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As a foreign anthropologist in Romania in the 1970s and '80s, Katherine Verdery was under observation by the secret police. Later, having obtained her files, she put the secret police under her own ethnographic observation. Her analyses are examined in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the anthropological scholarship of Katherine Verdery, especially her last book, My life as a spy , to explore the conditions of doing fieldwork and producing knowledge in the European East during the Cold War and onwards. In particular, I attend to the themes of secrecy, identity, surveillance, and power that are integral to fieldwork and anthropological practice more generally beyond the confines of Eastern Europe and that resonate in different contexts of authoritarianism and securitization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intelligence agencies in former Yugoslavia served as the regime's political police, which carried out domestic security roles in an internally divided country that was caught at the crossroads of a geopolitical cleavage between great powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impact of secret police organizations on the occurrence of antiregime protests in authoritarian regimes. We argue that such organizations are related to lower levels of protests via two related mechanisms: intelligence gathering and an increased perception of risk among citizens, which reduce citizens' ability and willingness to mobilize, respectively. Using new data on secret police organizations in dictatorships covering the post–World War II period, our findings support the main expectation. This research contributes to our understanding of security institutions, antiregime protests, and the repression-dissent nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following text is an excerpt from The Refugee Chronicles, a fictional diary written by Evgeny Shtorn, poet and activist, from his experience of seeking asylum. Shtorn had to flee Russia due to the government's hostile policies toward both queer sexualities and political dissent right after he was interviewed by the Russian secret police FSB in 2018. The run for life and liberty brought him to the utmost end of Western Europe, Ireland. Shtorn's experience of claiming asylum made him question clear cut boundaries between the West and the East along the lines of guarantees and protections of human rights. He also noted how queer sexuality plays a specific role in the asylum application process as a protected and even desired ground for granting refugee status. His experience of a lengthy stay in the dormitory for asylum seekers converted into a book-length, semi-fictional chronicle was published by an independent press, Poryadok Slov, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The book is full of queries, ambiguities, and doubts that surround the issues of queerness, migration, and the politics of human rights. The following chapter is introduced with a short pre-word by a scholar of sexuality studies Alexander Kondakov who offers a brief contextualization and conceptualization of The Refugee Chronicles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informers in the service of state secret police collaborate with authorities and thus contribute to the power of repressive regimes. Through a case-study of Communist Czechoslovakia (1945–1989)—and drawing from secret police archives– this article presents selected stories of informers who in one way or another also 'resisted' collaboration with the Czechoslovak State Security (StB). By doing so, we try to further complexify the notions of 'everyday resistance', on the one hand, and 'collaboration' on the other. We demonstrate that resistant acts, similar to collaborative acts, can be apolitically devoid of ideology, highly idiosyncratic, and motivated by private drivers. Informing can be a tool of social navigation—namely, making the most out of one's circumstances—in repressive times. Hence, resisting while informing also can be approached as a method for an individual to maximize opportunities within the overlapping incentives—both public and private, personal and professional—that contour decision-making and social action in repressive regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an edited transcript of a question-and-answer session with Molly Pucci, the winner of the inaugural Dr Polly Corrigan Book Prize for her monograph Security Empire: The Secret Police in Communist Eastern Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020). It took place at King's College, London on 17th January 2023, when the inaugural Dr Polly Corrigan Book Prize was presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article summarizes the initial phase of Béla Markó’s career leading up to his first poetry collection, A szavak városában (In the City of Words, 1974). Markó’s first writing attempts were published in local newspapers during his school years in Târgu Secuiesc/Kézdivásárhely, later gaining visibility in national daily and weekly publications. Shortly thereafter, Béla Markó’s poems were introduced in the Megyei Tükör by Árpád Farkas, and in Igaz Szó by János Székely. His notable poem Egyszerû vers (Simple Poem) is often considered a manifesto of his generation. His years at the university in Kolozsvár/Cluj (1970-1974) unfolded in a briefly liberated political and intellectual atmosphere following the “thaw” in Romania after 1968. During this time, in addition to the Echinox student journal, Béla Markó’s works were regularly published in various types of publications. Following his publication in Kapuállító (1982), his work also appeared in the anthology Varázslataink (1974), retaining its title despite censorship cutting Markó’s verse. From 1971 to 1973, he led the Gaál Gábor Circle, a forum for young writers and poets at the university, which served as a valuable platform for public discourse and also attracted the interest of the secret police of the regime, the Securitate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: The use of covert means is any information gathering intelligence operation (secret police activity) in which the authorised authorities of the State seek to obtain new knowledge in the course of administrative and criminal proceedings without the knowledge of the holder of the information, by limiting the right of self-determination. 