Security Empire: The Secret Police in Communist Eastern Europe

Abstract

When John Connelly was writing his excellent book on captive universities some 30 years ago, he decided to take a closer look at three countries dominated by the Soviet Union after the Second World War: Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. This comparative approach was a fruitful way of studying the modern history of the region. Molly Pucci uses a similar approach in her book on Communist states’ internal security organs, focusing on the institutionalization and anthropology of the repressive agencies. By tracing the history of these agencies’ rank-and-file, she seeks “to place the early history of communist secret police institutions back into the entangled and violent history of Europe and Russia in the twentieth century” (p. 284). Pucci’s well-written book offers a great narrative and is a pleasure to read. She goes further and wider than have other historians who focused only on single countries. The book offers an illuminating comparative analysis of the repressive organs’ early formative years, roughly 1945–1956. However, Pucci does not simply present three pictures of the countries one by one. She shows how the Soviet model of state security agencies and a certain organizational culture were adopted in the countries that came under Soviet domination. At the same time, she emphasizes that Soviet patterns were not perfectly transplanted and implemented; rather, they were “imperfectly translated” into the Central European languages. The book reveals that although the general approach in the three countries was the same with the introduction of the Soviet model, the implementation differed significantly depending on the circumstances and the people who were responsible for such processes. An interesting example is the presence of so-called Soviet advisers in the agencies overseeing the East European secret police. In the case of Poland and East Germany, Soviet personnel were installed almost immediately because it was clear that supreme power in both countries was held by the Communist party, which exercised control over the state security forces. In the case of Czechoslovakia, the situation was more complex. Edvard Beneš’s return from exile to Prague and the emergence of a relatively pluralist party system excluded the presence of Soviet advisers during the initial years after the Second World War. They were not brought in until 1949. Thus,