The Man Who Played with Fire

Might Stieg Larsson have taken a page from Theodore Abel? In The Girl Who Played with Fire, Larsson's best-selling detective novel, a reporter is stymied in trying to track down a retired police officer. He has the retiree's e-mail address but no town or street. Veteran reporter Mikael Blomkvist suggests a trick: notify the retiree that he's won a mobile phone that must be delivered to his home address. The reporter takes Blomkvist's suggestion, the retiree takes the bait, and the plot thickens.

An early implementer of a similar technique, Abel sought to track down followers of Adolf Hitler in 1934. As a sociologist at Columbia University, he thought that the life stories of early party members could help make sense of the National Socialist movement. How to locate those people? A contest, of course, in which Abel offered 400 German marks "for the best personal life history of an adherent of the Hitler movement." Limiting the contest to people who had joined the party before 1933, his announcement, distributed at all local headquarters of the party and published in the party press, stated that "contestants are to give accurate and detailed descriptions of their personal lives, particularly after World War I. Special attention should be given to accounts of family life, education, economic conditions, membership in associations, participation in the Hitler movement, and important experiences, thoughts, and feelings about events and ideas of the post-war period."

Abel paid the awards out of his own pocket. Had he been able to offer more money, he thought, he would have gotten more entries. Even so, he received 683 manuscripts, "a result as unexpected as it was gratifying. The wealth and variety of material contained in these life histories fully justified the undertaking." Many of these life histories are among the Theodore Abel papers at the Hoover Archives. If you can't visit to read the originals, try Abel's book, Why Hitler Came into Power: An Answer Based on the Original Life Stories of Six Hundred of His Followers (1938), from which these quotes were taken. I can't truly call Abel the man who played with fire, but he surely played a smart game.

Nazi Party Biography of Wilhelm Schmitz, Box 1, Folder 3, Theodore Abel papers, Hoover Institution Archives

Microfilming: A Meticulous Preservation Process

Someone said that “today’s activity is tomorrow’s history.” That is certainly true at the Microfilming Department at the Hoover Institution, where we preserve documents for future reference. Over the years, many people who have visited our lab, whether they had used microfilm before or not, said they had never realized what a thorough process microfilming was. As a result of witnessing our work, they appreciated and had a better understanding of microfilming as a meticulous preservation process.

I won’t go into the many technical details in this short article, and even though preservation and access go hand-in-hand, I will deal only with preservation here. I will begin with the preparation aspects of the process.

Ideally, all the documents should be ready to be microfilmed when they come to our lab. There are times, however, when we have to do some document preparation before filming, including removing fasteners, staples, paper clips, pushpins, etc. Depending on the age of the documents, the fasteners may be old and rusty (first photo below). We don’t use staple removers (second photo) to remove the metal fasteners, since they could leave marks. Instead, we use micro-spatulas and other tools (third photo). Once the metal fasteners are removed, we replace them with plastic clips (fourth photo). Finally, the documents are ready to be microfilmed.


To give you an idea of the extent of the preparation, the following photos show the number of fasteners removed from 110 boxes from September 2009 through mid-March 2010. Their total weight came to 2.866 pounds. (The total number of each type of fasteners was approximated by weighing all the removed fasteners and approximating the percentage of each type from the total.) The breakdown is as follows:

Each metal paper clip weighed 0.0881 ounces. There are 500-600 metal paper clips. Each pushpin weighed 0.0352 ounces. There are 150-250 pushpins. Ten staples weighed 0.0352 ounces. There are 2,000-25,000 staples.


I hope you can now appreciate all the work that goes into microfilming.

You Have Been Warned

Hoover fellow Mark Harrison is one of the first researchers to delve into the recently acquired Lithuanian KGB materials. When he heard about a law that would expand the powers of Russia's FSB (Federal Security Service) if enacted, his immersion in these materials became even more material. Mark's blog entry, You Have Been Warned, tells how the KGB files have informed and enriched his understanding of the proposed law.

A draft law before the Russian Parliament (since passed) gives new powers to the FSB (Federal Security Service), the successor to the KGB. It allows the FSB to issue binding warnings to citizens suspected of creating conditions, through negligence, passivity, or incitement, in which crimes might be committed or facilitated. A warning that is ignored can be followed by an unspecified penalty, even though the actions that led to the warning may not be offenses in themselves.

This provision of the draft law restores the legal basis of a function once widely exercised by the KGB. This function was known in Russian as profilaktika, which translates directly as "prophylaxis" or "prevention."

Across the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, the KGB subjected around 15,000 people a year to profilaktika, more than half of them for displaying some sort of overt political unreliability, or having connections with foreigners leading to suspicion of disloyalty (see Rudol'ph Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz: istoriia vlasti, 1945–1991: Moscow 1998, pp. 365-366.) In proportion to the population, this would be about one in 10,000 adult Soviet citizens in each year.

What did profilaktika mean? Evidence of many, many individual cases can be found, for example, in the Lithuania KGB collection of the archive at the Hoover Institution, where I'm working now. How did they work? You could imagine it like this. Out of the blue, you get a call to come into your local KGB office. You really don't know what it's about, but you're on your best behaviour. Sitting behind his desk is a KGB colonel. He asks you what you think of the Soviet Union. Wonderful! You declare. Good, he says.

