quantity of declassified documents, it is these archives’ significant role in transitional justice—their turn from an illegible instrument of terror into a publicly accessible collection of documents that can count as evidence against that terror, and potentially lead to knowledge, rehabilitation, remembrance and reparation—that further justifies the choice of the term “archival revolution.”

Declassification is, however, more complicated than a simple dichotomy of secret/illegible versus public/legible would lead us to believe. The declassification of the archives has brought some incontestable accomplishments, such as the rehabilitation of former political prisoners and the belated removal of old criminal records, which had continued to legally, materially, and psychologically affect the victims long after the collapse of the Iron Curtain.⁹ Yet access to these sensitive, unreliable, and often toxic documents has also triggered countless sensationalist, manipulative, profiteering, abusive, ignorant, tactless, and self-righteous readings. Indeed, it often seemed that the more problematic these readings were, the more public attention they garnered.¹⁰ At the same time, quietly, slowly, a loose yet active community—survivors, scholars, artists, lawyers, investigative journalists—has been producing alternative readings of these archives. Three decades into this process, it has become clear that the archival revolution cannot be judged just by the mass, however great, of declassified documents lying in the archives, but must also be judged by the ways in which we read them.¹¹ This book attempts to identify and tackle the key challenges that I—and other readers—have repeatedly encountered in the reading of this archival revolution. In this book, then, “archival revolution” expresses both the amplitude of the phenomena at stake as well as my attention to the entangled ethical, political, and aesthetic valences of archival reading.

A reading challenge is, at some level, just another way of saying a reading problem. Yet a challenge is also not just any problem—it is a hard problem that interpolates you; according to OED Online, it is “a calling into question, a disputing, the state of being called into question”; it is “a defiance,” “a difficult or demanding task, one seen as a test of one’s abilities or character.” In sticking with the most challenging case studies that I encountered in the archives, I was inspired by Jane Hirshfield’s insight that “the recalcitrant case interests most,” as its “challenges to preconception,” to expectation, and to previous knowledge are the greatest.¹² For this reason, recalcitrant case studies are also likely to yield the most insight, not just into the subjects depicted in the writing but also into the reader and the process of reading. And unlike the object of reading, readers and their reading habits have the potential to change in response to these challenges. It is fitting that the word “change” is already contained in the word “challenge,” its half-hidden promise. Unlike a well-behaved case study that answers the research question we bring to it, the recalcitrant case study resists both our questions and our methodologies. It can trigger a search for new methodologies, throwing into the foreground the usually invisible tools, labors, and ruses of sense-making and interpretation.¹³ All of this book’s recalcitrant case studies occupied me for inordinate amounts of time. A reviewer of an earlier version of chapter 2, “Silences: Foucault in Poland,” called it “a ten-year-long archival research project that reads like a thriller.” The thrill was not in the results of the search—precious little—but in the vertiginous exposure and dismantling of one scholarly expectation after another, and in the new perspectives allowed by letting go of previous frameworks.

Difficulty can, however, also set traps for the reader. In military parlance, a challenge can also be, again according to OED Online, “a particular calling to account, esp. the act of a sentry in demanding the countersign.” In this sense, the OED instructs that the verb “to challenge” can be said of a sentinel, and that in “derived figurative uses,” a challenge asks, “Who goes there?”¹⁴ In the process of facing the challenges that these archives pose to our reading, we can learn not only about the archives but also about our own reading’s answer to the question of who goes there. This challenge further sets us up to search for the countersign—the secret answer to the sentinel’s question, the answer that the sentinel already knows and expects. Indeed, the most obvious reason why these archives present such a difficult reading challenge is that we lack the original countersign—we are not the intended readers. This gigantic archival world of signs, countersigns, watchwords, and passwords was meant for internal circulation, and while the sentinel at the door of these archives may have changed, and may even be willing to grant us access, our reading is continually challenged by the documents themselves. At the most basic level they challenge our reading with their encryptions, pseudonyms, and euphemisms, and with the spectacle of secrecy and declassification, the red “strictly secret” stamps hastily struck through with the blue ink of declassification.

This is a misleading challenge, I believe, and one that if followed reveals the kinship of challenge with provocation and its deeply buried etymological cousin, calumny.¹⁵ This is a challenge that traps reading into becoming a sort of deciphering: learning the language and countersigns of the police in order to find what this spectacle of secrecy frames as these documents’ authoritative meaning. As I concluded after trying out this kind of reading in my first book, Police Aesthetics, the results are usually a letdown: reading as deciphering often confirms Hannah Arendt’s theory that in totalitarian society the spectacle of secrecy was necessary to camouflage the absence of a real secret.¹⁶ In the best-case scenarios, when there is something to be discovered at the end of this deciphering, it is information that the police always already had before us, contemporary readers. There is certainly important information that we have uncovered in this way, and it is probably impossible to read at all in these archives without practicing some reading as deciphering. However, by itself, this is a limited, often misleading reading, better complemented with other approaches.¹⁷ If we need to learn the countersign to get past the sentinel, we can also get past reading as countersign, for to answer the sentinels’ challenge in the way that they expect lures us into giving them the answer—the countersign—that they already know, thereby confirming their knowledge and authority.

My case studies showcase the variety and shiftiness of secret police practices (including archiving practices) over time and space: these institutions were defined by their longevity as well as by their internal purges and resulting changes. Furthermore, no single timeline of these changes holds across the vast expanses of space lumped together under the term “Soviet Bloc,” even when it comes to watershed moments like de-Stalinization. The chronotopes (or time/space configurations) of these institutions are radically discontinuous.¹⁸ Juxtaposition of even just the first two case studies—Foucault in Poland and the bank heist in Romania—offers a stark warning against convenient generalizations about Eastern European secret services; instead, it demonstrates the extraordinary range in the degree of power held by the Polish and the Romanian secret police in 1959.¹⁹ The surprising shortage of basic surveillance technology and manpower evident from the Foucault case study paints a vivid picture of the extent to which the Polish secret police was decimated by drastic internal purges. In contrast, the sinisterly powerful Romanian institution had not undergone de-Stalinization: its agents could, for instance, casually appropriate the know-how of the country’s leading filmmakers and the latest visual technology of the newly established National Documentary Film Studio in the service of their own filmmaking needs. When I started work on my first book, Police Aesthetics, I felt the need to orient the reader (and, to be honest, myself) by charting the anatomy of the secret police file and tracing its development across the twentieth century. Twenty years later, thanks to the prolific multidisciplinary and multilingual scholarly community studying the secret police files, we are now ready for the more granular, locally and temporally differentiated knowledge allowed by case studies.

These case studies facilitate engagement with key, often contentious, questions about the secret police and its archives—their timelines and discontinuous chronotopes, the degree of their power during the Soviet period, and their continuing influence in post-Soviet societies. The case studies also bring our attention to understudied aspects of the archives, such as their uses and abuses of media, art, and technology, as well as their treatment of sexuality and gender. Thus, chapter 1 opens a window onto the secret police treatment of homosexuality, and chapters 3 and 4 reveal how women were targeted, interrogated, detained, and archived in gendered ways. The same chapters offer a new perspective on “fiction in the archives,” through considering the actual literary fiction that abounds in these archives alongside disinformation, testimony, and autobiographical writing. These case studies also enable us to reconsider the relationship between the personal file and other types of powerful but less-studied files, such as the problem file, the institution file, and the group file. Such an approach allows us not only to train our attention on exceptional individuals but also to better understand the secret police’s defining preoccupation with networks of people. Furthermore, while research so far has mostly turned its spotlights on victims, informers, and—to a certain extent—agents, my case studies bring to light how the archives were also populated and shaped by a network of more ambiguous figures—the host of the informant house, the passer-by caught in the crossfire of surveillance, the extra in the secret police film, the cameraman drawn overnight into the making of a secret police film. In my previous book, I tried to bring the archivist out of the shadows; this book pays attention to another éminence grise of the archives—the secret police translator.

