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Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania’s Secret Police. By Katherine Verdery. The Natalie Zemon Davis Annual Lecture Series. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014. xix, 289 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. Figures. $24.95, paper.

"If you rely solely on the documents, you may not get it right." So William Deakin, warden of St. Antony's College, Oxford, cautioned this reviewer early in his academic career, a stark warning that is validated by Katherine Verdery's penetrating and compelling analysis her own Securitate file. Verdery spent more than three years in Romania in the 1970s and 1980s conducting ethnographical research in the province of Transylvania, and her presence and activity generated almost three thousand pages of informer reports, surveillance logs, and transcriptions of telephone conversations. In 2006, Verdery requested a copy of her file, and her dissection and exegesis of it forms the inspiration for, and the basis of, this stimulating and riveting collection of essays. "Stimulating" because by subjecting her files to an ethnographical analysis, the author challenges the conventional reading of secret police files, thereby inviting us to reconsider the values accorded them; "riveting" because she uses her file to show how the Securitate's fears of espionage dogged her research and how she unwittingly fed those fears. In effect, Verdery turns the focus of the Securitate on itself, commenting wryly in a footnote that "turnabout is fair play" (241n86). Ironically, secret police surveillance redirected her research projects in such a manner that, as a distinguished anthropologist of socialism with a focus on Romania, she has come to write a number of seminal studies that have offered a fresh understanding of communist Romania and its past. These essays, in effect, provide us with a veritable ethnography of the Securitate. On a personal level, the files offer a selective diary of an individual's activities, and in doing so can restore to history experiences that may otherwise have been overlooked by the subject. On a collective level, following the model of the Siguranta, the interwar Romanian secret police, the Securitate produced monthly reports county by county, each containing a section on the population's starea de spirit (state of mind), some of which have a markedly anthropological character. In chapter 1, "An Archive and Its Fictions," Verdery explains that in the case of her own file, her "long-term goal is to treat its 2,780 pages as if they were someone's field-notes, attempting to reconstruct from them the world view and practices of the officers and informers who produced them" (40). One of the Securitate's main tasks was to provide "the category of 'enemy,' including spies and various other types of enemies, and to populate it with real people. The files were a principal means of doing so" (64). Verdery's contention is supported by Securitate practice in the late 1940s