Epress.am News from Armenia
Armenian translation is available on Epress.am
I don’t think I ever dobbed anybody in – or if I did, I would have told myself I was doing something else. Dobbing is the preferred Australian word for denunciation or snitching to the bosses, and it is taken to be a shameful betrayal of one’s fellow subalterns. I’m quite sure that, as a child, I never sneaked to a teacher about other girls: that would have been contemptible in schoolyard culture and I would remember if I’d done such a thing. For adults, it’s easier to obfuscate the act. A university dean of my acquaintance once told me that faculty members at his Ivy League school regularly dropped in to his office for casual chats whose real purpose, usually not directly stated, was to let him know that ‘there might be a problem’ with some other colleague.
When I first went to the Soviet Union as a British exchange student in the 1960s, I found that Soviet attitudes on the matter were similar to those I had grown up with in Australia. To be a snitch (donoschik) was and remains contemptible in Russian eyes, no matter how much governments – from 17th-century Muscovite to Soviet – have encouraged it, and how common the practice is in real life. Of course, as a principled position, this blanket ban on informing the authorities about anything has its problems. In the 1980s, when I had become interested in denunciation as a social historian, I asked one of my Soviet/Russian friends what he would do if he found out his neighbour was a serial murderer. Would he break his own rules and go to the police with a donos, or remain silent and risk more people dying? ‘I would tell them,’ he said, after a moment’s thought. ‘But I would hate myself for doing so.’
America, as I realised soon after arriving there as a budding Sovietologist in the Cold War, is different. Telling the authorities about another citizen’s wrongdoing becomes an ipso facto betrayal of subaltern solidarity only in context of a strong dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’; and this dichotomy seems to be only partially and episodically present in American life. It was ‘us’ and ‘them’ for the anti-Vietnam protesters of the 1970s, and for intellectuals in the McCarthyist 1950s, outraged at the pressure put on witnesses before the House Un-American Activities Committee to ‘name names’ of communists and sympathisers. But in general, Americans have seemed to accept the idea that government is their representative, not a thing apart, so they don’t feel so bad about telling the authorities something the authorities should know.
Among the difficulties of talking about denunciation is that there are so many words for it, along with sharply opposed understandings of its morality. If you denounce me, you’re a snitch with a personal agenda. If I denounce you, it’s because I’m a public-spirited citizen. Many of the terms in different languages are negative or at best neutral officialese, but Americans, uniquely, have invented a term for denunciation that is wholly positive: ‘whistleblowing’. This word, reportedly coined by Ralph Nader in the early 1970s to avoid the pejorative connotations of ‘snitching’ and ‘informing’, refers specifically to the reporting of abuses on the part of bosses of corporations, government departments and the like. Since whistleblowers risk retaliation by speaking out, they are seen (except by their targets) as brave, public-spirited truth-tellers.
By contrast, denunciation was seen by US Sovietologists, as well as a broader Cold War public, as a distinctively Soviet phenomenon, part of the ‘atomisation’ fostered by the totalitarian state through the breaking of traditional family and friendship loyalties, and wholly negative. The case always cited was that of Pavlik Morozov, a Young Pioneer who denounced his own father during collectivisation, whose example was recommended to generations of Soviet children.
In the course of my research on Soviet history, I became interested in Stalin’s Cultural Revolution of the late 1920s and early 1930s, a precursor to (and no doubt an inspiration for) Mao’s better known Cultural Revolution in China decades later. The Soviet Cultural Revolution was an assault on the entrenched power of elites (the ‘bourgeois’ intelligentsia and ‘rightist’ bureaucrats) in the arts and education. The campaign was taken up with enthusiasm by young communist militants eager for a fight as well as people with grievances in all fields of culture. Denunciation of opponents to the Party was a major weapon in these conflicts. Such denunciations were known as ‘signals from below’, a positive Soviet term for denunciation which, despite official endorsement, never caught on in ordinary Russian speech.