1 In dictatorships, this form of exercise of state power is also dominated by arbitrariness. Constitutional states place the use of secret means on a public law basis. This study aims to demonstrate that it is possible to regulate acts of public authority that are at the heart of secrecy by means of legal instruments whose core is publicity. Methodology: The objective outlined above can only be achieved if the dogmatic and moral characteristics of the legislation are harmonised with the specific characteristics of the secret police. The task is not easy. Legislation is always about the future and is always based on abstract prognosis; covert intelligence aims to discover the past, the present and the future, and the knowledge to be acquired is always unique and concrete. Findings: The abstract nature of the regulation and the uniqueness of the intelligence operation resolve the contradiction between publicity and secrecy. What is public is the rule, what is secret is the application of the rule to a specific situation. However, legislation can become fully formalised when it no longer imposes limits on the operation of state power, but merely authorises it, opening the way to free discretion. In such a case, the guise of legality conceals an untrammelled power. Value: Law that serves humanity is an effective means of preserving social order. Secret data-collection requires a limitation of rights, yet it is indispensable to combat violations (principle of necessity), provided that it does not cause more serious harm than the threat against which it is used (principle of proportionality). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article explores the conditions necessary for a narrative recounting of past events to become memorable and incorporated into collective memory. The analysis is focused on the role played by artistic remediations in creating such memorability. In Romania, as well as in other East Central European countries, the production of memorability and the management of the resulting collective memories are interlinked with the narratives of communism that dominate the memorialisation of the recent past. The article reviews several examples of acts of dissent, based on their representativeness and the existing literature, and question the memorability of dissident acts by considering the memory discourse on communism and the involvement of different agents of memory. It also interrogates the use of the Romanian secret police (Securitate) files in artistic productions, examining this acknowledgement of the role played by the Securitate in creating the narratives of the communist past. Two artistic productions based on reworkings of the Securitate files are analysed: a documentary theatre play staged by Gianina Cărbunariu, Uppercase Print (2013), and Radu Jude's 2020 film of the same title, both presenting the story of Mugur Călinescu. The article argues that these productions question mainstream frames of memory by revisiting the narratives and biographies created by the Securitate files and give new, artistically mediated voices to victims, perpetrators and collaborators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June of 2010, a Canadian couple, Donald Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley, was arrested in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the KGB "sleeper agents." These KGB agents (Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova) lived in Canada since 1992, and in the United States since 1999, working for the Russian intelligence as "a sleeper cell" of the Russian spies. This story became an inspiration for the American TV show The Americans (2013–2018). Using the reviews of this TV show from the United States and Russia, the interviews with the real participants of the events of 2010 and with the retired KGB officers, the KGB documents from the SBU Archive in Kyiv, Ukraine, this article is an attempt to study how the special KGB/FSB operations in the USA, portrayed in one American TV series became an object of fascination and "fictionalization" on the both—American and Russian—sides of the geo-political conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secret police are generally viewed as key institutions in autocrats' repression apparatus. However, we lack clear empirical evidence on the link between secret police and repression. Instead, recent studies indicate that the surveillance provided by secret police reduces physical human rights abuses. This paper re-examines the relationship between secret police and physical state repression. We identify four mechanisms linking these variables, deterrence, targeting, organizational practices, and institutional self-preservation. These mechanisms provide contrasting expectations for the overall relationship but also contextual expectations on when secret police may (not) increase repression. To test these expectations, we collect data on the global existence of secret police. Results indicate that secret police are associated with increased physical repression, particularly when they must develop a reputation to deter dissidents or when multiple rival security organizations exist. In contrast, older, more established secret police or ones without institutional rivals are not associated with physical repression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main goal of the article is to expose how the Czechoslovak state socialism shaped scholarly habitus through various mechanisms, institutions and policies, especially through the intrusion of the secret police into the scholarly world. The article is informed by the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and presents a case study focusing on the ethnographer Vladimír Karbusický. In the 1960s, Karbusický was under surveillance by the State Security, the secret police of the socialist Czechoslovakia. His