Introduction to the Symposium: The Panorama of Informers Up Close

[Mark A. Drumbl is Class of 1975 Alumni Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University. Barbora Holá is Professor in Empirical Legal Studies of International Criminal Justice at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.]

She was practiced at the art of deception
Well, I could tell by her blood-stained hands

‘You can’t always get what you want’ (1969) from Let it Bleed by The Rolling Stones

Informers are generally reviled. After all, ‘snitches get stitches.’ Informers who report to repressive regimes are particularly disdained. While informers may themselves be victims enlisted by the state, and hence are victimized, their actions cause other individuals to suffer significant harm. Informers, then, become victimizers. Their hands may be bloodstained; clawed and curdled; supple but shameful. Yet, little is known about exactly why ordinary people end up informing on — at times betraying — others to state authorities. Moreover, little in the way of reflection (as opposed to reaction) has been given to what law should do about informers, afterwards, if anything.

We hope to step into these parallel gaps. Through a case-study of Communist Czechoslovakia (1945-1989) that draws from secret police archives, oral histories, and a broad gamut of secondary sources, Informers Up Close unearths what fuels informers to speak to the secret police in repressive times and considers how transitional justice should approach informers once repression ends. 

This book unravels the complex drivers behind informing and the dynamics of societal reactions to informing. It explores the agency of both informers and secret police officers. By presenting informers ‘up close’, and the relationships between informers and secret police officers in high resolution, this book centers the role of emotions in informer motivations and underscores the value of dignity and reconciliation in transitional reconstruction. Informers Up Close also leverages research from informing in repressive states to better understand informing in so-called liberal democratic states, which, after all, also rely on informers to maintain law and preserve order.

Informers up Close presents informing as a process of social navigation, conversation, and intimacy. Our review of Czechoslovak secret police (StB) files excavates resentment, desire, fear, and allegiance as central drivers of why people spoke to the secret police. The book couches informing in Communist Czechoslovakia as motored top-down by state pressures to engineer souls and also as bottom-up exercises of individual agency within participatory dictatorships. Informers Up Close addresses the solicitude and frustration of secret police officers. It unveils betrayal, deception, mistrust, and deceit and, all the while, wonders in heterodox fashion about whether all secrets always are putrid. Following the fall of the Communist regime, informers were exposed and caricaturized – expediently yet often unjustifiably – as baleful menaces to the new democracy and, hence, became cruelly scapegoated to deliver comfort to the masses whose own complicity in authoritarianism may therefore slink from the public gaze. What is more, all the documented stories about the informed-upons (namely, people that informers reported to StB officers) also went public, through transitional justice interventions, meaning that children could access all kinds of salacious details about their parents, as well as friends, co-workers, teachers, lovers: everyone, really, about each other. Ironically, during the Communist years many StB officers recorded all this information and then ignored it, leaving the dusty files sitting on musty shelves, the sheaves and reams of type-written tissue paper fading into obscurity.  

The book challenges the growing retributivism of transitional justice. It emphasizes that there is a politics to transitional justice: the politics of control and power. In the end, the book draws attention to the need for transitional justice to recall its roots in reconciliation, dignity, and reintegration.   

This book is about Cold War Communist Czechoslovakia. This is where it nests. But this book is also about informing everywhere. No state, no social movement, no revolution – whether vile or virtuous – can exist without informers. Informers are necessary and, hence, ubiquitous. How to separate the ‘good’ informer from the ‘evil’ informer? How to cleave the heroic whistleblower from the conniving quisling? How to distinguish the malicious mole from the protector of the people? In the end, this book suggests these dichotomies are not so evident. By presenting informing as a mechanism of social navigation simultaneously pulled by the state and pushed by private interests, this book aims to reinsert the personal within the political.

Informers Up Close revolves around 23 ‘file-stories’ of individual informers. These ‘file-stories’ are detailed biographical narratives developed through our careful interpretation of information contained in the Czechoslovak Communist secret police files archived in Prague and now brazenly open to the public. We present six of these file-stories in full in the book. Readers can access the remaining 17 at a dedicated website. These 17 files are synthetically discussed in the book but are not fully excerpted therein. In this regard, this website fulfills a complementary companion role to the published book. We believe that these biopic file-stories serve important research and pedagogical purposes, including as case-studies for teaching and instruction at all levels, from high school to doctoral level programs; and also for professional training instruction in areas as diverse as policing, military intelligence, and public administration.

These file-stories offer fascinating vignettes of life as lived in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War. They can guide and interactively kindle discussion of the complexities of a number of themes including: agency and constraint under repression; the role of disposition versus situation to explain participation of individuals in massive human rights abuses; complicity and victimhood; provenance of mass violence and role of individuals therein; history of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe from below; and comparisons to informers in liberal democratic societies.   

