May 9, The Admonitory State Research in Progress Talk by Ed Cohn

What: Research in Progress Talk — The Admonitory State: KGB Surveillance, Prophylactic Policing, and Political Control in the Soviet Union
When: 4 p.m., Tuesday, May 9, 2023
Where: Burling First Floor Lounge

Please join the Grinnell College Libraries at 4 p.m., May 9, as we continue our Faculty/Staff Research Series with Edward Cohn, professor of history and Russian, Central European, and Eurasian studies, for his research in progress talk “The Admonitory State: KGB Surveillance, Prophylactic Policing, and Political Control in the Soviet Union.” Professor Cohn will be discussing his research on the KGB tactic of prophylaxis, in which low-level offenders are ‘invited’ to so-called ‘chats.’ He argues that these were subtle efforts to shape the population and its behavior. Further, the KGB’s use of warnings, admonitions, and chats anticipated similar changes in state-society relations around the world. The KGB’s confident, interventionist approach in the USSR's last decades belies the idea of a lethargic regime that had given up on its ambitions.

Edward Cohn came to Grinnell in 2007 after completing a Ph.D. in Russian history at the University of Chicago. A 1999 graduate of Swarthmore College, he worked for a year as a journalist before entering graduate school and specializes in the social and political history of the Soviet Union in the decades after World War II.

Professor Cohn’s first book, The High Title of a Communist, was published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2015. This book analyzes the Soviet Communist Party’s system of internal discipline in the twenty years after World War II, focusing on investigations of corruption, war-time collaboration with the Nazis, drunkenness, and sexual misconduct among communists. Professor Cohn has now begun a new research project on the KGB’s efforts to fight dissent and political unrest in the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. In particular, this project focuses on the tactic known as the “prophylactic conversation,” in which the KGB sought to prevent low-level offenders from becoming hardened enemies of the regime by “inviting” them to supposedly informal “conversations” or “chats.”