To be clear, it’s not that these clippings were more disturbing than those in other files I have read over the years. One of the projects that I have been most consistently engaged with, and whose results you will see in chapter 2, is to identify traces and—where possible—proof of torture in the files. Like most CNSAS researchers, including the one who had already read Cassian’s file and was requesting photocopies, I have reading access to unredacted files; it is typically just when a researcher asks for photocopies and permission to make them public that redactions are made. Looking back, I think what made this dossier of redactions so disturbing to me was the lack of context and thus of warning about its abuses. The only thing that held the redactions together in the file was their abusive nature and their secrecy: there was no other narrative, no other raison d’être for this file. I succumbed to the temptation to read, a temptation whetted by the hypersecrecy of the redactions, without the benefit of the many-layered contexts and reading strategies that usually help me to avoid getting stuck on such intrusive passages. Not that I am always aware of my own process—indeed, it was only when I skipped that process, in the hurried reading of this material chosen exclusively for its heightened secrecy, that I became aware of how much work goes into preparing for such passages and how helpful the layered contexts that we bring to the files can be. Even the immediate context of such passages—the file itself, as controlled as it was by the secret police—can offer some help. Once you have some experience with a file, you usually know when such passages are coming—often in the reports of particularly indiscreet informers or in transcripts of wiretapping sessions recorded in private spaces such as bedrooms. Usually I skip large parts of such passages. If I think I have a good reason to read, I constantly keep in mind, while reading, the parts of the file that remind me of the subject’s dignity, their other stories and silences, which can also often be found in informer and wiretapping reports. I tend to go into the archive having spent time with writing by or about the maligned subject. Alongside such readings, I bring to the archives my lifetime’s collection of literature, scholarship, prayers, and memories, reshuffled on any given day. For a while I imagined these as a kind of shield that I could use to steel myself against such demoralizing content. (I had always loved the story of Achilles’ shield, the artful representation of the world, designed to protect the vulnerable body.) But what was amazing about my previous readings was that, while at times they did steel me against whatever pettiness or horror lay before me, they just as often softened me to other parts of the files.

These former readings banded together in chorus with other, less-textual memories—voices, songs, shades of light and darkness, bodily sensations—to form the accompaniment to my seemingly silent reading in the archives. This internal chorus accompanied the files with dirges, nocturnes, requiems, curses, bard song irony, and Soviet-era black humor, but occasionally also included one of the lullabies I was singing at that time to my children each night.²⁰ A mind-blowing, and sometimes mind-saving, chorus, even when what it came up with was no music at all but noise and static. These sometimes did a better job of creating the needed distance between me and the most intrusive parts of a wiretapping report than the ubiquitous interference technology that made radio static into a phonic signature of those times. The metaphor of the mental chorus, however, only goes so far—partly because so much of what I brought to the files were memories of former readings alongside bodily sensations. I am a painfully unmusical person, which is why I choose this metaphor—to make sure it is understood that I did not compose the songs, nor did I even arrange their timing. At times I searched for them, and at times I welcomed them when they found me; mostly I just made space for them, and carried them within me in and out of the archives.

This is where the notion of polyphonic reading (which I will elaborate on later with the help of Mikhail Bakhtin and Tina Campt) emerged. A reading that attends to the call and response among the many voices, silences, and “low frequencies” haunting the archives and the many voices, silences, noises, and their in-betweens that we carry within us.²¹ Polyphonic reading is rooted in the encounter among all these multitudes, an encounter that took place in these archives not only through my mind but also through my body, in an inextricable way perhaps best described in the cognitive science refutation of Cartesian dualism—“the mind is embodied and the body is mindful.”²² As I am writing this paragraph, I am recoiling. In some ways, the last thing that I want to bring to the attention of my reader is my own mind; even less, my body; and even less, their interconnection. It is an act of self-exposure, and I experience an intense desire to stop writing, or to switch genres, back to a more familiar academic style. An academic style that first shields the reader behind the writer, then shields them both in its reasonable conventions, and finally pulls that magic trick—the one my young daughters already know is the ultimate—invisibility. This readerly invisibility, another facet of what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls the transparency of the privileged subject of power, is safer.²³ From its safety, I could then read about the abuse of privacy against Cassian, a very different kind of subject, an “affectable” subject. That is precisely how these files were meant to be read, by a supervising agent who had more power than both the subject of the files and even its writers. The files were written by the “subaltern,” for the reading eyes of the “superior.” Incidentally, the words “subaltern” and “superior” are in Romanian; I did not translate them. They are the actual military-derived jargon used by the secret police.

Silva’s critique of the transparent subject sensitized me to the power dimensions of the relationship between the invisible reader and the affectable subject of the secret police archives. I try to oppose this powerful fiction of the reading dynamic by an understanding of reading as an eventful encounter in which all parties, including the readers, are affectable. In this, I am inspired by Brian Massumi’s understanding of Spinoza’s affect—“the capacity to affect and be affected”—as being “directly relational, because it places affect in the space of relation: between an affecting and a being affected. It focuses on the middle, directly on what happens ‘between.’ More than that, it forbids the separating of passivity from activity. The definition considers ‘to be affected’ a capacity.”²⁴ Here Massumi gives the illuminating example of the blow, usually conceived as a relationship of active force and passive reception, showing that in fact the blow is “the product of an impinging force meeting a force of resistance,” which can “absorb, deflect, dodge, or even, as in martial arts, turn its force toward its author.”²⁵ I think it is useful to perform the same operation on our understanding of reading as Massumi performs for our understanding of the blow, by conceiving both as dynamic encounters. This means going beyond the traditional understanding of reading as a passive activity, and fathoming, but not settling into, the opposite conception of a reading endowed with the active force of the blow. This force could be largely invisible, yet powerful, as in the reading of secret police “superiors.” My aim is to destabilize both of these polar understandings of reading—as powerless passivity or as sinister force—and instead to tap reading’s potential as an eventful and dynamic encounter. This understanding of reading as an event taps into the event’s “reservoir of political potential.”²⁶ According to Massumi,

even in the most controlled political situation, there is a surplus of unacted-out potential that is collectively felt . . . You can return to that reservoir of real but unexpressed potential, and re-cue it. This would be a politics of microperception: a micropolitics . . . Micropolitics, affective politics, seeks the degree of openness of any situation, in hopes of priming an alter-accomplishment. Just modulating a situation in a way that amplifies a previously unfelt potential to the point of perceptibility is an alter-accomplishment.²⁷

To do this, I think it is necessary to fully gauge the secret police reading’s often invisible power of shaping the files and their subsequent readings, but also to step out of the protective cone of reader invisibility and “learn [and relearn] to be affected.”²⁸

It is easy to slip into the powerful readerly position that these texts have long created, or that, maybe more accurately, created these texts. As a countermove, it is also tempting—and I imagine not just for someone who came of age under the last decades of an extreme police state—to jump sides, in well-intentioned identification with the affected subject of the file. The positions are so clearly staked out, so starkly arresting in the spotlight of history, that the audience, the reader of the files, often becomes invisible; we easily forget ourselves while reading. It is easier. Yet I think it is worth trying to displace the reader from their painstakingly, indeed often violently, constructed invisibility and to recognize the awkward and vulnerable affectability of the reader’s position as its fraught potential toward “reading other-wise.”²⁹ Approaching reading as an event starts us on the path of practicing reading as a way of attending to others and to the otherness within oneself, to one’s own affectability. While most of this book follows the conventions of current academic style, it seemed at first honest, then necessary, to at times acknowledge the embodied nature of the act of reading. The good news is that bringing attention to our reading process is less about navel-gazing than about orchestrating dialogues among what is currently in front of our eyes and the readings that have long been stored in our embodied minds. So while the embodied reader is the point through which this encounter passes, this reader is an open portal of communication between such readings, unlike the navel of navel-gazing, which is a sealed portal testifying to a past point of contact.

