KGB Photography Experimentation: Turning Religion into Organized Crime

Abstract

The Soviet secret police made a habit of photographing their targets and visually capturing what was meant to be evidence of their crimes. “The improvement of photography opens up a diversity of new opportunities for its use in criminal investigation, both for the fixation of a crime scene and for undertaking the most complicated investigation, otherwise impossible to realize by other means,” states a 1935 textbook on Soviet criminalistics.1 Soviet police manuals carefully elaborated the use of photography in crime investigation, instructing how to produce photographs of criminals and how to capture scenes and traces of crime: murdered body, arson, firearm traces, blood, sperm, footprints, cigarette butts, and so on. Police photo labs produced mug shots of suspects in custody, while field officers took photos of crime scenes and criminal evidence in addition to relevant shots in Committee for State Security (KGB) prisons and courts.2 The KGB also used photography