Police aesthetics : literature, film, and the secret police in Soviet times

262 Pages·2010·2.41 MB·English

by  Vatulescu

Police Aesthetics

Police Aesthetics
Literature, Film, and the Secret Police
in Soviet Times
Cristina Vatulescu
stanford university press
stanford, california
stanford University Press,
stanford, california
© 2010 by the Board of trustees of the
leland stanford Junior University
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of
stanford University Press.

library of congress cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vatulescu, cristina.
   Police aesthetics : literature, film, and the secret police in Soviet times / 
cristina Vatulescu.
p. cm.
includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8047-6080-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Russian literature—20th century—history and criticism. 2. Russian
literature—Political aspects. 3. Romanian literature—20th century—history and
criticism. 4. Romanian literature—Political aspects. 5. secret police—soviet
Union—history. 6. secret police—Romania—history. 7. literature and
state—soviet Union. 8. Motion pictures—Political aspects—soviet Union.
i. title.
pg3026.p64.v37 2010
791.43'6556—dc22 2009044481
Printed in the United states of America on
acid-free, archival-quality paper
typeset at stanford University Press in 10.5/13 Garamond
For Kiki

contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Zones of Contact: Literature, Film and the Secret Police, 1 Reading a
Secret Police File, 11 “Police Aesthetics,” 20 The Road Plan, 24
1 Arresting Biographies: The Personal File in the Soviet Union
and Romania 27
Preamble: Fragmentary Archives, 27 A Short Genealogy of the
Secret Police File, 32 Surveillance Files: Characterization Through
Collation, 34 Investigation Files: From Autobiography to
Confession, 39 Stalinist Files: How Many of Those Enemies Were
Forged, 41 Post-Stalinist Files: The Age of Surveillance, 46 A Note
on Foucault, 53
2 The Master and Margarita: The Devil’s Secret Police File 55
The Distinguishing Characteristics of the Devil in 1930s Moscow, 56
Writer Prototypes: Madmen, Apostles, and Secret Police Investigators, 59
Censorship and the Authority of the Word, 63 Stalinist “Fantastic Reality”
and Its Textual Practices, 68 Mikhail Bulgakov’s Personal File, 69
Repetitions with Suspect Differences: The Writer as Copyist, 72
3 Early Soviet Cinema’s Shots at Policing 77
Filmmaking and Fingerprinting: Dziga Vertov’s Film Theory and
Practice, 78 Hidden and Artfully Exhibited Cameras, 85 The Original
Show Trial Film and Its Audience, 88 Alexander Medvedkin: Cinema as
Public Prosecutor, 92 The Indistinguishable Crowd: Criminal Challenges
to Vision and Visual Technologies, 99 The Forged Party Card: Detaching
Photographs, Names, and Identities, 103 Vigilance: The Look of High
Stalinism, 108 Legitimizing Cinematic Vision: Socialist Realism,
Depth Style and The Party Card, 110 Stalin as Scriptwriter and His
viii contents
Chekist Protagonist, 114 Melodrama and the Police, 115 Vision, Visual
Technologies, and Policing, 118 The Many Ways Film Directors Took
Shots at Policing, 121
4 Secret Police Shots at Filmmaking: The Gulag and Cinema 123
The Camp as Soviet Exotica: Solovki, 124 An OGPU Blockbuster:
Road to Life, 135 Discipline, Punishment, and a New OGPU
Experiment, 137 Film Techniques and Secret Police Tactics, 140
Violence and Stylistic Innovation, 144 Interpellating a Dubious
Public: The Belomor Project, 147 Multimedia Portraits of the
Camp Inmate, 152 Belomor’s Femininity: The Prostitute and the
Shock Worker, 153 The Place of the Arts in the Belomor Project, 157
5 Literary Theory and the Secret Police: Writing and
Estranging the Self 161
Two Masters of Estrangement: Lev Tolstoy and Ivan the Terrible, 163
Revolutionary Estrangement and the Explosion of the Self, 165
Self-Estrangement and Self-Effacement, 167 Deposition and
Autobiography: An Estranging Encounter, 169 “This is surrealism”:
Estrangement in the Interrogation Room, 173 Eulogy to the Lie:
Self-Estrangement and Reeducation, 181
Concluding Thoughts 187
Notes 199
Index 239
Acknowledgments
this project, like many others, has its beginnings scattered in different places.
Part of it probably sprouted, together with my grandmother’s tomato seed-
lings, in her kitchen, as she instructed me in the first household task I can 
remember. long before i was trusted with dusting, my grandparents taught me
how to turn the radio dial from the static-covered sounds of Radio Free Europe
to the official Romanian radio station Programul 1; i was to do this every time
the doorbell rang and they hurried to the door to welcome visitors. From those
forbidden radio shows and from countless more or less oblique references i
learned that people’s lives were recorded in secret police files whose words  
came back to haunt them. this awareness that our lives were continuously writ-
ten somewhere, as we talked, slept, or listened to the radio, webbed in and out,
often muted by the louder events of one’s private life but sometimes stridently
brought back by a slip of a tongue: my husband still remembers the panicked
tears he cried at the age of four while confessing to his parents that he had
somehow slipped to his friend larsi, also four, the forbidden news of Russia’s
invasion of Afghanistan. For those given to worrying about the denouement,
let me say that it was a happy ending, of sorts: nothing happened. larsi was a
good friend, too busy going about his four year old business to do much with
this piece of Afghanistan news. others, however, spent considerable energy
trying to influence the secret police account of their lives and the lives of oth-
ers. Who knew? If this or that fact got noted in a file, maybe one would finally 
get that promotion or at least put an end to a grueling commute. Most people
i knew seemed intent on keeping themselves just below the radar, making
themselves invisible and inaudible, with the ultimate hope of passing unwritten.
i feared these secret police texts long before i knew that people’s lives could
also be written as autobiographies, or memoirs, or novels, indeed long before
i had any real concept of literature. But when, in 2000, I finally got to read 
the secret police files of the Romanian Securitate, these texts already belonged 
to the previous century, and i had a hard time deciphering them other than
through analogy with the literary texts that i now read for a living in a different