While I will periodically return to this embodied readerly experience throughout the book, for now I am more than ready to move on to the partial resolution of the Cassian redaction file dilemma. What ultimately helped me move past the distorting mirrors of the redacted passages, was reading, years later, Herta Müller’s novel The Appointment. Reading The Appointment reframed Cassian’s redactions file in my mind as evidence to be added to Müller’s testimony that the secret police pursued women differently, actively framing women intellectuals as sexually promiscuous and delinquent. In other words, reading these two texts alongside each other reframed the redactions—originally written as incriminating evidence of Cassian’s “promiscuous character”—as evidence of secret police abusive practices against Cassian; conversely, this parallel reading also added more evidence supporting the testimony set forth in Müller’s fiction. This imaginary encounter between the novel and the redactions file drew my attention early on to one of the key, if long-overlooked, questions this book came to address: the gendered differences in the secret police’s treatment of its subjects, from surveillance and harassment to recording and archiving.

As Cassian’s redactions file demonstrates, one of the real dangers of this hubris of archival reading is reenacting the violence and trespassing that define much of the writing about the archived subjects. Placing the ethics of archival reading at the forefront of her work, Anca Șincan shares an instructive case study from her research in the Romanian secret police files on the Calendarist community, a religious minority outlawed until 1989.³¹ In an impressive initiative that attempts to share research findings with the affected community, Șincan contacted this community’s representatives, who she expected would be interested in both the information and the researcher’s aim to recover objects and materials that the secret police had confiscated (according to European law, the archives’ subjects can strike from the archive materials that regard them personally).³² One would expect the community’s interest to only increase when Șincan’s findings “took an interesting turn that imbued the contact with the community with an even greater significance. Along with the usual books, icons, religious texts, and paraphernalia, the secret police had also confiscated a body—that of the Bishop Evloghie Oța, whom the secret police disinterred and reburied” in an unknown location. The community members were indeed interested in the fate, and potential return, of their bishop’s body. However, “unfortunately, the file, which contained five volumes’ worth of surveillance on Bishop Oța . . . offered few clues as to his body’s whereabouts.”³³ While such withholding of the answer to the most pressing question that readers bring to a file never fails to surprise and disappoint, it is actually a common experience, to be explored in chapters 1 and 4. This is partly what makes secret police files such recalcitrant case studies—they tease and resist contemporary questions and expectations. Instead, in a bait-and-switch gesture that is also common, this file surprised the researchers with its collections of written religious confessions, an unorthodox genre of religious text (confessions are traditionally spoken face to face), intercepted along with other “correspondence to and from the monastery.”³⁴ For a historian of religions, the written confessions represent a fascinating “hybrid” genre, testifying to the creativity of religious practice under repression.³⁵ For the secret police, the confessions represented a treasure trove of compromising information on the church members: “fornication, adultery, homosexual acts, stealing, gossip, fights within the community.”³⁶ For the surviving members of the Calendarist community, these confiscated confessions and the researcher’s offer to facilitate the community’s access to the files represented not just the history of multiple violations but also a still very present danger of violating the sanctity of the intercepted confessions, and thus committed a major sin. So when Șincan pulled up the scanned files on her laptop to share them, the monks abruptly turned their backs to her screen.³⁷

Șincan’s story reminds us that despite the researcher’s best intentions, individuals and communities who have long tried to make themselves invisible, inaudible, and illegible to the secret police may not want to be made legible now.³⁸ While I have long drawn inspiration from archival research that is animated by ethical and political attempts to listen to and honor those unwillingly written about in these hostile archives, the Calendarist community’s refusal to read and to be read gave me pause. Their striking body language, in particular—the turn of the back toward the files—gave me pause, and not because I had not encountered it before; on the contrary, I recognized it as the tip of the iceberg of a phenomenon of (self-)obfuscation that is as widespread and defining of the files as it is difficult to perceive. Archival subjects often attempted to make themselves invisible and, when that was impossible, to make themselves illegible. When even that was impossible, they resisted employing on themselves or others the reading and deciphering strategies devised by the state. These attempts “to make oneself (and members of one’s community) obscure” were violently countered by the state and, in particular, by what I will argue were the intertwined secret police master narratives of identification, forced visibility, and legibility.³⁹ Kligman and Verdery see the secret police files, alongside employment registers and penal files, as “new devices of legibility [that] created means for identifying and tracking individuals.”⁴⁰ As I will show at length, the power of these archives rested not just in their classified files but more insidiously in a carefully orchestrated visual and textual pedagogy that aimed to impose particular ways of reading documents as well as people. There are precious moments when the variegated resistances to being made visible and legible within the master narrative of these archives are made graphically evident—the Calendarists’ turning of their backs to the files recalls for me the leitmotif of turned backs and covered faces that I identified in secret police films.⁴¹

Tatiana Vagramenko and Gabriela Nicolescu similarly document moving attempts made by subjects in files from the Ukrainian branch of the KGB to turn their faces away from mug shots: when the agent’s hand forcefully held their faces before the camera, their determination to close their eyes, grimace, or sing amounted to a desperate attempt to “move” the picture toward illegibility.⁴² These examples are precious because they are the rarely visible remains of a remarkable, yet largely invisible, phenomenon that defined these archives—their subjects’ attempts to make themselves obscure. The archives are strongly, if usually imperceptibly, shaped by this resistance to visibility and, further, legibility. Most often the very act of turning the back to the police is itself obfuscated—under inane information, under the pretense of not understanding, a missed appointment at the headquarters, and very likely under disguises and subterfuges that worked so well we still can’t see through them, or even see them at all.⁴³

The goal of my book is then not to make the archives legible, against all challenges, but to sketch and at times stretch the limits of their legibility, while recognizing that much illegibility will remain. Reading the Archival Revolution draws attention to this illegibility precisely as a question, without an easy answer. At times this remaining illegibility is a temporary failure of reading that can be eventually corrected through other readings. But at times, this illegibility is reading’s carefully assumed limit. Attending to the challenges of reading in the archives is sometimes about making these archives more legible, but it is also often about acknowledging what cannot be read. If reading can be reparative, it first needs to drop the pretense or arrogance of being a panacea. Just because we lack the correct reading glasses to see the hurt, it does not mean that the hurt never happened. The history of medicine provides a ready illustration of the dangers of hubris. It is so much easier to attend to the cases you have treatments for, and ignore or deny the cases that the medical community has not yet made legible. Yet there are always suffering patients before the disease gets a name, be it AIDS, Lyme, or COVID-19, and their hurt is magnified by the lack of recognition and even by denial. The hubris of reading is especially pernicious when its assumption that everything is or can or should be made legible denies the existence or relevance of what it cannot fix, comprehend, or fully perceive.

