Dr Alexandra Sukalo, ‘Imperfect Instruments: The Political Police, Ideological Formation, and the Limits of Soviet Power in the Western Republics from 1940 to 1953’

About this event Between 1940 and 1953, the Soviet political police – the domestic intelligence and security services – were tasked with representing and reproducing Soviet power in Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Yet the officers and non-commissioned officers who filled the ranks of the security services in the west were themselves imperfectly formed. Building on Jan Gross’s account of how Soviet power arrived in the borderlands, this talk asks how that power attempted to sustain and embody itself through the men assigned to secure these territories. Treating the NKVD-MVD and NKGB-MGB as a unified institution, and following the personnel who moved freely between them, it brings four republican cases usually studied separately into a single frame. Drawing on departmental files fro