But in that case, he goes on: How come you told this anti-Soviet joke to your colleagues in the office on Thursday? And on Friday in the bar you repeated the news you heard the day before on Radio Liberty? And on Saturday you were heard cursing your Soviet-made automobile and wishing you had a BMW?

At first you bluster and deny everything. Inside, however, your world is collapsing. You're realizing just how much trouble you're in; your job and your home depend on the state and both are on the line. But that is only the start. Worse, it's dawning on you that your colleagues, your friends, maybe even your family members have been telling tales about you to the KGB. You're on your own.

You crumble. You start to make excuses: You were tired and under stress, you've always been a bit of an ignorant big mouth, you've been promoted above your competence and this has put you under pressure. You didn't realize how wrong it was. But you do now. Yes, you do, you do.

You promise you will never, ever do such things again. And you really mean it because, short of being physically beaten or locked in a cell, nothing is worse than the state of mind that this profilaktika has put you in. You've been exposed, hurt, humiliated, compromised, and isolated from society: From now on you will trust nobody, not even yourself. In fact, the only honest person in the room is the man in front of you.

The colonel listens as you stammer out your explanations. He is calm and nods a lot. He accepts what you say. When you've done, he closes the file. Go away, he says, and change your ways. We'll keep the information but, as long as you do the right thing from now on, we'll never have to look at it again. As you leave, you thank him for putting you back on the right track.

After you've gone, he makes a note to keep a special watch on you for a few months or a year, just to be sure that you meant it.

Profilaktika was applied to all sorts of cases, from loose morals and rowdy behaviour to indiscreet or unauthorized contacts with foreigners, petty smuggling or currency violations, and to adolescents who, in a place like Lithuania, might get caught up in the romance of anti-Soviet fly-posting or dreams of emigration. In such cases profilaktika was applied to the parents as well as the children.

More than half of all the cases of profilaktika were carried out in the privacy of the KGB offices, but there was also another version of the drama. This was enacted in public meetings. In this case the psychological beating was administered by your own colleagues, your student peers, or the pillars of your neighbourhood community.

For a police state, profilaktika was relatively humane. For hundreds of thousands of people it took the place of arrest and imprisonment, which would have been their fate in Stalin's time. It was also very effective in causing people to change their behaviour. In eight years, according to Pikhoia, out of more than 120,000 people subjected to such treatment, only 150 were subsequently taken to court for an actual offense. That's one eighth of one percent, a recidivism rate that western penal systems can only dream about.

A durable police state cannot be built out of bricks alone. There are building blocks like the security police and civilian police, border controls, the control of public assets, the distribution of taxes and resource rents, and media monopolies. In addition, binding agents are needed to assemble the blocks and glue them in place by controlling and coordinating the everyday behaviour of citizens at work, at home, and in the streets. Profilaktika was part of the mortar that held the bricks of the KGB state in position. Looks like it will do so again.

Professor Harrison's blog


Her home telephone having been disconnected by the KGB, Arina Ginzburg calls the U.S. embassy in Moscow; fellow dissident Sergei Moshkov ensures that no one enters the telephone booth. In the background, a KGB woman watches. Undated, Aleksandr Ginzburg papers, Hoover Institution Archives

Fiftieth Anniversary of the Confederation of Iranian Students

As long as archivists keep processing new collections, the tale of a single historical event or personage is never quite put to rest, which was certainly my experience when processing the Hamid Shawkat collection. Unfortunately, for an Iranian-American, my knowledge of modern Iranian history is fragmented, at best: Mosaddeq was thrown out, the shah came to power, the shah was thrown out, Khomeini came to power, and the Islamic Republic of Iran was formed. Often it takes a modern phenomenon to awaken interest in a now distant historical event. Last year's contested Iranian election provided the fuel for a generation of Iranian students to slip beyond their firewalls and, for a brief moment, converse with a world that has otherwise labeled them as other, distant, and disconnected.

The power of the Iranian student uprising, however, is not without precedent. In 1960, a group of students came together to form what would become the most organized and democratic student group Iran had ever seen: the Confederation of Iranian Students (CIS). Originally made up of members of the Tudeh Party and the National Front, CIS expanded in 1961 to include members of the Iranian Student Association of the United States. Armed with the unifying goal of denouncing the shah and the human rights violations of the secret police, the confederation was seen by some as the only political organization capable of representing the needs of the Iranian people in a time when opposition groups were being forcefully eradicated.

To uphold this responsibility, CIS produced an assortment of printed materials, including journals, newsletters, and newspapers, that strengthened the network stretching across Europe and the United States. Those materials, many of which are included in the Hamid Shawkat collection, offer a rare glance into the organized student front that helped promulgate the tumultuous political climate that gave rise to the Iranian revolution in 1979.

In 2010, we are proud not only to have access to these records but to recognize the fiftieth anniversary of the Confederation of Iranian Students which, for the most part, has escaped the narrative of modern Iranian history.