The Great Purges of the late 1930s, which were initiated by Stalin but gathered their own momentum, offered a different kind of mass-denunciation experience. Communist elites were the main target, and popular denunciation was a common way of identifying the victims (‘spies’ and ‘enemies of the people’) who were to be arrested, executed or banished to Gulag. In contrast to the Soviet Cultural Revolution, which was not usually hysterical, this became a real moral panic – a witch hunt in which ‘enemies’ might be suddenly and intuitively recognised with no real evidence offered or required. Citizens thus accused were unable to defend themselves, and if well-wishers tried to step in, even just by calling for due process, they instantly became ‘enemies’ too.
Comparisons with American experience were in general discouraged in US Sovietology, so the Salem witch hunts in late 17th-century Massachusetts were never invoked as an earlier episode of moral panic. Since denunciation was seen as a by-product of totalitarianism, it was taken as read that no such practice could exist in a democracy. This was one of the Cold War axioms encountered in the US in the 1970s that struck me as self-evidently wrong. Having grown up with an outspoken left-wing father who trod on toes in Cold War Australia (where we had our own HUAC equivalents in the form of Royal Commissions on espionage and communism), it seemed odd to me that Americans had so quickly forgotten their own experiences of the 1950s. Of course there is denunciation in Western democratic societies as well as in totalitarian ones. The question is about moral status and equivalence.
The philosopher Judith Shklar had an answer: denunciation is good when made to a good government, and bad when made to a bad one. Perhaps that helps to some degree. We might agree that, since the Soviet government was bad (which is clearly Shklar’s premise), it was also bad to denounce ‘enemies of the people’ under Stalin, ‘dissidents’ under Brezhnev and, mutatis mutandis, anti-war and gay activists in post-Soviet Russia under Putin. But how about denouncing ‘Stalinists’ under Khrushchev or Gorbachev? Or ‘Nazis’ and ‘Nazi collaborators’ under any of these?
Shklar’s argument suggests that denunciation should always be morally acceptable in a democracy. But in the US some might prefer to decide on a case by case basis, or at least administration by administration. Denouncing ‘terrorists’ under George W. Bush in the 2000s is one thing (though don’t take that as a personal endorsement), but denouncing ‘communists’ under Truman or Eisenhower in the 1950s might seem more dubious to American liberals, not to mention denouncing ‘woke’ intellectuals under Trump in the 2020s.
It would be nice if we could distinguish between denunciations on the basis of motive, but that seems hopeless. Most denunciations are couched in public interest terms, motives are generally mixed, only God can see into the heart etc. We may be on firmer ground making distinctions between denunciations on the basis of likely outcomes. Under Stalin during the Great Purges, these included arrest, exile to Gulag and summary execution. While the denunciatory processes of McCarthyism had some similarities to the Purges, their outcomes were hugely different. Victims of McCarthyism (despite the Rosenberg case) didn’t typically suffer death or long-term exile, but ‘only’ reputational damage. Loss of employment was a high possibility, but the chance of arrest was small. This was much closer to the level of consequences likely to follow a Soviet denunciation in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras.
Shklar focuses on political denunciations, but it’s difficult to draw a hard and fast line between these and denunciations for criminal acts, or for behaviour that is merely deemed ‘inappropriate’, to use an anachronistic term. After the opening of classified Soviet archives in the 1990s exposed a remarkable range of Soviet donosy, I did a study of three hundred denunciations made by Soviet peasants against their bosses in the 1930s. It made little sense to divide them into political or non-political, since so many combined both: a typical denunciation against the chairman of the kolkhoz would include a political accusation (‘Trotskyite’) as well as a criminal one (‘embezzler’), along with allegations of abusive or disrespectful behaviour such as slapping rank-and-file kolkhozniks or having sex with their daughters. Peasants seem to have written the same kind of letters throughout the Soviet period, with cosmetic changes on the political side (‘Nazi collaborators’ for ‘Trotskyites’ after the war). Indeed, for a large range of denunciations, not only in the Soviet Union, the nature of the current political regime seems largely irrelevant. Should sexual abuse have been reported in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev but not under Stalin? Would my Russian friend have been morally in the clear if he had kept quiet about his neighbour’s putative crimes until Gorbachev or Yeltsin came along?