surviving dossier from the State Security archives allows us to see precisely how exactly the actions of the State Security diminished the autonomy of the scholarly world, influenced career paths and contributed to the formation of academic habitus. At the same time, the dossier, which emerged as part of the effort of the state to maximize its control over society, can be also used as evidence of the persistence of (surviving) academic autonomy and the concomitant scholarly ethos. This suggests that the socialist state of Czechoslovakia under the hegemony of its Communist Party may have not been entirely successful in its policies to control society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of the Siege of Sidney Street, and the associated Houndsditch police murders and 'Tottenham Outrage' is not new. The author of this new work, Andrew Whitehead, takes the reader beyond a narrative detail of these momentous events in British criminal history and instead looks at the political and social situation in London's East End, only a generation after the Ripper era. He examines the lives and backgrounds to the outsiders of the era – Eastern European 'revolutionary anarchists' fleeing Imperial Russia and the oppression of the tsarist Okhrana secret police, to the supposedly tolerant shores of England. He seeks to understand what motivated their decision to commit such heinous crimes, and the fallout for the perpetrators, and wider British society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is it morally permissible to spy on allied countries? What type of otherwise criminal acts may covert intelligence agents commit in order to keep their cover? Is it permissible to subject children of high-value targets to covert surveillance? In this article, I ask whether democratically elected politicians ought to rely on advice from ethics committees in answering moral choices in secret policy. I argue that ethics committees should not advise politicians on how they ought to conclude secret moral choices. Instead, we can mandate ethics committees to provide advice aimed at improving the moral reasoning behind moral decisions in secret policy. Such advice, I argue, may add value to the decision process independently of whether it increases the chances of reaching morally correct conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two decades after the overthrow of the autocratic regime of Slobodan Milosevic, security intelligence agencies in Serbia are not only far from being reformed, but they play a central role in democracy decline and what many academics and policy officials describe as state capture. Intelligence agencies are among the first victims of state capture and among the major instruments in further capturing state institutions. This process has been a product of the agreed transition from autocracy to democracy that prevented bloodshed but maintained a clientelist relationship between (new) democratic leadership and the (old) security apparatus. Consequently, thorough intelligence reform never happened, resulting in the survival of agencies' strongholds of power, which facilitated the return to old secret police practice. It is not uncommon today that among important tasks of security intelligence are regime protection through suppression of political opposition and critical voices, as well as making sure that suspicious deals of those close to the ruling party run smoothly. This article aims to map and analyze events and processes that have led to these outcomes and describe how security intelligence is being instrumentalized by the ruling political party and its leader, Aleksandar Vucic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visible surveillance technologies are vanishing in the wake of dataveillance. The practice of surveillance is certainly not disappearing, but it has become inconspicuous. In a regime of invisible surveillance, the watchers and the watched alike are hard to identify, for the latter have also become socially invisible as human beings. I argue that the idea of becoming invisible in both digital and pre-digital surveillance societies is multifaceted. On the one hand, it suggests total deprivation of personal autonomy as a result of overexposure resulting in the disappearance of the subject and, on the other hand, it implies a possibility of resistance and self-assertion. Self-exposure is taken to extremes in Dave Eggers's dystopian novel The Circle (2013) where the protagonist becomes the centre of attention in a "viewer society" (Mathiesen 1997) and "goes transparent" (Eggers 2013, 351). In contrast, Wolfgang Hilbig's Stasi novel "Ich" (1993) works with different notions of invisibility. Recruited to spy for the Stasi, Hilbig's protagonist – an unsuccessful poet – is at the same time targeted by East Germany's secret police and wants to become invisible, hiding from the omnipresent Stasi surveillance in Berlin's maze-like cellar corridors in an attempt of self-assertion. The comparison of these novels will elucidate how different discourses on (in)visibility and transparency contribute to an account of subjectivity that attempts to resist surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of de-Communization, states in central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union used lustration measures to remove Communist officials and secret police collaborators from positions of power and to bring to light Communist-era abuses. As a form of transitional justice, lustration is unusually temporally tethered to the Communist past. However, in practice some states stretched lustration's temporal parameters, reaching back up to eighty years to pre-Soviet and Nazi World War II (WWII) abuses, and extending forward decades into the post-Communist present. This temporal stretching expanded lustration's goals beyond vetting mechanism to corruption fighter, historical memory marker, and nation-state (re)builder. Lustration's temporal stretching conflicts with Venice Commission, Council of Europe, and European Court of Human Rights guidelines and legal rulings on lustration. This article presents three temporal approaches