The Passive Resistance of the Securitate’s Informers. A Foucauldian Perspective on the Case of the Archaeologist Nubar Hamparțumian
The Passive Resistance of the Securitate’s Informers. A Foucauldian Perspective on the Case of the Archaeologist Nubar Hamparțumian

Summary/Abstract: The inefficiency of the Securitate, the secret political police of the Romanian communist regime, has recently emerged as an interesting hypothesis based on files of the people it targeted and testimonies of its informers. This research conducted on the file of the archaeologist Nubar Hamparțumian, a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology of Bucharest between 1956 and 1975, when he emigrated to the United Kingdom, and informer under constraint of the Securitate between 1960 and 1983, aims to bring new insights on this issue. The passive resistance mounted by Hamparțumian mainly through providing inoffensive information on the targeted people and ignoring instructions to develop closer ties with them, while pretending to be loyal and disciplined, falls into the Foucauldian category of micro crimes of activity and time against the disciplinary institution, which was the Securitate. Whereas this kind of resistance, coupled with the poor planning and excessive bureaucracy of the Securitate, certainly made the secret police inefficient, it did not turn it into an ineffective institution, too.

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