Arina Ginzburg, wife of imprisoned dissident Aleksandr Ginzburg, calls the US embassy in Moscow while fellow dissident Sergei Moshkov ensures that no one enters the telephone booth. In the background, a KGB woman watches. Aleksandr Ginzburg papers, Hoover Institution Archives.

As part of the tenth annual Hoover Summer Workshop, Amir Weiner, associate professor of history at Stanford University, will discuss his forthcoming book, Getting to Know You: Domestic Surveillance in the Soviet Union. Based on thorough research in the former archives of the KGB, including the newly acquired KGB collections of the Hoover Archives. Weiner’s book explores the level of information the Soviet security services had on their citizens, what kind of information they sought and how they obtained it, whom they recruited as informants and how, how they coped with domestic challenges and decline, how they evaluated their own performance; and how the KGB fared in comparison with other security services. Also as part of the workshop, on Monday at 7 PM at Cubberly Auditorium, a showing of David Satter's film Age of Delirium will take place.

Weiner is the author of several works on the wartime and postwar Soviet Union and communist social engineering enterprises. Click here for more information about the event.