to the window of time covered by lustration in eleven post-Communist states between 1990 and 2018: lustration focused on a single, elongated Communist past, lustration covering multiple pasts, and lustration spanning both Communist and post-Communist abuses. Comparative cases in these three temporal categories illustrate significant variation within states surrounding the temporal purview of lustration. This regional variation is juxtaposed with Council of Europe guidelines, related court rulings, and Venice Commission amicus briefs to illustrate contending temporalities surrounding the use of lustration as an "extraordinary" justice measure in consolidated democracies. This study highlights the importance of time as a variable and invites more empirical work on the conditional effects of time on transitional justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, Hungary was characterised by ethnic diversity. Nevertheless, for a long time there was no sign of this causing any particular tension. The language of everyday life was characterised by pragmatism, and the language of public life, education and science was uniformly Latin. Joseph II's language decree of 1784 (which made German the official language instead of Latin) started the process that would culminate in the language decree of 1844, which made Hungarian the official language. In the first decade of the 19th century, there was a revival of the language issue, with the publication of a series of documents on the language. At the Diet of 1807, there were such heated debates about the language that the Viennese court and the secret police thought it would be a good idea to hold a competition to see whether Hungarian was suitable for official use in Hungary. 21 contributions were received for this competition. Almost half of the applicants were from Upper Hungary, all of them Protestants, most of them pastors. They were the founders of one of the earliest scientific-literary societies, Solennia, in 1808. The works of the society's members were published every year in the journal Solennia, which was published in four languages (Latin, Hungarian, German, Slovak). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the case of the student Nicolae Rădulescu, one of the five young people who were included in the Burning Bush (Rugul Aprins) group and arrested in 1958 and seeks to reconstruct the facts by gathering the data from the documents of the former Secret Police and the testimony of the victim, the only current survivor of the group. The reading of the interrogation minutes and the numerous informative notes that can be found in the files drawn up in his name from the Informative and Criminal Fund, constitutes, from a witness' perspective, eloquent evidence of the tragedy of the situation, of the mystification and distortion of reality, of the fabrication of a profile in line with the purposes of the Secret Police. Thus, the analysis of the documents in the CNSAS Archive related to the arrest, investigation and trial provides an idea of the specific mechanisms of an oppressive regime in its struggle to annihilate any form of opposition or resistance. The efforts of student Nicolae Rădulescu to preserve dignity will inevitably bring to our attention the concept of the value of the human being in the context of a totalitarian regime. Another direction of the present article is the pursuit of the legitimacy of the fight waged by Nicolae Rădulescu in the name of preserving the Christian identity in a state that guaranteed religious freedom through the Constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose is to study the biography of P. Kanivets -- one of the active participants in the Ukrainian social democratic movement at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. His activities are noted in numerous scientific works, there is no comprehensive study that reproduces his biography yet. In writing this publication, both traditional and modern methodological approaches were used, incorporating principles of historicism, critical analysis, impartiality, and macro- and micro-approaches to the study of the past. One ofthe primary methods used is the biographical approach. Scientific novelty. The biography ofa little-known figure of Ukrainian history is reproduced, through which the important trends of the social and political life of the Ukrainian lands as part of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries are characterized, in particular, the issue of the development of the revolutionary movement and the functioning of the law enforcement system of the autocracy is considered. Main results. It has been established that P. Kanivets was born into a modest Ukrainian noble family in the Chernihiv region. During his studies at St. Volodymyr University of Kyiv, he actively participated in Ukrainian political organizations, including the Ukrainian Social Democracy Group and the Ukrainian Revolutionary Party. P. Kanivets' involvement with the Ukrainian Social Democratic Union is evident in his efforts to smuggle social democratic newspapers, brochures, and leaflets across the border. This article provides a detailed report of the circumstances surrounding the unsuccessful smuggling of illegal literature on February 8, 1905, and the subsequent arrest of the activist in the village of Altynivka in the Chernihiv region using a micro-historical approach. It is revealed that P. Kanivets was arrested and imprisoned multiple times by the tsarist law enforcement agencies due to his revolutionary actions. However, it is worth noting that the reformed judicial system and the secret police adhered to the principle of the presumption of innocence, as evidenced by their investigations and court decisions. Finally, P. Kanivets' imprisonment ended favorably for him. This was a result of the democratization of the political system following Tsar Nicholas II's publishing of the Manifesto on October 17, 1905, which "granted" political rights and freedoms to the subjects of the Russian Empire. Subsequently, the Decree of the Senate granted amnesty to political prisoners, allowing the hero of our article to regain