The Lives of Soviet Secret Agents: Religion and Police Surveillance in the USSR

(Hardback)

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The Lives of Soviet Secret Agents: Religion and Police Surveillance in the USSR explores the covert world of secret police surveillance within the Soviet Union, delving into lesser-known grassroots religious life and the collusion of religious communities with the Soviet secret police. These case studies come from Ukraine, Latvia, Kazakhstan, and Russia, spanning from the Central Black-Earth region to the Bashkir and Udmurt regions. This book reconstructs the stories of insider agents, focusing on the entanglements and ambiguities of collaboration and secret police surveillance in the Soviet era. These are the stories of the resilience and creative agency of religious believers in times when their faith in God was considered a legal offense. These issues are addressed through an in-depth analysis of previously untapped archival sources from the Soviet secret police archives and eyewitness testimonies.

Reviews

This agenda-setting volume brings together cutting-edge research into newly declassified archival documents from Ukraine, Latvia, Kazakhstan, and Russia. A must-read for any serious student of religion and secret policing in the Soviet Union, the contributions explore not only the histories of infiltration , surveillance, and repression of religious communities, but also their resilience and survival. -- Mark Edele, University of Melbourne

Author Bio

Tatiana Vagramenko is senior postdoctoral researcher at University College Cork.

Nadezhda Beliakova is scholar at risk at the University of Bielefeld and at the Institute for the Academic Study of Eastern Christianity (INaSEC) at the Faculty of Religion and Theology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.