Cristina Vatulescu observed in her first book, Police Aesthetics, that though secret police files were important socialist texts, students of Soviet literature had largely ignored them. In that book, she focused her attention on the impact of the security services on Soviet cultural production. In Reading the Archival Revolution, however, she turns her lens away from novelists to focus it upon us, the scholars who read and interpret the files for others. Each chapter uses a case study to help organize Vatulescu’s theoretical and ethical considerations. Each is also framed by engagement with famous critical theorists: Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Edward Said, and Mikhail Bakhtin, to name a few. The result is an erudite, bracing, and consistently thought-provoking text that is important not only for literary critics but also for historians.

The first chapter (co-authored with Anna Krakus) gives a good sense of the book’s tenor and methodology. The authors tackle the issue of “silence” by recounting their unexpectedly winding road to uncover traces of Foucault in communist Poland. They assumed that there would be an extensive file on the French philosopher because Foucault himself narrated a story that he was expelled from his job directing the French Cultural Center in Warsaw because he had been caught in a “honey trap” by the Polish security police (SB). Surely the SB would have a record not only of their own operation but also, as Vatulescu puts it, of “an openly homosexual French intellectual riding to his job at the French embassy in a flashy white sports car” (35). This is a reasonable, but unfulfilled, expectation. The authors get a “no-hit” when searching Foucault’s name in the database of declassified files and are only able to find slight traces of him in other collections. They explore many possibilities for this “silence,” describing thoughtfully how police archives work, but cannot come to a solution. The inability to solve the mystery is only temporarily frustrating, because it allows the authors to turn back to Foucault’s own writing on “the archive” to consider not what was said (or discoverable) in the files, but the limits of the sayable, a process that leads them away from the archives and toward speculation.

The other chapters follow a similar pattern. The section on “intermedia” centers around a film re-enactment of a bank heist produced by the Securitate (Romanian secret police), starring the captured felons themselves. Two chapters on the Romanian author Herta Müller allows Vatulescu to think about the presence of “fiction” and gender in the archive. Finally, she uses digital archives to trace the usage of the term “Iron Curtain” in the Soviet bloc, showing how digital research is transforming scholarship on the secret police. Vatulescu positions herself as an interdisciplinary scholar throughout the text, and this normally pays substantial dividends. She is a reliable and thoughtful guide to the process of researching the secret police. There are times, though, when there are disciplinary tensions. Some of the approaches she recommends as necessary and novel are close to the approaches already used by most historians working in Soviet-bloc archives. One’s mileage may vary as to how much value added is provided by the Big Theorists here. Vatulescu briefly considers, for instance, whether the “answer” to the Foucault riddle is that he invented his expulsion story before turning away from the possibility. Who knows whether he did or not, but the question of whether Foucault is as important as he thinks he was extends well beyond 1950s Poland. While disciplinary approaches differ, in my view this book is stronger when Vatulescu engages with, say, Müller rather than Agamben.

This is also true in the conclusion, where Vatulescu, appealing to Bakhtin, argues that the goal of research after the “archival revolution” should be “polyphonic reading.” However, in contrast to Bakhtin, who focuses on the author of polyphonic texts, she makes the important point that power in the secret police archive lay with the readers of texts. Confessions, informer reports, and the summaries of low-ranking staffers fed upwards to the bosses, who read more than they wrote. Scholars reading the same files in these archives thus occupy a parallel position of power, not over the characters in a Fedor Dostoevskii novel, but over real people and the ways people remember them. The power held by scholars of the police carries an ethical responsibility to try to hear the polyphonic chorus of these totalitarian and post-totalitarian societies. This is a good reminder to anyone working in Soviet-bloc police archives.