his freedom and continue his revolutionary activities. Conclusions. Presenting the biography of the Ukrainian social democrat with the help of modern research tools made it possible to obtain new scientific information about the revolutionary movement in the Ukrainian provinces in the context of the functioning of law enforcement and judicial bodies of the Russian Empire at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article intends to bring to the foreground the case of Dan-Grigore Pistol, one of the young people who, in 1958, was convicted in the group “Teodorescu Alex. and others” (also known as the “The Burning Bush” group), together with Șerban Mironescu, George Văsîi, Niculae Rădulescu and Emanoil Mihăilescu. Unlike the students mentioned above, the subject of this research remains one of the mysterious figures of this large-scale spiritual movement, the testimonies of the survivors emphasizing its unique, quasi-anonymous position. The current study required the recovery of information using the files from the National Council for the Study of Secret Police Archives, his files from the Criminal Collection and the searching for information representing the significant bibliographic references of the study. The reading of the pages of his files should be done with caution since they represented the perspective of the Secret Police, a repressive organ, meant to justify the convictions.

The objective of the present study is to analyze the operational methods employed by the secret police agency (Securitate) in exerting influence and control over individuals within the Romanian communist society, as depicted in the film Metronom directed by Alexandru Belc. Through an analysis of the dialogue between the protagonist and a Securitate officer, this research explores the tactics used by the Romanian secret police to manipulate and deceive citizens, preserve power, and maintain social control. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and theories of power, this study reveals the subtle and insidious ways in which the Securitate operated within the Romanian society to silence opposition, spread propaganda, and maintain a stranglehold on society. In this line of work, a set of elements has been delineated, aimed at evaluating the manipulative nature of communist discourse strategies. The findings provide insights into the cinematic portrayal of the Securitate in Romanian communist society, highlighting the use of language and discourse as tools for controlling and manipulating both the population and individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon of transitional justice appears when authoritarian regimes transform into democracies—a topic that has been studied for many years. One main focus has been the question of the responsibility of the former ruling elite and their subordinates, and in particular, criminal responsibility. After the collapse of communism in Europe, secret police informers were perceived as sharing responsibility, alongside the regime's functionaries. The first steps toward bringing them to justice were taken in March 1990 in Czechoslovakia. The process was called "lustration," harking back to an ancient tradition of cleansing newborns of evil. In the jargon of the Czechoslovak security apparatus, "lustrace" meant checking an individual's secret police records. The best known example of lustration took place in Germany, but the basic idea was carried out in all post-communist Central European countries. This kind of transitional justice was not associated with criminal responsibility, and—except in Poland—the courts were not involved in lustration, which was conceived of as a purely administrative procedure. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, only the Baltic states adopted lustration legislation; in other post-Soviet states, such initiatives failed. A similar situation emerged when Yugoslavia disintegrated, where the ethnic wars overshadowed society's memories of communist wrongdoing. Lustration was unique to post-communist states and was not seen in any other transitional context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The secret police, along with the political apparatus of a ruling party or administration, created the backbone of communist regimes and constituted the main tool of State violence. The state of the art within studies on the Polish security apparatus—albeit extremely rich—is entirely focused on archival documents. What is missing from the research on the secret police in Poland is an oral history approach. This article is a pioneer attempt at revealing the operative methods of the Służba Bezpieczeństwa (SB) through interviews with former officers. It aims at reconstructing the mechanism that led the officers to victimize dissidents and how they created moral justifications for their deeds. Asking about their career track, successes and failures, relationships with other officers, private life, and details of daily duty, I tried to glean what made the interviewees become perpetrators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fundamental changes in the management of technological innovation took place over the course of the 40-year history of the German Democratic Republic. This article analyzes management culture in electronics and microelectronics R&D, as well as at Carl Zeiss Jena. R&D directors of the 1950s and 1960s, whose careers started in the Weimar or Nazi era, had a professional ethos and managerial style not rooted in state socialism. This article analyzes their approaches to management according to criteria such as reliance on authority and hierarchy, promotion of communication, and importance attached to political conformity. Developments in R&D management at Carl Zeiss are traced up into the 1980s. The role of the Stasi (secret police) in high tech R&D is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the communicative interactions between actors as a crucial epistemological moment. In particular, it analyses the information exchanges and negotiations between the Polish section of the US-American Cold War broadcaster Radio Free Europe (RFE) and its Polish