Mass Social Control in Action: The New Modus Operandi and Agent-Operational Activities of the KGB in Shaping Soviet Society in the Post-Stalin Era (Early 1950s-1991)

• Applicant: Evgenia Lezina, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 570784017

The research project will explore the novel modus operandi of the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB), established in March 1954, an updated repertoire of its practices and methods, and a new temporality of state violence. The focus is on the medium- to long-term development from late Stalinism to the end of the Soviet Union, against the backdrop of Party and KGB efforts to stabilize the system during perestroika. The period of high Stalinism was characterized by the direct subordination of the Soviet state security agencies to Stalin’s personal rule and the unlimited use of terror as a tool for shaping society. The death of the Soviet dictator in March 1953 brought about a tectonic shift in the functioning of the security police marking the transition from mass terror to mass social control, combining selective repression with broadly interpreted preventive surveillance. The goal of the research is to render visible the mode of social control by the KGB, to describe it in action, and to assess the extent to which its hidden nature as well as the dosed, variable, and differentiated repression and coercion that came to replace mass terror determined citizens’ perceptions of the Soviet system, arguably ensuring the political stability of the regime in the second half of its existence. The study of the new mode of the security police will place particular emphasis on its agent-operational activities, serving as an upgraded mechanism of mass control, detection, assessment and correction of political deviations, its normative development and conceptualization, which often lagged behind actual practices. The primary areas of inquiry center on the methods of influence that emerged as a means to supplant state-sanctioned terror. These efforts are viewed through the lens of updated secret police priorities, or, put differently, a renewed hierarchy of enemies and threats, and the observance of “socialist legality.” This analysis is intended to provide a new perspective on the channels of control over Soviet society as a whole, and the methods of detecting and correcting ideological deviations. As analytical material, the project will examine exemplary case studies revealing the tactics of the KGB, tracing the trajectory of its operations and delineating the shift in its mode, both in terms of the means employed and the intended outcomes. The case studies should also facilitate the identification of the nexus of surveillance and repression by illustrating the KGB’s operational approach to different environments and institutional domains in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. Exploring a more nuanced response to political dissent and an updated mode of security policing should not only broaden our understanding of the functioning of late Soviet communism, but also of the revival of “Chekism” in the post-Soviet period of Russian history, culminating in the war of aggression against Ukraine since 2014.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants