Compte rendu de l'ouvrage de Julie Fedor, 'Russia and the cult of state security: the Chekist tradition, from Lenin to Putin'
Résumé
Julie Fedor’s book is a very interesting work about ‘the mythology woven around the
Soviet secret police and the Russian cult of state security that has emerged from it’. The
author embarks on the task of analysing this myth and ideology, as well as the central role
of the Cheka and KGB in the 1920s; in the late 1950s to early 1960s; and from 1995 to the
present. Fedor does not discuss the Stalinist period or the Brezhnev period; she chose to
study the Khrushchev years and late Yeltsin−Putin era ‘because they were both historical
moments at which the cult was reorganized and reasserted in the wake of periods of intense
historical debates challenging the legitimacy of chekism’ (p. 7) (...).