"Nameh Parsi" Published by the
Confederation of Iranian Students,
Box 9, Hamid Shawkat collection,
Hoover Institution Archives

You've Got V-Mail

When a colleague encountered something unfamiliar while working on a collection of documents and asked me if I knew anything about "V-Mail," I thought she must be referring to some new and exotic form of electronic mail. I was unaware that the term “vmail” was currently used by some people as shorthand for voice mail. But rather than the present, her question led to the past and a form of mail devised in exceptional circumstances—World War II—and making use of technology, albeit of a non-electronic kind.

A little digging and a helpful web page turned up a wealth of details on the subject of V-Mail. It turned out that the V stood for Victory, a word ubiquitous in the discourse of the Allied war effort, which had already seen the promotion of Victory gardens (to grow vegetables on the home front) and the sale of Victory bonds (to raise money from the public). V-Mail referred to a process whereby correspondence being sent to troops overseas was microfilmed to reduce its physical volume so as to free up space on cargo planes for war material.

The basic V-Mail program was fairly simple. One used standardized stationery on which to write letters; the letters were then microfilmed, and the microfilm was then shipped overseas, where it was developed and then delivered. But behind this lay a formidable logistic undertaking. Processing centers had to established, both in the United States and abroad, requiring significant amounts of personnel and equipment. Eastman Kodak was awarded the contract for the microfilm machines, and V-Mail detachments were created in the postal units of the armed forces. Three regional centers were established in the United States (San Francisco, New York, and Chicago) to process V-Mail, along with numerous stations overseas.

The archives has a number of promotional posters that stress V-Mail’s reliability and speed and suggest that it was the “most patriotic” way to send mail to troops. One poster details the savings that V-Mail created in terms of cargo space. Its morale-boosting importance was another theme, captured in the slogan “You write, he’ll fight.” Of course, like other mail sent during wartime, V-Mail was subject to censorship.

The V-Mail program lasted from June 1942 until November 1945, but the mail itself has survived and thus remains available. The same may not hold true for e-mail, at least in its electronic form. As technology and formats change, files may not always remain recoverable, a challenge with which archivists are beginning to grapple.

A fuller description of the specifics of the V-Mail program can be found at the National Postal Museum section of the Smithsonian Institution’s web page.

Political Poster Collection, US 7299, Hoover Institution Archives

Political Poster Collection, US 7298, Hoover Institution Archives

Political Poster Collection, US 7297, Hoover Institution Archives

The Rhythm Road Ambassadors

It’s Sunday, June 20, 2010. It’s a beautiful day in San Francisco: the sun’s shining, birds are chirping, guys are in t-shirts and girls in sundresses, and I’m stuck in a laundromat on Oak Street. Life isn’t always glamorous in the City’s hipster neighborhoods, but I digress.

Catching up on the previous week’s human-interest news, I was surprised, amused, and happy to see an article on musical ambassadors in the June 17 edition of the Wall Street Journal. Immediately, my mind recalled our Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) collections and the slideshow my colleague Brandon Burke assembled. Fifty years ago, America sent musicians to Europe, and it’s great to see that, today, the same is happening in the near East. Though, as an ardent fan of rock and roll, I was bummed it wasn’t one of the mentioned genres.

The Journal article highlights some differences between the programs. Were one to visit the Archives, one could hear Dizzy Gillespie talk to RFE’s Bulgarian service about Jazz at Lincoln Center. Or hear interviews with British punk rock fans from 1977. Or—forgive me for the self-serving nod—Phil Woods blowing sax in an RFE exclusive recording. I would invite the listener to then contemplate how it compares to today’s world.

Sometimes history repeats, and during those times, it’s fascinating to look at what happened before.

British beat group the Creation in the studio with RFE disc jockeys Janos Havel (left) and Jan Tyszkiewicz (right). Box 117, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Broadcast Records, Hoover Institution Archives.

Bulk Freezing

Although it's not cryogenics, freezing is a tool for archival preservation. Collection materials that are damaged by water in a disaster such as a flood or burst water pipe can be frozen to retard further deterioration. The frozen materials can then be thawed in small batches and treated. This is a job for preservation professionals, as you'll see from these leaflets about salvaging wet papers and wet photographs.

Freezing can also be used to eliminate insects and other pests from newly acquired collections. That's just what we did in December with a collection that had been stored in a barn. All magnetic media--audiotapes, videotapes, floppy disks--had to be removed first because they can be damaged by freezing. Each box of papers also had to be bagged in plastic, with excess air eliminated and the bag tightly sealed. By eliminating as much air as possible and freezing the materials very quickly, few ice crystals form. When the materials are gradually returned to room temperature while remaining in the bag, moisture condenses on the outside of the bag but not on the materials inside. This prevents any water damage to the materials that are frozen.

What I like about this use of freezing is the mass-treatment approach. Five pallets of boxed papers received preservation treatment as a big group--that's a cost-effective process! This is the way archivists approach many aspects of our work. It's when we have to deal with items individually, be it applying intensive conservation treatments to each or describing every single document individually, that our systems break down and our backlog grows exponentially. In archival work, we're always looking for an aggregate approach.

Supplies were at the ready as we prepared an archival collection for freezing.