But I didn’t have to go all the way to the Soviet archives to find examples of denunciation. In the US, where I had been living since the early 1970s, the mainstream press provided ample evidence of the phenomenon. The new moral panic was not about communism but about the sexual abuse of children in kindergartens. Denunciations came in from parents reporting their children’s fantastic tales of flying witches, Satanic rituals and being flushed down the toilet to secret chambers where the abuse took place. One of my friends, normally a rational person, but with young children, took the accusations semi-seriously. So did the courts in California and elsewhere, sentencing some nursery school workers to long prison terms. Eventually the hysteria died down; the charges were dropped and the teachers released. In January 1997, the ex-felons were invited to a ‘Day of Contrition’ – held, appropriately, in Salem.
Crime Stoppers, another product of the 1970s, offered a new avenue of anonymous denunciation for citizens who were too squeamish or too prudent to report directly to the police. Crime Stoppers is now an organisation with international reach whose function is to pass on the information it receives from individuals to the relevant national and international authorities. Even Australians, with their strong anti-dobbing tradition, have embraced this useful ‘receiving service for people wanting to share what they know about unsolved crimes and suspicious activity without having to say who they are’, as its Australian website currently puts it.
Political whistleblowers in the US periodically captured the headlines in the US press. In 1971, there was Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and Washington Post. Since his aim was to discredit the government position on the Vietnam War, most liberals regarded his actions as morally justified, indeed admirable. In 2013, when Edward Snowden did something similar with NSA documents, the reaction was more mixed (his flight to Russia was a bad look). In between, the denunciation of the ‘Unabomber’, Ted Kaczynski, by his brother David in 1996 made many Americans uneasy: against the undoubted ‘good’ of catching a terrorist was the ‘bad’ of snitching on his own family, something uncomfortably close to the Pavlik Morozov story. Then, in 1998, came the scandal of Monica Lewinsky’s sexual relationship with Bill Clinton, which came to light as a result of a denunciation by Lewinsky’s co-worker Linda Tripp. This provoked even more strongly divided opinion. Perhaps it was in the national interest to expose the president’s sex life (and his false denials); on the other hand, Tripp, who seemed eager for the limelight, was betraying a friend’s confidence and getting that friend’s reputation completely trashed for what was at most, on Lewinsky’s part, a minor peccadillo.
But it was the anti-terrorist panic following 9/11 that was the turning point in US attitudes, the moment when denunciation became not only acceptable but also, with regard to suspected terrorists, a moral duty. I remember the shock of driving down the New Jersey Turnpike soon after the attack and seeing a flashing sign admonishing me to ‘Report any suspicious persons’. The state of Pennsylvania advertised a toll-free number for the public ‘to report tips about possible terrorists or terrorist activity’. It’s true that when Congress tried to reproduce this nationally as Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) in 2002, the House majority leader, Dick Armey, a conservative Republican, objected that he could not support a law that encouraged Americans ‘to spy on one another’. The initiative was defeated, but both anonymous and signed tips about people with Middle Eastern names kept flooding in anyway. Perhaps not coincidentally, Time declared 2002 ‘The Year of the Whistle-Blowers’, choosing three female whistleblowers as its Persons of the Year.
The idea of a duty to denounce (terrorists or anyone else) was taking hold. ‘If you see something, say something,’ a catchphrase originating from the New York transport authority after 9/11, was licensed to the Department of Homeland Security in 2010 for use in a nationwide anti-terrorism campaign. The equivalent message in the UK, ‘See it, say it, sorted,’ emphasised the relief passengers should feel on unburdening themselves of unwanted knowledge and responsibility.
The #MeToo movement that began in 2017, for retrospective denunciation of powerful men for sexual abuse, was undoubtedly a good cause, but it also had some of the characteristics of a moral panic, notably the insistence that victims’ statements must never be questioned and that those they accused must immediately be judged guilty without the right of self-defence. ‘Speaking out’ in the context of #MeToo was seen as truth-telling, something quite different from denunciation, snitching or even whistleblowing, despite the functional equivalence. #MeToo was part of a broader climate fostering the reporting of many forms of ‘inappropriate’ behaviour in the sphere of sex and gender, including the failure to use an individual’s chosen pronouns. Researchers at North Dakota State University found that 72 per cent of students thought that professors who made ‘offensive’ remarks should be reported to the university administration.
