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If You Do Not Change Your Behaviour: Managing Threats to State Security in Lithuania under Soviet Rule

03 February 2016, 12:45 pm–2:00 pm

Professor Mark Harrison…

Event Information

Location

Room 431, UCL SSEES, 16 Taviton Street, London, WC1H 0BW

In Soviet Lithuania (and elsewhere) from the 1950s to the 1980s, the KGB applied a form of "zero-tolerance" policing, or profilaktika, to incipient threats to state security. Petty deviation from socio-political norms was regarded as a person's first step towards more serious state crimes, and as a bad example for others. 

As long as petty violators could be classed as confused or misled rather than motivated by anti-Soviet conviction, their mistakes would be corrected by a KGB warning or "preventive discussion." Successful prevention avoided the costly removal of the subject from society. This represented a complete contrast to the Stalin years, when prevention relied largely on eliminating the subject from society. Preventive discussions were widely practised in many different circumstances. KGB internal evaluations concluded that these discussions were extremely effective in preventing further violations. This was the front line of the Soviet police state; it was perhaps the largest programme for personally targeted behaviour modification anywhere in the world at that time outside the education sector. It was also a front line of the Cold War because the foreign adversary was seen as the most important source of misleading or confusing influence. My work in progress aims to understand the origins and operation of profilaktika, including how and to whom it was applied, how it worked on the individual subject, and its wider influence on the Soviet Union’s social and political order.

Biography
Mark Harrison is a professor of economics at the University of Warwick. He is a research fellow of the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham, and the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. He has written widely on Russian economic history, the international economics of the two world wars, and the historical political economy of dictatorship. His book One Day We Will Live Without Fear: Everyday Lives in the Soviet Police State, will be published by the Hoover Institution Press in early 2016.