informants as go-betweens in the 1950s to the early 1970s. Framing these interactions as intimate epistemic economies, the author pays special attention to questions of intimacy, confidentiality, testimony, and trust as well as epistemic uncertainty regarding the identity of actors and the content of messages. Furthermore, following recent scholarship, I investigate the boundaries between the history of science and the history of knowledge by interrogating about the role of subjectivity, ignorance, error, and failure in knowledge making. Finally, two main case studies are used to exemplify the tension between different types of knowledge including rumour and gossip, in the light of the epistemic realm of un/knowledgeability in which the US and Polish secret services operated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the rise and demise of Chaim Gildin (1883/4-1943), one of the most vociferous Soviet Yiddish writers, a pioneer of proletarian poetry and prose. It is also aimed at providing a broader perspective on the perilous Soviet Yiddish literary terrain, especially during the Stalinist repressions. In 1936, Gildin lost his Communist Party membership but was spared from arrest. Nevertheless, the secret police came after him in 1940, generally considered as a "quiet year." His attempts to organize a collective protest-to compel the authorities to reverse the process of closing down Yiddish institutions-might have played a fatal role in his fate. It seems that Yiddish writers of proletarian persuasion generally tended to be more prone to activism than their former "bourgeois" counterparts, and this-rather than their writings-made them more vulnerable during the purges aimed to make the population fully obedient. Although Gildin's secret police file is full of diligently collected information about his "harmful" prose and poetry, his oeuvre clearly played a secondary role in the decision to prosecute him. It seems that this was the pattern for the entire period of Stalinist repressions: while Yiddish literati were not prosecuted specifically for literary motives, investigators would pay much attention to their writings, whose ideological "defects" helped them to make the indictment look more convincing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of the early manifestations of the State Security Committee (KGB)'s penetration of postcommunist Russian politics follows its self-reforms and collective practices during perestroika. A formerly classified KGB journal demonstrates that the KGB stayed ahead of the tide of demokratizatsiya, and managed to institutionalize its influence in the newly minted Soviet legislative bodies by encouraging security officers to run for office and co-opt people's deputies. A purported parliamentary oversight for the security services was undermined from the start. The findings vindicate the KGB's institutional survival, sensitizing scholars to the behaviors of the secret police, which largely remains an omitted variable in the discussions on failed democratic transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Especially after the fall of communism in Romania, Romanian theatre artists were referring nostalgicallyvindictively to what they considered to be a recognition of the importance of their own activity: the inclusion of actors/performers in the categories of hard or harmful labor, just like miners, in the 1950s and generally before 1977. The legend of the similitude between actors and miners is, in fact, part of the symbolic competition with the industrial working class, in which intellectuals felt engaged especially in the 1980s and which played an important role then and in the following decade (a subject which I elaborate in a larger research). This paper investigates the factual basis of this narrative of State legitimation of cultural labor, starting from the legal codification of the miners' central position in the ideology and public discourse of the communist regime and exploring the wage and retirement conditions of (theatre) actors from 1948 until 1989, including through the lenses of their non-public positions, as reflected in the archives of the secret police. Part of a larger framework of the intelligentsia’s antagonism and lack of solidarity with the working class, which has been analyzed at length in post-communism but which tends to not include the specifics of the performing arts in the general cultural framework, it examines the foundations of the persistent discourse placing theatre artists (alongside writers, filmmakers, etc.) as the righteous beneficiaries of the post-1989 transition, aiming to replace miners at the center of the new, capitalist society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a thorough research in different Romanian archives, leading to the discovery of previously unknown documents, this study presents the personal and professional biographies of five communists from Bessarabia acting as illegal residents for the Soviet intelligence, revealing the depth of the Soviet espionage penetration into the Eastern Romanian territory, military and civilian structures. The study covers both the data-gathering activity of the five, before the war, and their spectacular trajectories, as leaders of the new regime, in the first years after the war. Their extraordinary political evolution - but also very similar among the chosen group - is a model story about the human resources the Communists relied on before and during WWII and the troubled relationship between the „old guard" of the „Moscovites" and the thirst for power of the ethnically Romanian new leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During Communism, party members and their relatives were typically privileged elites in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the former Soviet Union (FSU). At the same time, secret police informants were often coerced to spy and report on their fellow citizens. After the fall of Communism, CEE countries and the Baltics underwent decommunization, unlike most FSU countries. This paper is the first to empirically distinguish between these two Communist party regime affiliations