The file-stories reveal how individuals initially often had to make ‘choiceless choices’ and were in one way or another forced to sign a pledge to cooperate with the secret police but progressively over time became adept and willing informers. The stories demonstrate how some informers eagerly and enthusiastically collaborated with the regime, going above and beyond what was expected and requested of them. Other informers, conversely, gamed the regime and the system – in their own modest yet meaningful ways — by avoiding, stalling, or ignoring requests from the secret police.

Each file-story showcases a deeply personal cocktail of emotions that pulled informers towards and pushed informers away from the secret police and vivifies how these sentiments changed and morphed over time. Informing, in this sense, reflects tactics and strategies of social navigation through the bartering of information. This is one of the main themes we explore in our book. Our book helps demystify informing, and presents a humanistic portrayal that is conducive to reconciliation while also redressing harm. 

Why do we center these individual stories? We do so because we believe people matter, greatly. Experiences, ups and downs, life-cycles, boldness and bitterness, mortifying meekness and measly malice, flailing frailty and courageous charisma. We believe these stories, presented as we do in high resolution granularity, offer a panorama of life as actually lived. 

In the late European 1800’s, artists became fascinated with panoramas. These were the moving pictures of the time. Panoramas were monumentally circular in nature — a full 360 degrees — and elevated or sunk. They were housed in rotundas. Indeed, visitors accessed them through stairs that led up (or down) to the center of the circle. There, visitors emerged to be fully surrounded on all sides by the image of a landscape or an event. In Wroclaw, Poland, the panorama of the battle of Racławice depicts an April 1794 victory of the Poles over the Russians. But the lust for panoramas continues. Upon visiting Wroclaw, in 1987, so reports the Racławice website, the Chinese Prime Minister was so impressed that in 1989 he commissioned a panorama in China presenting the victory of the Communists over the Kuomitang Army in 1948. Indeed, panoramas have a long history in China, dating back to the late 1700s. 

Not all panoramas are about conflict. Some play with the calmness of daily life. For example, in The Hague, the Museum Mesdag features a panoramic seascape of the Dutch village of Scheveningen that abuts the North Sea. This panorama was painted in 1880 by Hendrik Willem Mesdag. It is the oldest panorama in the world still in its original location. It remains the largest paining in the Netherlands.

We visited the Scheveningen Panorama as Informers Up Close went into publication. While we stood there, in the center, our eyes wandered around the vista. Ships, horses, wagons, a washerwoman, sails, clouds, waves, chimneys and beach umbrellas all beckoned us to get closer. But the viewer cannot get too close, because between the viewer and the walls lies actual sand, anchors, fake grasses, and flotsam and jetsam protected by a guard-railing. The panorama is a cocktail of real objects and invented scenes, in a way a cocktail of fact and fiction just like how the Communist secret police files have been described. The sounds of the surf and the cries of the sea gulls complement the visualities. 

In one part of Mesdag’s panorama the village of Scheveningen itself appears. It presents such thinness amid the thickness of its walls, such a familiarity: a propinquity and proximity as among the inhabitants that suffocates and supplicates all at once. The village seems a blur, a jumble, buttered by its rooves. The panorama showcases separateness but constant closeness. Everything can be heard. The veils of the curtains are at best translucent, just like in the image on the cover of our book from a school in a Prague suburb. Surreptitiousness abounds amid the intimacy. This is the habitat of the informer: listening and looking, reporting and remembering, sharing and scalding and, at times, saving and protecting, misleading and stalling, and then also, on another day, reaching for the jugular, all covertly. Then one day the secrets become public. The regime crumbles. The sunshine of transparency opens it all, resulting in shame to the informer and also to the informed-upons whose secret machinations become fodder at the trough of public consumption. 

Returning to the panorama, and Scheveningen, in the distance looms the panoptic of a church, surveilling. Communists did not fancy religion, but the panopticon remained, now in the hands of the state and its new modern ideology. And nowadays we are all informers, no?: cellphones in hands, social media as our vehicles, always recording, shearing and exposing, all the while, cancelling and liking, amid the indelibility of the internet. 

We are delighted that four distinguished scholars and brilliant readers – Sergey Vasiliev, Saira Mohamed, Mia Swart, and Nesam McMillan — have immersed themselves into the panorama of our words. Their thoughts will follow ours, sequentially, in this symposium, and we will conclude it all with our own responses. 

Photo attribution: “Panorama Mesdag” by Mark A. Drumbl and Barbora Holá