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