Documents as weapons: secret police files in Communist and post-Communist Romania
| Date | 14 November 2022 |
| Pages | 847-863 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-07-2022-0160 |
| Published date | 14 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
| Author | Iulian Vamanu |
Documents as weapons:
secret police files in Communist
and post-Communist Romania
Iulian Vamanu
School of Library and Information Science, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA
Abstract
Purpose –This study examined dossiers of informative pursual (DIPs), a particular type of secret police files,
before and after the fall of Communism in Romania. These DIPs were often weaponized against citizens
perceived to be anti-government.
Design/methodology/approach –Based on Buckland’s (2017) concept of a document as an object with
physical, mental and social parts, the study used thematic analysis to examine volumes of DIPs from 1945 to
1989 Communist Romania as well as several recorded reactions to the DIPs by the victims who were targeted
by the Communist secret police.
Findings –Four themes were revealed by the study’s findings and discussed within the manuscript: DIPs as
unreliable epistemic tools, DIPs as tools to construct the identity of the “People’s Enemy,”DIPs as weapons to
fight the “People’s Enemy”and DIPs as tools that could be used in counterattacks during post-Communism,
including in political-economic blackmailing.
Research limitations/implications–There are two major limitations to research of DIPs. First, since many
DIPs have been stolen, copied illicitly or even destroyed, it is difficult to articulate precisely their actual or
potential social and political effects. Researchers may often detect these effects only indirectly, based on
information leaks in the news. Second, many victims of surveillance practices during the Communist period
have chosen not to leave records of their reactions to reading the DIPs that targeted them.
Social implications –Current and future comprehensive studies of DIPs can reveal possible parallels
between surveillance by the Communist regime and the massive data-collection that occurs in democratic
societies, particularly given the increased technical capabilities for processing data in these democratic
societies.
Originality/value–Within documentationstudies, secret police files and document weaponization have been
particularly under-researched, therefore this study contributes to a small body of literature.
Keywords Documentation, Documents as weapons, Dossiers of informative pursual (DIPs), Information
history, Romania, Communism and post-Communism, Secret police files
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
This study examined secret police files, an under-researched document type, and their use as
weapons before, as well as after, the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. The study
investigated what it means for documents to be used as weaponry, what makes these uses
possible and what effects these uses have.
Documents are informational objects produced by various social actors and have
economical, juridical, political, semiotic and moral values (Day, 2014;Suominen, 2007,
pp. 244–245). Because they are material objects, documents usually serve as evidence for the
information that they convey (Brown and Duguid, 1996). For example, passports are travel
documents produced by states on behalf of their citizens; they contain personal information
about their owners, and, if valid, they are the evidence that this information is accurate.
Documents as
weapons
847
The author would like to thank Professor Ronald E. Day for insightful comments on presentation of an
earlier version of this paper at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Document Academy, Professor Roswitha
Skare for useful observations and kind encouragements and anonymous reviewers for helpful
suggestions. All these comments helped improve this paper.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 22 July 2022
Revised 5 October 2022
Accepted 13 October 2022
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 79 No. 4, 2023
pp. 847-863
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-07-2022-0160
Moreover, these official documents have material effects, such as their owners’ability or
inability to cross borders between certain countries (Buckland, 1997,2017, pp. 6–7).
Secret police files are special types of documents. They are produced within the
framework of government work and include detailed information about activities of social
actors such as people or organizations suspected of criminal activities against a certain
community or political regime. Secret police files are often used as evidence that incriminates
those social actors (Ash, 2010;F€
ollmer, 2008;Verdery, 2014).
This paper discusses the study’s exploration of “dossiers of informative pursual”
(henceforth DIPs), a type of secret police file produced on a large scale in Communist Romania
(1945–1989) and other Eastern European countries that acquired a strange “secret-and-
public”life of its own in post-Communism: some of them have remained hidden in still
inaccessible archives or have been illegally acquired by private actors who have used them to
blackmail political or business competitors, while other have been made available for
consultation to victims of surveillance and to researchers (Ash, 2010;Roy, 2009;Skultans,
2001;Stan and Turcescu, 2017;Tileag
a, 2011;Verdery, 2014). The paper presents in detail
how certain types of documents may be used as weapons and, thus, open the door for
questioning the morality of that use.
This study is particularly significant, as it contributes to the understanding of both the
long-lasting impact of documentary Communist practices in post-Communism and, in
general, of the ways in which certain types of documents can be harmful. As such, it
contributes to both information history and documentation studies as two subareas of LIS.
2. Background
2.1 History
In 1947, just after the end of the Second World War, the sixty-six-year-old Kingdom of
Romania was occupied by its mighty neighbor, the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union’s ruling
Communist Party. Monarchy was replaced by the Popular (later, Socialist) Republic of
Romania. The new political leadership, the Soviet-backed Romanian Communist Party,
worked to consolidate its grip on power by installing a secret police apparatus (called
Securitate) and a police force (called Militia) to detect and neutralize social actors interfering
or likely to interfere with its goals (Verdery, 2014, p. 21). Political repression unfolded brutally
and relentlessly until 1989, when Communist regimes began to collapse in Eastern Europe. In
its first phase, roughly between 1945 and 1965, political repression involved punitive
measures against “class enemies”including members of non-Communist and religious
organizations, most of whom would end up in prisons or “reeducation”camps (Chivu and
Albu, 2007, pp. 20–21; Verdery, 2014, pp. 16–17). In a second phase, the interval between 1966
and 1989, the repressive regime undertook a wide range of “prophylactic”measures. The
class enemy having presumably been annihilated, morally and even physically, the ruling
party was now interested primarily in conducting “widespread informative surveillance”to
locate any popular expressions of discontent with the regime, citizens attempting to flee the
country, various activities deemed illegal and any interactions between Romanians and
dissidents, foreigners and foreign organizations (Chivu and Albu, 2007, pp. 22–23; Verdery,
2014, pp. 16–17). Suspicion of engaging in one or more of these activities was sufficient
grounds for the Securitate to create a DIP on any citizen or resident of the Socialist Republic of
Romania.
These repressive measures reflected what Romanian-American political scientist
Vladimir Tism
aneanu called “the besieged fortress mindset,”that is, the Communists’
obsession with being besieged relentlessly by a presumed “enemy”(Tism
aneanu, 2014). This
mindset led to the design and implementation of a massive apparatus of surveillance and
terror with the aim of identifying, controlling and ultimately annihilating anyone who might
JD
79,4
848
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