and study their long-term implications for the well-being and preferences of affiliated individuals and their relatives. In the FSU, we find that individuals connected to the former Communist party are more satisfied with their lives, but those linked to secret police informants seem to have lower life satisfaction than those without such ties. The life satisfaction benefit of having former Communist regime party connections in the FSU is, on average, equivalent to one month's household income. Simultaneously, the psychological costs of being an informant can amount to two monthly household incomes. In CEE countries, having informant connections is not associated with life satisfaction, but having links to the former Communist party is negatively correlated with subjective well-being. Formal and informal decommunization efforts are an important mechanism behind our findings. We also show that those connected to the former regimes differ from those without such connections in their preferences for democracy and market economy, levels of optimism, and risk tolerance, which provides suggestive evidence for the mechanisms underpinning our findings. Our results underscore that the former Communist regimes produced winners and losers based on the trustee status of their collaborators that decommunization efforts further shaped and solidified. Future decommunization efforts in the FSU may thus have important welfare implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study maps on an unexplored subject: Radu Stanca, in the sights of the former Security, in the context of the surveillance mechanisms, and of the persecutions exerted on the literary group of which he was a part. The point of the exhibition is a unique document, a holographic autobiography (3 pages) which the poet provided to the repressive organs in the 50s. The text, important also through omissions, not only through the revealed information, is analyzed by reconstructing the context on his literary, historical, familial, and political face, being put face to face with a series of archive data relating to the other members of the Circle (correspondence, informative notes from the CNSAS funds & so on). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study examined dossiers of informative pursual (DIPs), a particular type of secret police files, before and after the fall of Communism in Romania. These DIPs were often weaponized against citizens perceived to be anti-government. Design/methodology/approach: Based on Buckland's (2017) concept of a document as an object with physical, mental and social parts, the study used thematic analysis to examine volumes of DIPs from 1945 to 1989 Communist Romania as well as several recorded reactions to the DIPs by the victims who were targeted by the Communist secret police. Findings: Four themes were revealed by the study's findings and discussed within the manuscript: DIPs as unreliable epistemic tools, DIPs as tools to construct the identity of the "People's Enemy," DIPs as weapons to fight the "People's Enemy" and DIPs as tools that could be used in counterattacks during post-Communism, including in political-economic blackmailing. Research limitations/implications: There are two major limitations to research of DIPs. First, since many DIPs have been stolen, copied illicitly or even destroyed, it is difficult to articulate precisely their actual or potential social and political effects. Researchers may often detect these effects only indirectly, based on information leaks in the news. Second, many victims of surveillance practices during the Communist period have chosen not to leave records of their reactions to reading the DIPs that targeted them. Social implications: Current and future comprehensive studies of DIPs can reveal possible parallels between surveillance by the Communist regime and the massive data-collection that occurs in democratic societies, particularly given the increased technical capabilities for processing data in these democratic societies. Originality/value: Within documentation studies, secret police files and document weaponization have been particularly under-researched, therefore this study contributes to a small body of literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates the life of Chinese communist secret police chief Deng Fa and his pioneering influence on the profession of political policing. The Chinese secret police handle intelligence and counterintelligence duties in addition to suppressing political dissent. During the revolutionary period, the secret police's neutralization of hidden threats proved critical to the Chinese Communist Party's rise to power. The present-day secret police still stand guard for the party-state while closely observing its revolutionary traditions. Through examining Deng Fa and his professional legacy, this article hopes to contribute to the academic discourse on China studies and intelligence studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the formation of a transnational secret police corps in the Habsburg Empire in post-Napoleonic Europe. It shows that widespread anxieties in imperigal Austria following several nineteenth-century revolutions (1830, 1848) led to the recruitment of secret police agents, who operated across Europe. These agents were used to keep track of revolutionaries and radical organizations beyond the empire's borders, who – in the authorities' perception – might be detrimental for state security. The article uses a microhistorical approach to analyse this state institution and follows closely the lives and careers of several such agents. It thus delivers a transnational and 'from below' perspective on nineteenth-century Austrian state formation. This perspective, the paper argues, underlines the blurred and complex relations between state and society, and highlights the personal agency of obscure figures such as secret agents and police informers.