Experiences were very different in Russia. Communism had been overthrown in 1991, the Union disbanded, ‘wild capitalism’ tried under Yeltsin, and a degree of law and order, with emphasis on national self-respect, restored under Putin Mark 1, before Putin Mark 2 swerved into international aggression with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For Russian citizens, some everyday practices have changed, but not the practice of denunciation. Currently, the offences most often denounced are anti-war attitudes towards the Ukraine conflict and LGBT rights activism (‘propaganda’). The first are patriotic in tone, the second go under the banner of ‘traditional family values’. In both cases, the baleful influence of the West is often cited.
The invasion of Ukraine was viewed critically by the Russian liberal intelligentsia. Most people maintained a prudent silence in public, though in the first months it wasn’t unusual for university teachers to raise the issue for discussion in their classes, making their own anti-war stance clear. Over time, however, such people became more wary. A number of intellectuals with Western contacts chose to move abroad, at least for the time being (with Russian borders now open, it is possible, unlike in Soviet times, to retain some ambiguity as to whether one has emigrated), while retaining their jobs and working remotely via Zoom. Alarmed at the prevalence of denunciation of academics for anti-war attitudes, one group of Russian scholars (who feel safer remaining anonymous) undertook a study of it, based on interviews and the documentary public record. They reported a climate in which denunciation of those with anti-war attitudes by students, colleagues and outside vigilantes has become ever more common and reputationally damaging. These denunciations are generally made not to the FSB (the KGB’s successor) but to university administrations. At first, the universities often tried to defend their faculty, but increasingly they have resorted to disciplinary measures, including pressure to resign and actual firings.
Of course, denunciation is only part of the picture of repression in Russia. The Foreign Agent law, originally designed to reduce the influence of foreign NGOs, is now also used against individual Russian citizens deemed to be ‘under foreign influence’, which requires those with foreign contacts to put themselves on a register. Foreign agents are, among other things, banned from public office and from teaching; failure to register, if you are judged to be under ‘foreign influence’, is a criminal offence. Putin’s regime takes domestic dissent seriously; it has an active security police to keep an eye on those who oppose the war, and over the past decade an array of laws has been passed to allow them to be punished. According to data gathered by researchers at OVD-Info, 356 people are currently in prison in Russia for anti-war crimes, only occasionally as a result of citizen denunciations.
A Moscow publishing insider told me that in commercial publishing, denunciation is still the main method of control. Unlike in Soviet times, there is no formal censorship, but in some ways this only makes life harder since, while there are undoubtedly subjects you are not supposed to publish on and things you are not supposed to say, you essentially have to sniff the air and guess what they are. The direct threat comes from self-appointed vigilantes who ‘carefully read books on subjects that interest them’, and then, if they see offensive material, ‘write denunciations to all possible authorities and the security organs, which are always glad to receive news of easily uncovered violations of law and launch appropriate actions – in most cases administrative and not criminal’.
Criticism of the Soviet performance in the Second World War and the equating of Stalin with Hitler are among the themes that are known to be disapproved of ‘up there’, and are particularly likely to attract denunciation by vigilantes. But the biggest target, apart from criticism of the Ukraine war, is gay and trans activism. Both have been criminalised, so here denunciation can cause more than reputational damage. Recent reports of prosecutions for ‘gay activism’ noted the role of ‘tips and complaints’ from vigilante organisations such as the Safe Internet League and the Veterans of Russia. For longtime Soviet/Russia-watchers, this is an intriguing variation on the old story of pernicious Western influences. In the late Stalin period, capitalist degeneracy and ‘cosmopolitanism’, probably peddled by Jews, were blamed for aberrations in high culture such as abstract art and atonal music. Despite a current reported rise in popular antisemitism in Russia, Putin seems to have avoided giving that kind of signal. But his message on the sex and gender question has been quite explicit: ‘A man is a man, and a woman is a woman.’ The Orthodox Church, the Duma and – judging by opinion polls – the great majority of the public heartily agree.
