Photographic truths of the Soviet Secret Police

This article examines the history of Soviet secret police photographic practices and experimentation, arguing that the agency's rich array of visual methodologies helped create a lasting image of the "people's enemy" in the Soviet socialist imagination. The research integrates into the scholarship previously unknown archival documents, photographs, charts and photocollages pertaining to criminal cases against the alleged followers of the catacomb True Orthodox church. The analysis of this visual material discloses the internal mechanisms of knowledge production, when the secret police photograph served as a kind of "ideological blueprint" and when it was subject to manipulation, the purpose of which was to expose the enemy and to prove the crime.