Treating archival reading as a challenge can too easily incite the hubris of reading, its drive to make everything legible, despite the arduous work of its subjects to make themselves illegible. I believe that recognizing and resisting this temptation is a necessary precondition of any reparative, or at least responsible, reading; thus my choice to foreground the hubris of reading here. Yet I don’t think that refraining from reading or not attending to the illegible parts of the archives makes the problems vanish. The illegibility of these archives is not a clearly demarcated margin that can be avoided while making sense of the more legible parts: it is instead the teeming negative space that, when heeded, can open alternative meanings in the salient writing of power. Only by paying attention to this space of illegibility can we produce readings that go beyond privileging and relaying the too legible writing of power. Only when attuned to these challenges of illegibility can we learn to read “other-wise,” which at times may mean not reading in any traditional sense but being aware of our reading’s limits. Thus the vital importance of learning to recognize those negative spaces that resist our reading, sensitized by a deep regard for those subjects written against their will.

When I first entered the secret police archives in 2000, part of me was still trying to find my own solution to Steinhardt’s challenge: how do you respond ethically to the limit situation of Soviet time, the encounter with the secret police? Of course, that first encounter had happened long before my entrance into the archives or into Steinhardt’s dramatic account of the interrogation. For many of us, that encounter started even before our birth; indeed, I am not alone in owing my existence in part to my mother’s encounter with the secret police. Like many of the children born after the 1966 decree banning abortion in Romania, I was a decrețică, a “child of decree 770.”⁴⁶ My mother told me when I was still a child that she had intended to abort me, as she had a medical condition that made it dangerous for her to have more children. Luckily for her, this was one of the rare medical conditions that could have exempted her from Ceauşescu’s draconian ban. She was painfully aware of the Kafkaesque process of securing a legal abortion, and came to dread so much the presence and questioning of the secret police agent at the gynecological examination needed for approval of the procedure that, when it came to me, she finally decided to risk her health and keep the pregnancy. In my black comedy moments, I think of that secret police agent, whose presence at the gynecological exam my mother feared so much, as a peculiarly late socialist avatar of a Fate ushering me into the world. Indeed, my very existence is to some degree owed to my mother’s fear of encountering him, and to her decision to avoid that meeting, while I was still a fetus. I am living proof that power in socialist Romania was not just, as Foucault argued, productive but also reproductive. Roxana Cazan convincingly argued that the womb was a place of dissent in communist Romania.⁴⁷ If so, then my gestation and birth were a quelling of that dissent: I emerged from the womb as the regime’s little accomplice against my mother’s desired resistance to the state’s appropriation of her body through the most aggressive pronatalist policy in the world.⁴⁸

My story is in no way unique. The year after the abortion ban, the number of infants born in Romania doubled. In other words, half of the children born to Romanian mothers in 1967 were unwanted, and would most likely have been aborted had there been no fear of the police state.⁴⁹ If I were to choose from the many repressive practices that the Securitate oversaw in late communist Romania the one that most deeply affected not just me but the largest number of people, it would be the pronatalist policy.⁵⁰ It stands to reason that my early history—my mother’s encounters and missed encounters with the secret police—shaped my entrance into the secret police archives, even though you would be hard-pressed to find any sign of it in my first book on the topic. Indeed, I think it was precisely because of that complicated history and because of my position as a teenager and young woman during Ceauşescu’s grim last years and the troubled transition period that I did not work on this issue—which I now see as my elephant in the archive reading room. Instead, when I entered the secret police archives in 2000, I still conceived of the heroic narrative of arrest and interrogation of mostly male intellectuals like Steinhardt or Foucault as the ultimate limit experience of living in a police state, an experience that I was drawn to in part as a way of preparing for such a powerfully feared—even if strangely anachronistic—encounter. My original research topic, “cultural figures and the secret police,” was probably more manageable than writing about the more widespread limit situations in late Romanian communism that were closer to a teenage girl’s universe—becoming pregnant, securing contraception or an abortion.

Having spent years studying records of interrogations, I did learn some valuable archival lessons: that my leading question going into the archive could be a screen for more difficult questions I was not yet able to articulate; that what is missing in the archives (such as the record of my mother’s missed encounter with the secret police that resulted in my birth) could be more relevant than whatever is found in the archive, and could shape the quality, focus, and blind spots of my reading; and that my questions going into the archive were often wrongly formulated, in need of revision in the face of the material. For instance, in time I recognized that interrogation records are not the place to look for lessons in dissent or humanity, even if these were interrogations of some of the artists and human beings I most admired. Indeed, the kind of interrogation practiced by the secret police should be considered a test of the humanity not of the interogatee, whom I’ve long stopped judging, but of the interrogator, and even further, of the whole structure for which the interrogator was the most visible representative. I’ve also come to recognize the obvious fact, long made strangely invisible to me by the mechanisms of readerly identification, that I am the reader rather than the hero. A much less glamorous and less difficult role, but a role that, once assumed, proved difficult and relevant enough for me. For if, as I believe, the secret police documents do not just record human actions but also foster and teach particular ways of perceiving and interpreting them, if the visual documents in the secret police archive were not just images but the visual aids for a whole visual pedagogy whereby the police taught people to look not with or at but through each other, then finding ways of reading and watching and listening that do not follow the mode d’emploi contained in these documents is worthwhile.

I may make my meaning clearer by considering the split within a newer sense of the word “challenge”—its medical use. The dangers and hubris of challenge can be seen in its most recent uses in medicine, where according to OED Online a challenge is “the action or process of administering an immunogenic agent to an animal or person in order to study the resulting immune response, or of exposing an animal or person to an infectious agent, esp[ecially] to measure the efficacy of a vaccine.” Part of what I was trying to do when I first started reading the secret police archives, I think, was to immunize myself against their power. I thought that reading the files would act as a sort of vaccine, whereby I would take in a controlled amount of information (a virus is often defined not as a stand-alone organism but as information), so that I would then become immune in case of an actual attack. It may have been easier than dealing with the fact that the virus itself was changing, that the litmus tests were changing, and that they had always been in the plural: before, during, and after the Soviet period. I now believe that if reading in these archives can act as a sort of vaccine, a vaccine that has to be continuously tinkered with and improved, then what we need most urgently at this time is a reader’s vaccine. By reading in these hostile archives we can potentially inoculate ourselves against the contagion of hostile readings. Accepting this challenge does not come without dangers. Yet my hope is that we can learn how to resist the many ways in which these archives write experience and the lives of others that invite, coax, rehearse, or even coerce hostile readings, in an attempt to open up more possibilities for reparative readings.

The “reading map” at the end of this introduction gives concrete descriptions of each challenge and its chapter: silences, mediums, fictions, silences (take two), and data. The recurrence of “silences” in the title of chapter 4 intentionally underscores their centrality to the book; it is also meant to signal, from the very beginning, that none of these challenges is ultimately solved within a single chapter, and that different case studies can throw different—whether complementary or nuancing—light on each challenge. Indeed, focusing each chapter on one main reading challenge is a heuristic device meant to lend clarity to the structure of the book. However, when we read in the archives, these challenges rarely keep neatly separate. Each chapter is thus attentive to the ways its main challenge is complicated by others. Even the two seemingly opposite bookends, absence and excess, are shown to be intricately connected. For a start, the sheer mass of documents masks the charged silences, erasures, and gaps in the files. There were three reading challenges that defied any effort to contain them within a single chapter. The first is multilingualism and the attendant problems of translation. The archival materials considered in this book contain originals in Romanian, German, Polish, French, and Russian, while Eastern Bloc archives at large draw on dozens of other languages. Furthermore, translation shaped the archives long before any readers arrived. One of the book’s contributions is to bring to light the figure of the secret police translator, long left in the shadows, from the nitty-gritty of translator recruitment and pay rates to the ways in which their translations inculpated or exculpated the originals and their writers. Each chapter attends to the ways in which translation threads through both the production and reception of these archives, taking stock of its powerful, if often overlooked, influence.

