The Unsleeping Eye

At the heart of The Unsleeping Eye is a provocative narrative about the role of the secret police in the modern totalitarian state. Joseph Fouche, Napoleon’s minister of police, made surveillance and informing into an art form (“Where there are three,” Fouche once said, “I always have one listening”) and coupled this surveillance with propaganda techniques that made it doubly effective.  Stove describes the development of domestic surveillance in Russia, from the time of Ivan the Terrible, to its final refinement under Stalin, who brought Lenin’s ideal of “organized terror” to perfection in collaboration with his brutal head of secret police, Lavrenti Beria.  (“You bring me the man,” Beria once said chillingly, “and I’ll find you the crime.”)  He also shows how the Gestapo and other police organizations led by demented individuals like Heinrich Himmler defined the essence of Nazism, particularly in his deluded notion that “the members of the Gestapo are men with human kindness, human hearts, and absolute rightness.”