Russian denunciation appears to have stuck to the traditional rule that denouncers are usually conservatives and their targets liberals. The same used to be true of denunciation in America, but that changed in the first two decades of the present century, when sex and gender offences became prime causes of denunciation. In the North Dakota survey, students identifying as ‘liberal’ were significantly more likely to be in favour of denouncing professors for inappropriate speech acts than those identifying as ‘conservative’. In an analysis from 2020 of ‘scholarship suppression’ in the US, the social scientist Sean Stevens and his colleagues noted that in Western academia, denunciations, typically made online in social media campaigns against sex and gender offences, come predominantly from the left.
But now, in the age of Trump, the anti-liberals seem to have regained the initiative as prime movers of denunciation; liberals, accordingly, have remembered that they have objections in principle. The consensus liberal view on denunciation under the new administration is revealed by the headlines: ‘Trump wants you to snitch on your co-workers’; ‘Trump is propping up his agenda on a network of snitches.’ ICE has an online portal for reporting on illegal immigrants and suspected criminal activity, and a hotline sponsored by the Department of Education calls for anonymous informing by ‘students, parents, teachers and the broader community’ on schools and teachers ‘perceived as promoting diversity, equity or inclusion’. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, a directive from the Office of Personnel Management led to emails being sent to employees of the Departments of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs, Nasa and other agencies asking them, within ten days, to identify colleagues still persisting in work on diversity, equity and inclusion – in other words, snitch or be snitched on. In April, the Department of Health and Human Services called for denunciations from health workers and the public of doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors. While there were some awkward problems with regard to patient privacy at first, these have now been circumvented, partly by classifying informers as whistleblowers.
The Trump administration’s campaign against ‘antisemitism’ in universities relies on a double denunciation process: students and faculty are encouraged to provide information about alleged offences, and universities are required not just to act on this information but also to report it to Washington. Fear of such denunciation is rampant among faculty, according to Rashid Khalidi, recently retired from Columbia University. George Washington University has been censured by the Department of Justice, with the usual threat of dire consequences, for failing in the first instance to take action on complaints received, and in the second to report them.
People from the Make America Great Again movement aren’t going to call reporting via the new tip lines ‘snitching’, or even ‘whistleblowing’, because these are liberals’ words. But the activist group Moms for Liberty has found a MAGA way of naming the practice: it described the call for denunciation of teachers for DEI activism as ‘putting power back in the hands of parents’. Calling for denunciations is one way of mobilising ordinary Americans to challenge the power of the ‘deep state’ and the liberal elites who despise them. Back in the day, when Stalin was presiding over his Cultural Revolution, this was called ‘mobilising the masses’ against ‘bourgeois liberal’ elites, and denunciation played exactly the same role in identifying offenders for the authorities to prosecute or fire. MAGA is Trump’s Cultural Revolution.
We should ‘resolve to make 2025 the year of no snitching’, the American labour journalist Hamilton Nolan wrote in January. That’s fine with me. I’m an Australian liberal who internalised the belief that dobbing is shameful when I was in primary school. But I can see why MAGA supporters have a different take. From their perspective, snitching is the pejorative liberal word for the exercise of grassroots democracy needed to keep bureaucrats honest and put phoneys from the ‘woke’ intelligentsia in their place. If it hurts corrupt bureaucrats and phoneys, so much the better: this is payback time. Or, as Stalin would have put it, it’s class war. And if it’s class war, perhaps I should just stick to my own class standpoint, the liberal elite one, and continue to oppose snitching in almost all circumstances.
But wait. Shouldn’t the anti-Trump forces be on the counter-attack? That was presumably the rationale behind the decision of Democrats in the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to set up their own tip line to report ‘potential wrongdoing under the Trump administration’. The announcement, in February, noted that ‘whistleblowers have a vital role in helping Congress conduct its constitutionally mandated oversight responsibilities’ and calls on the public to pass on information about ‘abuses of power and threats to federal workers’ emanating from the administration. Fox News described it as Chuck Schumer’s ‘Deep State snitch line for anybody who wants to dime on Trump’. So the Democrats are fighting fire with fire and denunciation with denunciation. The attached form may be submitted anonymously.
Sheila Fitzpatrick
Originally published in the London Review of Books, 25 September 2025.