The second overarching challenge concerns the body. These archives teem with bodily traces that trip up our reading habits. Photos and films preserve the indexical imprints of bodies and light. Then there are fingerprints, signatures, and handwriting. Even type, unmistakably shaded by the different weight that a particular hand assigns to each letter, was used by the police to identify subversive writers. There is a long history of overlooking the body in the archive, yet archives handle bodies in myriad ways—ceremoniously embalming, sublimating, disciplining, or silencing them. Reading the Archival Revolution builds on Vivian Sobchack’s distinction between body and embodiment in current literature: “The focus here is on what it is to live in one’s body, not merely to look at bodies.” Embodiment foregrounds “the lived body as, at once, both an objective subject and as a subjective object: a sentient, sensual, and sensible ensemble of materialized capacities and agency that literally and figuratively makes sense of, and to, both ourselves and others.”⁵² The book is attentive to what the digitization of archives often leaves behind: the materiality of the archives and their objects—chief among them, the human body. The book shows that one way out of this challenge is attending to the embodied experience of reading, moving through and being moved by the archives, including their digital avatars. Once we pay attention to the encounter between differently embodied and mediated archival subjects, ourselves included, we can start to remedy our historic and newly acquired blind spots.

The third challenge that threads through the book is archival hybridity. The declassified archives never ceased to surprise me with the hybridity of their holdings. In this I am not alone. Other researchers, such as Katherine Verdery and Sonja Luerhmann, have commented on the “inevitable polyphony and multiple authorship” of these records.⁵³ The most immediately noticeable type of hybridity is that of mediums, the topic of chapter 2. The case file analyzed there contains everything from surveillance photographs and maps to police sketches and baby photos, filmed reenactments and production stills, endless inventories of seized goods, informer reports, letters, and wiretapped kitchen conversations. Furthermore, there is extreme hybridity even within each medium. For example, texts run the gamut from forms and statistics to confiscated diaries, fiction, poetry, published literature, manuscripts destined for the drawer, and intercepted love letters.

Scholars working in various archives around the world easily relate to this encounter with archival hybridity. For example, many archives are predicated upon the possibility of different mediums coexisting, and maybe even interacting within a single collection, and as such they are fundamentally—rather than incidentally—intermedia hybrids. This is why I believe that the term could be relevant outside of its immediate context. Yet the secret police archives are a particular type of intermedia. They are intermedia on steroids because in these archives, the standard preservation requirements (i.e., that photographs and other visual material be kept separately from print to ensure their survival through time) were overridden by the forensic need to have words and images in one place, in one case file. Additionally, the lack of recognized boundaries as to what constitutes a collection or a file, and the police manuals’ insistence that every word, whether published, drafted, whispered, overheard, or violently extracted, and that any object (recall the Calendarist case cited above), whether prayer books, photographs, icons, or clothes, was fair game for inclusion in the investigation further heightened the hybridity of these archives.

I used to think that the striking hybridity of the police archives must have been for its agents a professional nuisance, something they would have rather done without, but that these misgivings—in the absence of a better solution—were quickly quelled within univocal reports. After all, isn’t hybridity a hyped term of cultural discourse, one that has migrated from postcolonial studies, where it celebrated multiplicity of voices, points of view, and contexts, to, more recently, media studies, where it describes (sometimes inflated to the term “super-hybridity”) the mind-boggling diversity of mediums and contexts available to the contemporary artist?⁵⁴ It turns out that there are hybridities and hybridities. In my research, I discovered that in the secret police archives medium hybridity is often a carefully choreographed source of archival authority. In a situation where the event—what actually happened—is by definition in question (for otherwise there would be no investigation), one of the main narrative devices is to verify words and images against themselves and each other. Think of the police sketch, based on the spoken portraits (portraits parlés) composed by witnesses, or the mug shot, largely useless without its caption, the proper name. Sometimes these verifications raise questions, poke holes in a definite version of a story. Usually, however, by reinforcing words with other words and images the police aim to bolster their representation of the event. In the absence of the elusive event itself, I found that the medium hybridity of the secret police archives often buttresses a single master narrative. In the process, the material is stripped of its ambiguities, questions marks, and silences. The secret police archives made meaning, and wielded power, not within one medium, and not even in neatly separated multimedia, but rather through intermedia, in the crafted collusion of different mediums. By exposing and further unhinging this collusion between words and images, and further among textual genres and other types of archival hybridity that the secret police hijacked, we can allow different configurations of these materials to emerge. This is no easy task because we often come up against the secret police modus operandi that created and preserved these archives.⁵⁵

Reading the Archival Revolution orchestrates a dialogue among this wide variety of reading methodologies and ultimately aims at what I call, in a tribute to Mikhail Bakhtin and Tina Campt, an embodied and polyphonic reading practice.⁶⁰ By “polyphonic reading,” I mean reading that is aware of the limitations of its proper domain, and aware of the urgent need to go beyond itself and attend to what has been left out, such as silenced voices or even the lower, less audible frequencies of archived subjects, their imprints and afterimages.⁶¹ For unlike Luehrmann, I believe that polyphony, in the utopian sense it acquired in literary studies through Bakhtin’s work, is anything but “inevitable” in the archives. On the contrary, I think that given the defining secret police modus operandi that created and preserved these archives, authoritative discourse carried the day. I do think, however, that these archives have a long-repressed polyphonic potential that can at times be activated through our reading.

So, how do we engage in a polyphonic reading practice? Prescriptions are bound to fail, proving too rigid for the rich and tortuous terrain of these archives. Fortunately, though, there is plentiful guidance in the archival (reading) practices of others, coming before us, as well as in the very texts buried in the archives. As Saidiya Hartman observes, “the promiscuity of the archive begets a wide array of reading.”⁶² I was inspired by scholars, like Hartman herself, who have pushed to further widen this array (and disarray) with new methodologies, while remaining alert to the limits and potentially violent overreach of archival reading. For Hartman’s sentence, referring to the murdered slave girl whose archival story she tells in “Venus in Two Acts,” ends thus: “the promiscuity of the archive begets a wide array of reading, none that are capable of resuscitating that girl.”⁶³ Even in the best intentioned drive to listen to the archive’s many buried voices, there is always a danger: the danger of hearing voices, of ventriloquizing, of taking our own words for those irretrievably absent. This is a danger and lure deeply inscribed in the dominant subject position of the archival reader, as famously inaugurated by Jules Michelet, who saw his nineteenth-century archival research on French history as “breathing life” into “the souls who have suffered so long ago and who were smothered now in the past.”⁶⁴ Much recent work, often rooted in (post)colonial archives, has taught us the risks and violence inherent in such a dominant readerly position.⁶⁵ Yet as Hartman argues, “the necessity of trying to represent what we cannot, rather than leading to pessimism or despair, must be embraced as the impossibility that conditions our knowledge of the past and animates our desire for a liberated future.”⁶⁶ The claim of resuscitating or saving past lives from their archival burial grounds often exposes little more than archival hubris. Yet spending time in the company of their traces and learning to listen may save us from reenacting the violence that attempted to replace their polyphony with the sham monologue of authoritative discourse. I say “sham” because learning to discern polyphony in these archives eventually empowers us to also see through the pretense of the coherence and unity of power.⁶⁷ Practicing polyphonic reading can further save us from ourselves, from our own tendencies to impose our own monologic perceptions on the past. In the process, we come to realize our limits in resuscitating the past, as well as its power in teaching us how to read and protect its polyphony along with that of the present, future, and, last but not least, the polyphony of our own voices.

