Violence is the midwife of history," observed Marx and Engels. One could add that for their Bolshevik pupils, surveillance was the midwife's guiding hand. Never averse to violence, the Bolsheviks were brutes driven by an idea, and a grandiose one at that. Matched by an entrenched conspiratorial political culture, a Manichean worldview, and a pervasive sense of isolation and siege mentality from within and from without, the drive to mold a new kind of society and individuals through the institutional triad of a nonmarket economy, single-party dictatorship, and mass state terror required a vast information-gathering apparatus. Serving the two fundamental tasks of rooting out and integrating real and imagined enemies of the regime, and molding the population into a new socialist society, Soviet surveillance assumed from the outset a distinctly pervasive, interventionist, and active mode that was translated into myriad institutions, policies, and initiatives.Students of Soviet information systems have focused on two main features-denunciations and public mood reports-and for good reason. Soviet law criminalized the failure to report "treason and counterrevolutionary crimes," and denunciation was celebrated as the ultimate civic act. 1 Whether a "weapon of the weak" used by the otherwise silenced population, a tool by the regime to check its bureaucracy, or a classic feature of the totalitarian state franchising itself to individuals via denunciations of their fellow citizens-and quite likely all three-denunciations were critical in shattering old and forming For their invaluable comments and suggestions we extend special thanks to Alain Blum,

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