Professor Ewa Majewska will examine national and private archives concerning the so-called “Hiacynt” Operation targeting gay men, carried out by the Communist regime’s police (MO) and security service (SB) in the 1980s Poland. The goal of the project is to trace the available documents, systematize the archives, and publish a monograph documenting the history of this infamous chapter of the Communist rule in Poland.
Project funded by the National Science Center, no. 2021/43/B/HS2/00579.
Between 1985 and 1987 in Poland, several operations, under the common code name “Akcja Hiacynt” [Hiacynt Operation] were conducted by the so-called Citizen’s Militia [Milicja Obywatelska (MO)], which was the national police organization, and the Security Service [Służba Bezpieczeństwa (SB)] the secret police – both serving the Communist regime that governed the country at the time. The goal of the Hiacynt Operation was to examine, interrogate, infiltrate, and analyze gay individuals and communities under the guise of investigating their international connections, preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS, and closing the unfinished investigations of crimes involving gay men, often with the status of main victims. Although the Operation was communicated as an initiative stemming from the concern for the gay population, it often resulted in fear and trauma, allowing further criminalization of the already marginalized and discriminated LGBTQ+ communities.
Project Objectives
The Operation's scattered and dispersed heterogeneous archives include the state archives of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), the National Library, state institutions (such as those belonging to the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Internal Affairs), the private archives of the men targeted by the Operations, the artistic archives created based on verbal testimonies, as well as media articles and scarce academic articles. Approaching the “Hiacynt Operation” almost 40 years later means confronting scattered and chaotic archives of very different types – those created by various state agents as well as those produced by terrified individuals and groups, those of the media, public debate, and the artistic ones.
The main goal of this project is to carry out a comprehensive reconstruction of the “Hiacynt” Operation's dispersed and heterogeneous archives, under the main denominator of the minoritarian subject formation, in the confrontation of the state apparatus and individual/collective bodies of the non-heteronormative persons and communities, living in Poland in the late 1980s that have emerged 40 years later from the scattered documents and accounts. In search of the minoritarian subject formation patterns, which emerge between the vulnerable ontologies and epistemologies of weak resistances and the biopolitical repressive state action, this project builds an interdisciplinary methodology of researching scattered, heterogeneous archives. It also reconstructs the patterns of state’s repressive biopolitical action, thus allowing for an in-depth study of the usually separated aspects of contemporary state surveillance apparatus, and reconstructs the subjectivity formed in such traumatizing conditions.
The “Hiacynt” Operation is an important case, which demonstrates the contradictions of subject formation in late modern state. The subject formation of the gay men targeted by the “Hiacynt” Operation that emerges from its individual, community, media and state archives, as well as from art and literary works, is one of many faces, one of trauma and recovery, of suppressed and overtly expressed affect. It is one abandoned because of the painful conditions it emerged in, but also because of the complexity of their ontology and production and the heterogeneity of its archives and traces. So far, there is no general analysis or summery of the “Hiacynt” Operation, the archives are scattered and justice has not been served. This project offers such summary in the form of articles and a monograph and in developing methodology, which could be applied in other archive studies of similar complexity. The project's website and conference presentations will allow further dissemination of the project's findings.