CRISTINA VATULESCU

      ARRESTING BIOGRAPHIES: THE SECRET POLICE FILE IN THE SOVIET UNION AND ROMANIA

SOON AFTER STARTING my research on personal files from the former secret police archives in Bucharest, I realized that I was often their second reader.  Because my predecessor, the secret police archivist, had left thick pencil marks that had survived through the decades, I could easily trace the trajectory of that first reading, with its narrow emphasis on the main narrative, the conclusive evidence, names, and court decisions. The archivist rushed to the inexorable closing of the files, intent on quelling any questions along the way. Following that red thread, I gradually learned to decode acronyms and pseudonyms and to read for the plot. Before long, however, I lost my place in this tedious, complicit reading. The file appeared as a disturbing collage of found objects still pregnant with untold stories: yellowed newspaper clippings, a love letter opened before reaching its intended destination, the transcript of an overheard conversation, scalloped-edged photographs, and fragments of literary manuscripts. If the suspicious gaze of the secret police had turned everything into incriminating evidence, I became interested in returning that gaze from the critical perspective of a reader of literature.

While my project initially focused on previously unpublished Romanian secret police files, it necessarily expanded to consider their explicit model, the Soviet file.  This essay examines the characteristics and development of those files from the 1920s to the 1980s. It investigates how this genre was structured and how it in turn structured its protagonist/victim, two topics that are as inextricably related as life (bios) and writing (graphike) are in biography.

A Short Genealogy of the Secret Police File

As the name suggests, the secret police file is a variation on the traditional genre of the criminal record. Walter Benjamin wrote that the challenge of identifying a criminal shielded by the anonymity of the modern masses "is at the origin of the detective story". The elusiveness of the criminal’s identity is also at the origin of modern criminology, a discipline that developed in the late nineteenth century based on discoveries about matching traces such as fingerprints, bloodstains, and handwriting with the individual who had left them. In the 1870s, the pioneering criminologist Alphonse Bertillon proposed a method for identifying criminals that synthesized many of these discoveries.  His police records combined mug shots, a spoken portrait (portrait parlé), and a record of peculiar characteristics (such as tattoos and accents). By the end of the nineteenth century, this prototype of the modern police file had been firmly established throughout Europe. 

Whereas a criminal record is usually limited to the investigation of a crime, the Soviet personal file provides an extensive biography of a suspect.  Already in 1918, Martin Latsis, a leader of the Soviet secret police, instructs:  "Do not look in the materials you have gathered for evidence that a suspect acted or spoke against the Soviet authorities. The first question you should ask him is what class he belongs to, what is his origin, education, profession. These questions should determine his fate. This is the essence of the Red Terror."  Romanian writer Nicolae Steinhardt summarizes the important shift documented in this directive: "you are not accused for what you have done, but rather for what you are."   Soviet detective stories (detektivy) exhibit a similar departure from the traditional Western genre of the detective story. Like these Soviet files, they disregard the particulars of any one crime to focus on the overall character of the suspect.  Thus, while the traditional police file can read like a Western detective story—the reader spurred on by a mystery whose solution is ideally crowned with the identification and punishment of the criminal—the Soviet secret police file reads like a peculiar biography.