Tatiana Vagramenko and Nadezhda Beliakova, eds. The Lives of Soviet Secret Agents: Religion and Police Surveillance in the USSR. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2025

Abstract

All bad edited volumes, to adapt Leo Tolstoy’s famous dictum, are the same (typically filled with disjointed articles that are poorly connected to the overarching theme); each great edited volume, however, is great in its own way. Thankfully, The Lives of Soviet Secret Agents: Religion and Police Surveillance in the USSR, brilliantly conceptualized by the editors (Tatiana Vagramenko and Nadezhda Beliakova) with expertly executed chapters by 11 authors (including both editors), falls squarely in the second category. Building on the fortuitous convergence of an accumulation of scholarship on religious life under Soviet power and a revolution in archival access that has opened the Soviet security apparatus to new scholarly inquiry, the volume is able to illuminate three distinct but related questions. The first question is the volume’s primary focus: What can the materials that scholars discover in Soviet security archives tell us about religious life in the USSR? The second question is methodological and flows from the first: How should scholars approach sources that were “never intended for external eyes” (p. 2) and which, as the editors unpack in the introduction, continue to carry tremendous moral and ethical weight for the individuals and religious communities involved, as well as for post-Soviet societies’ evaluation of the Soviet past? The third question, though not explicitly posed in the volume, is implicit throughout: What do these accounts reveal about the KGB’s “worldview” and the role of the security apparatus in the greater architecture of Soviet power?

Text in English