The Dissident Library: Soviet Secret Agents and the State Surveillance of Religious Communities

The next seminar of The Dissident Library will focus on the recently published volume The Lives of Soviet Secret Agents. Religion and Police Surveillance in the USSR, edited by Tatiana Vagramenko and Nadezhda Beliakova. During the seminar, we will discuss how religious leaders, clergy, and active laypeople—perceived as inakomyślącye (andersdenkers, or dissenters)—were subjected to particularly intensive surveillance and control by Soviet security services.

The session will explore how the Soviet state’s perception of religion as inherently subversive made faith communities especially vulnerable to infiltration and repression. We will also address one of the central aims of the volume: shifting attention from institutional mechanisms of surveillance to the experiences of those who were surveilled, those who collaborated, and to the biographies, motivations, and moral ambiguities of the agents themselves.

In addition, the seminar will examine methodological and epistemological challenges of working with post-Soviet archival collections that document repression, discrimination, and surveillance, considering how these sources both illuminate and obscure individual trajectories within informant networks in religious milieus.
Four contributors to the edited volume will take part in the seminar: Nadezhda Beliakova, Renat Bekkin, Johannes Dyck, Vera Klyueva, and Anna Samsonova.

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

Information on access to the Teams meeting will follow shortly.

Languages of the discussion: Russian with simultaneous translation into English.

The event is part of The Dissident Library, a series of online seminars discussing scientific publications on the Soviet dissident movement directed and organized by Olga Rosenblum.