Security Empire: The Secret Police in Communist Eastern Europe
Molly Pucci
Abstract
The secret police were one of the most important institutions in the making of communist Eastern Europe. Security Empire compares the early history of secret police institutions, which were responsible for foreign espionage, domestic surveillance, and political violence in communist states, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany after the Second World War. While previous histories have assumed that these forces were copies of the Soviet model, the book delves into the ways their origins diverged due to local social conditions, languages, and interpretations of communism. It illuminates th ... More
The secret police were one of the most important institutions in the making of communist Eastern Europe. Security Empire compares the early history of secret police institutions, which were responsible for foreign espionage, domestic surveillance, and political violence in communist states, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany after the Second World War. While previous histories have assumed that these forces were copies of the Soviet model, the book delves into the ways their origins diverged due to local social conditions, languages, and interpretations of communism. It illuminates the internal tensions inside the forces, between veteran agents who had fought in wars in Spain and Germany, and the younger, more radical agents, who pushed forward the violence, arrests, and show trials inside Eastern European communist parties in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In doing so, the book traces the role of political violence, ideological belief, and surveillance in building communist institutions in Europe by the mid-1950s.
Keywords:
Communism,
Eastern Europe,
intelligence services,
secret police,
show trials,
perpetrator studies,
Comintern,
Second World War,
state-building,
Cold War
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2020 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780300242577 |
| Published to Yale Scholarship Online: January 2021 |
DOI:10.12987/yale/9780300242577.001.0001 |