While it relies and builds on a wide array of theoretical and methodological works, polyphonic reading is not a theory or set of rules but rather a practice that has emerged from my attempt to respond to the many challenges of these archives as manifested in my case studies. Readers interested mostly in the theoretical and methodological aspects may want to turn to the postscript, “Toward a Polyphonic Reading Practice, II,” where I reflect on the theoretical inspiration and the urgent political and ethical stakes of this practice in light of my experience researching and writing this book. However, I would invite readers to join me in reckoning with at least one of the five recalcitrant case studies before jumping to the theoretical conclusion, as a way to better ground our reading.

I open the book in an unorthodox manner with a co-authored chapter to foreground my collaboration with Anna Krakus, as one possible way of working across language barriers (in this case, Polish and French) and also to turn the spotlight on the array of formative, if often unexamined, expectations and methodologies that researchers bring to an archival problem. Beyond participating in the dynamic, multidisciplinary, and multilingual study of secret police archives through workshops and edited volumes, co-authorship has powerfully mitigated the burden of working on such difficult topics, as well as the pressure for relevance that beleaguers individual researchers in small fields with generalizations and partisanship.

The postscript, “Toward a Polyphonic Reading Practice, II,” attempts to move us further in the direction first broached in an earlier section of this introduction. The postscript revisits the origins, revisions, and new directions in understanding polyphony’s migration from a musical term to a literary one, starting with Bakhtin and extending to the present. It also attempts to clarify the meaning and stakes of polyphony by comparing it to two kindred, if significantly different, terms—counterpoint and heteroglossia. I close the book with a call for a polyphonic reading practice that leaves behind the pernicious fantasy of the transparent archival reader and the affectable archival subject, and instead assumes reading as an eventful encounter among embodied and affectable subjects.

Notes

1. My postscript discusses the neurocognitive poetics research that underlies this view, in particular Kneepkens and Zwaan’s work on “fiction feelings” and the Panskepp-Jakobson hypothesis. Eleonore Kneepkens, and Rolf A. Zwaan, “Emotions and Literary Text Comprehension,” Poetics 23 (1995). See also Arthur Jacobs, “Neurocognitive Poetics: Methods and Models for Investigating the Neuronal and Cognitive-affective Bases of Literature Reception,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9, no. 186 (2015). For a fascinating discussion of developing a “biliterate reading brain” with expertise in both print and digital reading, and further “building [a] kind of pluripotential brain circuitry” through reading different mediums, see Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (New York: Harper, 2018), 169–71.

2. The literature on the contemporary crisis of reading is vast. An influential early contribution to this debate was Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Culture (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1994). For further bibliography and a comprehensive engagement with the topic that draws on both neuroscience and literature, see Maryanne Wolf’s extensive scholarship, especially Wolf, Reader, Come Home.

3. For a resonating critique of archival writing and reading practices, and a celebration of an alternative way of remembering (i.e., the repertoire), see Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). The complex choices involved in reading against or along the archival grain have been most influentially explored by Saidiya Hartman and Ann Laura Stoler. Good starting points for exploring their prolific work on the topic are Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008); Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Archival Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). A landmark polemical stance on alternative modes of reading that has deeply influenced this book is that of Eve Kosofky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). A provocative edited volume excavates the genealogy and development of reparative and critical reading, and ponders their futures: Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski, Critique and Postcritique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 1–30. See also Kirstin Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Robert Reid-Pharr, Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-humanist Critique (New York: New York University Press, 2016); Zeb Tortorici, Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). The ethics of researching in declassified Eastern European archives has preoccupied the Hidden Archives collective, whose prolific work is repeatedly referenced in this book. See also the special issue of the Romanian journal Martor titled Visual Ethics after Communism, particularly its introduction: David Crowley, James Kapaló, and Gabriela Nicolescu, “Introduction. Visual Ethics after Communism,” Martor 26 (2021). The thought-provoking methodology section of the magisterial Peasants under Siege also interrogated the limits of reading in hostile archives and argued for the need to complement it with oral history. Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery, Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949–1962 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 464–71.

4. Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 1, no. 110 (2004). The terms “archival impulse” and “archival turn” are treated in more detail in chapter 2.

5. The term “quantum leap” is taken from Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Impact of the Opening of Soviet Archives on Western Scholarship on Soviet Social History,” Russian Review 74, no. 3 (2015): 377. For thoughtful accounts of the “archival revolution,” including further bibliography on the term, see Donald J. Raleigh, “Doing Soviet History: The Impact of the Archival Revolution,” Russian Review 61, no. 1 (2002); Jan Plamper, “Archival Revolution or Illusion? Historicizing the Russian Archives and Our Work in Them,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 51, no. 1 (2003).

6. Michael David-Fox, “Into and Beyond the Stalinist Paradigm of Secret Policing,” in The Secret Police and the Soviet System: New Archival Investigations, ed. Michael David-Fox (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023), 6.

7. David-Fox, “Into and Beyond the Stalinist Paradigm of Secret Policing,” 4.

8. See, for example, Juliet Johnson, “2023 President’s Address: De-centering Russia: Challenges and Opportunities,” blog post, ASEEES Blog (2023), https://www.aseees.org/news-events/aseees-blog-feed/2023-presidents-add…; Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, “Decolonization in Focus Seminar Series” (2023), https://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/insights/announcing-decolonization-….

9. Besides the rehabilitation of former political prisoners, declassified archival records also played a central role in the “screening, lustration and public identification of perpetrators.” In her comparative study of the place of archival resources in transitional justice, Lavinia Stan shows that “archival records were of remarkable utility for the trials against former leaders and the truth commissions in Latin America, but the advantages—and the disadvantages—of using archival records for transitional justice purposes were particularly clearly revealed in post-communist Eastern Europe.” Lavinia Stan, “Entries on Transitional Justice Debates, Controversies, and Key Questions,” in Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice, ed. Lavinia Stan and Nadya Nedelsky (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 112.

10. There are thousands of informer scandals across the former Soviet bloc, some of which—such as those concerning Lech Wałęsa, István Szabó, Milan Kundera, or Julia Kristeva—made international news.

11. Some scholars warned early on that the term “archival revolution” could not be justified solely by the quantity of new sources. Stephen Kotkin, “The State—Is It Us? Memoirs, Archives, and Kremlinologists,” Russian Review 61, no. 1 (2002); Mark von Hagen, “The Archival Gold Rush and Historical Agendas in the Post-Soviet Era,” Slavic Review 52, no. 1 (1993). There were lively debates about whether “new perspectives derive from open archives or whether such openings only reinforce preconceived categories of analysis.” David-Fox, “Into and beyond the Stalinist Paradigm of Secret Policing,” 7. As David-Fox concedes, in the first decade, scholars warning that “often uninterrogated purpose and structure of the archival repositories themselves, the search for revelations their opening engenders, and the way fields use them to pour old wine into new bottles makes the knowledge they create less than revelatory” found ready ammunition for their critique. However, David-Fox continues, “with the hindsight of over three decades of Soviet history in the archival era, it has become clearer that the availability and allure of new sources have served as a potential, often even necessary impetus to widen and re-focus our vision.” David-Fox, “Into and beyond the Stalinist Paradigm of Secret Policing,” 7. Rather than a defeat of those initial critics, the quality of this new research and its self-reflexive interest in methodology has likely benefited from those early warnings.

