Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania's Secret Police

Chapter 2: The Secrets of a Secret Police

77 The Secrets of a Secret Police The secret society of totalitarian regimes is the secret police. —Hannah Arendt, Origins. “Secrecy,” wrote Elias Canetti, “lies at the very core of power.”1 In this he echoed Max Weber, who connected secrecy to bureaucracy: “Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret. … Everywhere that the power interests of the domination structure toward the outside are at stake, whether it is an economic competitor of a private enterprise , or a foreign, potentially hostile polity, we find secrecy. … With the increasing bureaucratization of party organizations, this secrecy will prevail even more.”2 Anthropologist David Nugent puts the point more bluntly: “Secrecy is constitutive of social order. … Whoever succeeds in controlling secrecy has the ability to define social order.”3 It is therefore no surprise that with socialism we find what Florian Banu calls “a true cult of the secret, in which the governing had to know absolutely everything about the governed , while the latter had no right to know anything Chapter 2 78 … of the ‘secrets of power.’”4 This secrecy was most fully concentrated in the Securitate, an organization defined by what it did not share. All modern states (and many older ones) have had their intelligence services, whose job is to purify the society in question of contaminants—to label certain behaviors or kinds of people “dangerous” and work to contain them or expel them from the polity. Since the definition of danger and its containment enjoy some similarities in practice irrespective of socio-cultural context, intelligence services have a variety of tactics in common. To call them “secret police” is something of a misnomer, though, for their existence is fully known. None of the communist organizations popularly referred to as “secret police”—East Germany ’s Stasi, Hungary’s ÁVO/ÁVH, Romania’s Securitate , Poland’s UB/SB, the Soviet NKVD/KGB, and so forth—actually has the word “secret” in its title. The common thread, rather, is “security.” Beginning with the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB), we have Romania’s Department of State Security (Securitate ); Hungary’s State Protection Authority (ÁVH/ ÁVO, later III/III), East Germany’s Ministry for State Security (Stasi), Poland’s Security Department (UB) or Security Service (SB), and so forth.5 Security is not necessarily based on the kind of repression assumed by the secret; it is thought of as a positive outcome, a 79 creation or furthering of order. But clearly the kind of security the secret police of socialism were after made multiple uses of secrets, hence their popular name. To think about secrecy is a conceptual challenge, rather like trying to theorize silence: how can we think about an absence? Silence can reflect many things: a willful suppression, or a simple lack of anything to say, or a lack of conviction that one is entitled to have something to say,6 or the presence of a doxa or hegemonic ideology that makes some things unthinkable/ unsayable. The silence itself does not tell us which of these options to explore. Secrecy—with silence as its instrument—is similar. Karma Lochrie likens secrecy to dark matter in physics, which “occupies the invisible realm of physical properties, like the spaces between stars. To try to talk about secrets is something like trying to describe [those] spaces.”7 Sissela Bok, in her widely cited work Secrets, finds it impossible to offer a single definition of them. She sees the secret’s defining trait as hiding or concealment, keeping something intentionally hidden, and she includes both the thing hidden (usually information) and the methods used to conceal it.8 For many, she notes, secrecy has negative associations, such as for former US President Woodrow Wilson, who once said, “Secrecy means impropriety .”9 The fundamental assumption of western democracies that government should be transparent 80 complicates any attempt to write about secret police in a neutral manner. At the same time, however, the norm of transparency produces a frisson at its transgression , giving us pleasure in the secret. In this chapter I will explore the Securitate and its secrets, approaching it from several different angles loosely centering on a basic conundrum that emerges from my research so far.10 On the one hand, the Securitate effectively kept its secrets from the public and maintained a climate of fear and anxiety among them. On the other...