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An Intensification of Vigilance: Recent Perspectives on the Institutional History of the Soviet Security Apparatus in the 1920s

Few aspects of the Soviet system have received as much scholarly (and popular) attention in the West as the secret police, and in particular its role in implementing the Terror, conducting espionage, and running the GULAG. As awareness of the vast prison-camp system spread during the Cold War, from Khrushchev’s secret speech to the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, even many formerly sympathetic commentators came to identify internal repression as a if not the fundamental feature of Soviet totalitarianism. While writing extensively on the Terror and GULAG, however, Western historians have devoted significantly less attention to explicating the origins of the security apparatus after the Russian revolutions and Civil War. A notable exception was two scholarly monographs describing the establishment of the security apparatus in the early years of Soviet rule, both published several decades ago. A recent spate of research and the availability of previously inaccessible materials have made possible a more thorough analysis of how the security apparatus originated, developed, and came to occupy such a central place in the Soviet system. In reviewing these new resources, I focus on several important, interrelated issues. First, I look at how changes in the institutional structure of the secret police at the beginning of the New Economic Policy (NEP) solidified rather than diminished its role in the Soviet system. While the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage (Cheka), as its name indicated, was designated as an “extraordinary” and therefore presumably non-permanent body, its successors were considered standing organs, an elemental part of the new polity. Earlier scholars certainly remarked