1st Edition
Secrets and Truths Ethnography in the Archive of Romania's Secret Police
By Katherine Verdery
Copyright 2014
310 Pages
by
Central European University Press
Nothing in Soviet-style communism was as shrouded in mystery as its secret police. Its paid employees were known to few and their actual numbers remain uncertain. Its informers and collaborators operated clandestinely under pseudonyms and met their officers in secret locations. Its files were inaccessible, even to most party members. The people the secret police recruited or interrogated were... Read more
List of Figures, Preface and Acknowledgments, Note on Pronunciation, Introduction: What Was the Securitate?, Chapter 1. An Archive and Its Fictions, Chapter 2. The Secrets of a Secret Police, Chapter 3. Knowledge Practices and the Social Relations of Surveillance, Conclusion: The Radiant Future?, Bibliography, Index
Biography
Katherine Verdery is Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology. Since 1973 she has conducted field research in Romania, initially emphasizing the political economy of social inequality, ethnic relations, and nationalism. With the changes of 1989, her work has shifted to problems of the transformation of socialist systems, specifically changing property relations in agriculture.