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the specifics of the surveillance process of the Ukrainian film director Oleksandr Dovzhenko organized by the Soviet secret police. The main focus is on agents' reports about the director's work on the films Earth, Ivan, Shchors, and the screenplay for Ukraine in Flames. The article reveals that Dovzhenko was under permanent secret police surveillance, starting from the end of the 1920s until the end of his life in 1956. This surveillance was well organized; it was largescale and complex in its nature and covered not only his professional but his private life as well. The purpose of the surveillance was to collect and analyze compromising, i.e., anti-Soviet information against the film director and, if necessary, to open a criminal case against him, and make an arrest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discovery of the secret organization «Gladio» in the summer of 1990 led to a harsh controversy on the part of the Communist Party and other opposition forces, in which, for their previous government positions, the President of the Republic Francesco Cossiga and the head of the government Giulio Andreotti were involved. The controversy concerned the legitimacy of «Gladio», accused of having pursued, in the years of the cold war, the aim of preventing the advent of the opposition forces to the government, through the terrorism and the meddling in the democratic game. As the highest representative of the constitutional democratic system born after the Second World War, Cossiga rejected all accusations and claimed, openly and polemically, the legitimacy of the creation of «Gladio», as a part of the «Stay-Behind» nets organized within NATO in many European countries to face an invasion by the Warsaw Pact. Faced with criticism on «Gladio»'s aims also by the majority forces and by the consequent hesitation of the government on the point of the legitimacy of the secret organization, in December 1990 Cossiga threatened an institutional crisis, which in turn led Andreotti to threaten his resignation if the government had not clearly and publicly confirmed its position on «Gladio»'s legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audio technologies that allowed eavesdropping on private conversations were a key tool in Cold War–era surveillance practices. In 1975, in the midst of the Cold War, a criminal police agency called the Fonoscopy Department was established in Czechoslovakia's capital, Prague, to explore the forensic potential of sound analysis for speaker identification. This article reveals for the first time that, aside from the well-known Czechoslovak secret police's wiretapping and eavesdropping activities, an independent government agency engaged in forensic fonoscopy, developing sound-based expertise. Examining the department's practices challenges the notion of mechanical and visually grounded objectivity to show how forensic science negotiated objective knowledge at the intersection of aural analysis and visualization technologies. More generally, the article contributes to debates on utilizing "sonic skills" to produce knowledge and evidence for security and legal purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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How did the state socialist regimes of the Soviet Bloc acquire knowledge about the 'West'? Despite the ready-made ideological framework about the nature of Western capitalism and 'imperialism', state socialist authorities constantly sought out and relied on new information about the societies and governments beyond the Iron Curtain. Since this learning process exceeded the competences and the energies of the Party and state organs, they relied on the observations and assessments of privileged individuals who were allowed to explore the world outside the Soviet Bloc. Focusing on the cultural and scientific contacts between Hungary and the United States, the article analyses a specific form of information-gathering: travel reports that reflected on work and study trips to the 'West'. Hungary, like most of its regional neighbours, became more open in the 1960s, signing a series of economic and cultural agreements with capitalist countries. The regime encouraged tourism and the number of travellers from and to the West quickly increased. Scholarly exchanges with the United States started through the Ford scholarships (since 1964) and then the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) (since 1968), and connections multiplied as Hungarian academics, artists and professionals were integrated into transnational networks. While the authorities could not control and shape all aspects related to the cross-systemic mobility of information, goods and people, they aimed to monitor closely the process through institutional bodies like the Institute for Cultural Relations which had strong ties to the State Security. All officially monitored travellers were required to attend an 'orientation' session before leaving and were expected to produce a written report afterwards in which they evaluated their trip, their hosts and the experience. The article investigates the form and the function of such travel reports in the wider context of covert and public knowledge production and dissemination about the 'West' in state socialist countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although gay espionage is a well-established Cold War trope, this article analyzes new evidence that intelligence agencies in divided Berlin actively sought to recruit gay men. They did so because they believed that gay men's contacts in the opaque and class-crossing queer subculture made them ideally suited for the purposes of intelligence work. Using files from the archives of the East German secret police, this article sheds light on these practices through the experiences of a gay agent recruited in 1960. It analyzes his experiences in order to question the relationship between sexuality and the modern security state. In so doing, the article highlights a gap in the Foucauldian model of surveillance, revealing not only how surveillance could play a permissive, rather than a disciplinary, role in queer lives, but also how the paranoias of the security state could reinforce themselves through the surveillance of subcultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]