12. Jane Hirshfield, Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise (Hexham, UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2008), 53.

13. As the poet Yehuda Amichai reminds us, difficulty yields interpretations and commentary in a way that straightforwardness does not: “Interpretations grew around them, as / When the Talmud grows difficult, / It shrinks on the page, / And Rashi and the commentaries, / Close in on it from all sides.” Difficulty also makes interpretation and its conclusions visible, putting them on display and thus subjecting them to critique, revision, and reinterpretation. Yehuda Amichai, Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry 1948–1994, trans. Benjamin Harshav and Barbara Harshav (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), 38.

14. OED Online provides usage examples: 1796 R. Southey Joan of Arc vi. 50 “The sentinel . . . with uplifted lance / Challenged the darkling travellers.” 1833 Regulations Instr. Cavalry i.i.28 “On any one approaching his post, he must challenge them by the words ‘Who comes there?’”

15. According to OED Online, our current word “challenge” originates from the Latin calumnia (a false accusation, calumny), by way of Middle English calenge (an accusation, claim).

16. Cristina Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police in Soviet Times (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 5; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 351–73.

17. See the section “Reading ‘Other’-Wise” in Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 30–33.

18. The term “chronotope” (khronotop) originates in Mikhail Bakhtin’s work. See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Caryl Emerson, trans. Mikhail Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 425–26.

19. For a fine-grained study of the differences among three Eastern European secret services in the aftermath of World War II, see Molly Pucci, Security Empire: The Secret Police in Communist Eastern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).

20. The auditory imagination is receiving increased attention in contemporary sound studies. For an engaging study of the auditory imagination through a fascinating focus on earworms, see J. Martin Daughtry, “Listening beyond Sound and Life: Reflections on Imagined Music,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures, ed. Friedlind Riedel, Harris M. Berger, and David Vander-Hamm (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2022). For a book-length, historically grounded analysis of the topic, see Viktoria Tkaczyk, Thinking with Sound (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023).

21. As we will see in more detail in the postscript, Tina Campt argues for counterintuitive “listening” to archives that appear silent but in fact emit on “low frequencies.” Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 23–45. J. Martin Daughtry proposes a similarly transmedial approach but coming from the opposite direction, conceptualizing sound through the originally textual metaphor of the palimpsest. J. Martin Daughtry, “Acoustic Palimpsests,” in Theorizing Sound Studies, ed. Deborah Kapchan (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017).

22. Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).

23. Silva describes the dynamic dependence between this transparent “I” (“Man, the subject, the ontological figure consolidated in post-Enlightenment thought”) and the affectable “I,” as the European construction of non-European minds. She defines “affectability” as “the condition of being subjected to both natural (in the scientific and lay sense) conditions and to other’s power.” Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, xv–xvi and 1–17.

24. Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015), 91–92.

25. Massumi, Politics of Affect, 92.

26. Massumi, Politics of Affect, 57.

27. Massumi, Politics of Affect, 57–58.

28. Katie King develops Bruno Latour’s invitation to learn to be affected into a whole book project: “Learning to be affected is what this book is all about.” Katie King, Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 274–75; Bruno Latour, “How to Talk about the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies,” Body & Society 10, nos. 2–3 (2004).

29. See the section “Reading ‘Other’-Wise” in Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 30–33.

30. For a radical critique of listening practices as trespass, see Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).

31. Anca Șincan, “Ethical Questions in Researching the Religious Underground in Romania’s Secret Police Archives, Part I–II,” blog post, All the Russias’ Blog, Jordan Center, https://jordanrussiacenter.org/news/our-story-ethical-questions-on-rese….

32. Șincan, “Ethical Questions.”

33. Șincan, “Ethical Questions.”

34. Șincan, “Ethical Questions.”

35. Here Șincan quotes Catherine Wanner’s term “hybridity of religion,” a term for “instances where the political context spurs change in orthodoxies of faith and praxis.” Șincan, “Ethical Questions.” For further development of the term, see Catherine Wanner, “Introduction,” in State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine, ed. Catherine Wanner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

36. Șincan, “Ethical Questions.”

37. Their refusal to read, first expressed through this striking body language, was then discussed at length among the community and later explicitly articulated and maintained by the community leaders.

38. Kinga Povedák also thoughtfully documents the moral dilemma she faced as a researcher when the community whose files she studied expressed their preference that she refrain from publishing photographs she had discovered in the secret police archives. Povedák models a respectful, resourceful, and creative approach to the ethics of reading in the archives, by approaching the files’ subjects for permission that she legally did not need, hearing their preference, and collaborating with them to find alternative ways of individually and communally processing the images through an innovative method of “photo-elicitation” and further through a moving public exhibition based in part on her archival research. Kinga Povedák, “Methodological Notes on Visual Ethics: ‘Choosing Not to Reveal,’” Martor 26 (2021). The exhibit was held in Budapest, at Galeria Centralis, Blinken Open Society Archives, as a Hidden Galleries project. It is available online at James Kapaló, Gabriela Nicolescu, “Faith-Trust-Secrecy. Religions through the Lenses of the Secret Police” (2021).

39. Nicolae Steinhardt, in his accounts of his interrogation and prison experience, repeatedly returns to the idea of “making oneself obscure.” Nicolae Steinhardt, Jurnalul Fericirii (Cluj: Dacia, 1997). See also the influential discussions of a kindred term, “deliberate opacity.” Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 37; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 35–36. For a fascinating take on the related practice of obfuscation, in the contemporary US context, see Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum, Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). In chapter 2, I explore the intertwined master narratives of identification, visibility, and legibility. For an in-depth look at the first two (identification and visibility), see Cristina Vatulescu, “The Mug-Shot and the Close-up: Identification and Visual Pedagogy in Secret Police Film,” in The Secret Police and the Soviet System: New Archival Investigations, ed. Michael David-Fox (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023).

40. Kligman and Verdery, Peasants under Siege, 450, emphasis mine.

41. Vatulescu, “The Mug-Shot and the Close-up.” For example, in V. Musatova, This Concerns Us All, a suspect turns his back and uses his coat to hide from the camera, and a woman suspect attempts to hide her face from the camera with her headscarf. V. Musatova, This Concerns Us All [Eto trevozhit vsekh] (Moscow: TsKDK, 1960).

42. See, for example, the original and altered arrest photographs of Maria Tishchenko, SBU Archive, f. 6, spr. 69346, ark. 249 rev and ark. 242, discussed in Tatiana Vagramenko and Gabriela Nicolescu, “The Hand at Work or How the KGB File Leaks in the Exhibition,” Martor 26 (2021).

43. While the word “subterfuge” has more recently acquired largely negative connotations, I use it to harken back to its powerful literal/etymological roots, subter (secret/underground) and fuge (to run, escape), which have given us its older meanings of “hiding place” and “secret refuge.” OED Online.

44. Particularly memorable was the TV series Memorial to Suffering [Memorialul Durerii], which told the story of political repression through interviews with survivors and secret police personnel; the film was shot on location at former camp and prison sites. Lucia Hossu-Longin, Memorialul durerii (Bucharest: Televiziunea Română, 1991).

