Soviet Studies
Sarah Weitekamp ’15 spent her summer poring over underground publications and KGB records for her Mentored Advanced Project (MAP). Translating as she went, she scoured her sources for accounts of Lithuanian Catholics being oppressed by the Soviet secret police. She worked with Edward Cohn, assistant professor of history, whose research focuses on the use of profilaktika — preventive warnings — by the Soviet Union’s secret police in the Baltic States.
MAPs allow students to reach beyond their regular coursework and work on projects that get them mistaken for graduate students. They can be performed with a team or individually, and give students the opportunity to work one-on-one with a professor. Weitekamp was one of three students working with Cohn over the summer.
Lucy McGowan ’15 and Luke Panciera ’16 also completed MAPs on the Soviet secret police. Panciera used a collection of oral history interviews known as the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System to examine what many citizens under Stalin thought about the secret police — the NKVD — and its informers. McGowan used an underground dissident publication known as A Chronicle of Current Events to research the ways that the human rights movement and the Soviet regime used the legacy of World War II to win legitimacy for their cause.
More than a third of Grinnell students complete a MAP during their college career. They offer an opportunity to take part in faculty research, pursue a creative or artistic project, or complete one’s own research. In recent years, students have translated Beowulf, written advanced papers and presented them at national and international conferences, and staged original plays as part of their MAPs.
Weitekamp researched the persecution of Catholics in Lithuania from the 1950s to the 1980s using Russian-language sources from the Lithuanian KGB and an underground publication written by Catholic dissidents. The KGB documents present a challenge because they are in the original Russian, and the KGB’s language is highly euphemistic. “They’ll say something like, ‘We had a chat with a group of youths,’ that sort of thing,” Weitekamp says. It doesn’t take too much imagination to understand that the KGB’s approach was far more brutal than its reports suggest.
Having a double major in history and Russian opened up the opportunity for Weitekamp to work with primary sources in Russian as well as translations. She was able to go through the church documents faster because they were in English, but she was grateful to be able to go back to the original Russian and make her own translation.
“I get the viewpoint of the KGB and I get the viewpoint of the church, and in putting them together, hopefully I get a more holistic understanding of what was really going on,” says Weitekamp. History, she says, is about more than what happened, though. It’s about what people thought and believed about what was happening.
One of the main reasons Weitekamp and Cohn are researching the Lithuanian KGB is that the Baltic states experienced even greater repression than most other Soviet-controlled regions. Another is that most KGB documents are still classified in Russia. Lithuania’s KGB archives are much more accessible, allowing scholars to understand how the secret police confronted dissents in the Baltic republics and beyond.
Lucy McGowan ’15 is a history major from Nantucket, Mass. Sarah Weitekamp ’15 is a history/Russian double major from Raymond, Ill. Luke Panciera ’16 is a political science/Russian major from Broken Arrow, Okla.