From Joseph Stalin’s until the 1980s, the KGB frequently dealt with low-level political offenders using a method known as “prophylaxis” [profilaktika], in which offenders were not arrested or prosecuted, but “invited” to the offices of the security police for a supposedly informal “conversation” or “chat.” This paper examines the fate of prophylaxis during the Gorbachev years, showing that even though the tactic originally arose during the Thaw as a liberalization of Stalinist terror, it lost favor during the glasnost’ era, when its defining principle—that the KGB could prevent future low-level offenses by narrowing in on the roots of crime––was called into question. The paper will use the KGB’s changing approach to prophylaxis in the 1980s both compare the Khrushchev and Gorbachev reform eras and to look at how the regime confronted everyday dissent in its final years.