45. Steinhardt, Jurnalul Fericirii.

46. Consiliul de stat al Republicii Socialiste Romania, “Decret Nr. 770 din 1 octombrie 1966 pentru reglementarea întreruperii cursului sarcinii [Decree no. 770 from 1 October 1966 regulating the interruption of the course of pregnancy]” (Bucharest: Buletinul Oficial [Official Bulletin] 60, 1966). The classic study on Ceauşescu’s reproductive policies, including the abortion ban, is Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceauşescu’s Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). See also Vladimir Trebici, Genocid si Demografie [Genocide and Demography] (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1991); Cristian Pop-Eleches, “The Impact of an Abortion Ban on Socioeconomic Outcomes of Children: Evidence from Romania,” Journal of Political Economy 114, no. 4 (2006); Corina Doboş, Politica pronatalistă a regimului Ceauşescu: o perspectivă comparativă [The Pronatalist Policy of the Ceauşescu Regime: A Comparative Perspective] (Iaşi: Polirom, 2010); Andreea Andrei and Alina Branda, “Abortion Policy and Social Suffering: The Objectification of Romanian Women’s Bodies under Communism (1966–1989),” Women’s History Review 24, no. 6 (2015).

47. Roxana Cazan, “Constructing Spaces of Dissent in Communist Romania: Ruined Bodies and Clandestine Spaces in Cristian Mungiu’s ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days’ and Gabriela Adameşteanu’s ‘A Few Days in the Hospital,’” Women’s Studies Quarterly 39 (2011).

48. This image of the decreței as tools of the state turned against their own parents and the population at large was taken to an extreme in the “orphan myth,” examined by Peter Siani-Davis amid the many theories concerning the “terrorists,” the feared group of armed Ceauşescu supporters on whom many Romanians blamed the deaths and terror during and after the 1989 revolution. It was rumored that some of the decreței abandoned by their parents were raised in special orphanages and turned into special forces fanatically devoted to Ceauşescu. As Siani-Davis has shown in his thoughtful research on the “terrorists,” much of the killings and terror of those days was the result of actions by the secret police as well as mistakes, accidents, and their cover-ups. The orphan myth is, however, telling of the many unprocessed fears and traumas of the socialist regime, including the fraught relationships between parents and the decreței generation as well as the secret existence of death-orphanages whose revelation shocked Romanians as well as the world in the early 1990s. Peter Siani-Davis, The Romanian Revolution of December 1989 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 161.

49. Cristian Pop-Eleches, “The Impact of an Abortion Ban.” The premiere of Children of the Decree, the first documentary film about this long-reaching pronatalist policy, took place, fittingly, in a factory, a site where women had been standardly subjected to forced gynecological exams en masse. Florin Iepan, Children of the Decree (Germany, Romania, 2004). At the after-viewing discussion, the then-minister of culture, Mona Muscă, asked the women in the audience how many of them had been affected by the abortion policy. Everyone raised their hands. Sandra and Simona Chitan Scarlat, “Vedetele Epocii de Aur aveau liber la avort [The Celebrities of the Golden Age Were Allowed Abortions],” Evenimentul Zilei, 19 May 2005.

50. The extensive reach of the pronatalist policy among the general population is also documented in the chapter dedicated to the policy in the Final Presidential Report on the communist period’s abuses, a chapter strongly based on Kligman’s 1998 study. “Politica demografică a regimului Ceauşescu,” in Raport Final, ed. Dorin Dobrincu, Vladimir Tismăneanu and Cristian Vasile (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2007).

51. As Șincan’s Calendarist case study suggests, not even my lengthy enumeration (scholarly, ethical, political, aesthetic) exhausts the different qualities of these reading challenges, which for the monks were of a religious/spiritual nature.

52. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 2. As Sobchack persuasively argues, much of the extensive scholarship in the humanities that focuses on the body overlooks embodiment, thus reinforcing the objectification of the body that it openly decries. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts, 1–2.

53. Sonja Luehrmann, Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 24; Katherine Verdery, Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania’s Secret Police (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014), 51–52.

54. The term “super-hybridity” was introduced by Jörg Heiser as a “possible catchall for the aesthetic output of our digitally sped-up moment, where artists mine the explosion of cultural contexts, available at the click of a mouse,” and was debated in Frieze’s 2010 September issue.

55. As chapter 2 demonstrates, to complicate matters, we also come up against the powerful wave of digital remediation, which erases medium hybridity by replacing it with the digital medium; additionally, we come up against old disciplinary models of archival scholarship, which are often rooted in the separation of mediums, usually privileging the textual.

56. The beginnings of “distant reading” are usually associated with Franco Moretti, who defined it in direct opposition to close reading: “One thing is for sure: it [distant reading] cannot mean the very close reading of very few texts—secularized theology, really (‘canon’!).” Franco Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2000): 208. This and related essays were later collected in Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013). The last chapter argues for the potential of these reading strategies to complement each other.

57. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading.”

58. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.

59. There is a rich literature and debate on Aesopian writing and reading practices in Russia and Eastern Europe. For key arguments for reading along and between the lines in Soviet-era archives, see Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Igal Halfin, “Poetics in the Archives: The Quest for ‘True’ Bolshevik Documents,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 51, no. 1 (2003); Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Svetlana Boym, “How Soviet Subjectivity Is Made,” in The Svetlana Boym Reader, ed. Cristina Vatulescu et al. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019).

60. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination; Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984); Tina Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Campt, Listening to Images.

61. As we will see in more depth in the postscript, Campt develops the concept of archival low frequency in Listening to Images, 23–45. My project of stretching current definitions and practices of reading is also influenced by Matthew Rubery’s work in disability studies: “Efforts to cordon off reading from nonreading are doomed to fail because there is no agreement on what qualifies as reading in the first place. The more one tries to figure out where the border lies between reading and non-reading, the more edge cases will be found to stretch the term’s elastic boundaries . . . Reader’s Block moves toward an understanding of reading as a spectrum that is capacious enough to accommodate the disparate activities documented in the following chapters . . . along with any new ones that will inevitably come to the surface.” Matthew Rubery, Reader’s Block: A History of Reading Differences (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2022), 4.

62. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 13.

63. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts.”

64. Jules Michelet, “Préface de l’Histoire de France,” in Oeuvres complètes, Tome IV (Paris: Flammarion, 1974 [1869]), 613–14. For a fascinating reading of Michelet’s metaphor and the articulation of a new embodied position for the archival reader, see Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 26–28.

65. Jenny Sharpe powerfully argues that “silence can also be a form of expression rather than just a puzzle of history to be solved.” Jenny Sharpe, Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020), 56. In so doing, she builds on M. NourbeSe Philip’s creative work of “defining silence as a black female space of expression rather than one of negation,” as well as on the works of scholars like Anjali Arondekar, who caution against “the project of filling archival gaps,” and Stephen Best, who “is especially critical of the recovery imperative.” Sharpe, Immaterial Archives, 9, 20. Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: on Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 6; Stephen Michael Best, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 40–41.

66. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 13.

67. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 20.

68. Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020). The uncomfortable links between KGB disinformation and the literary establishment are often obscured, but at times are made saliently clear. For instance, “Literaturnaia gazeta is the most important cultural journal since The Thaw, a go-to venue for KGB disinformation.” David-Fox, “Into and beyond the Stalinist Paradigm of Secret Policing,” 13.