Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc

Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc PDF Author: Valentina Glajar
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571139265
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
New essays exploring the tension between the versions of the past in secret police files and the subjects' own personal memories-and creative workings-through-of events.

Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc

Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc PDF Author: Valentina Glajar
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571139265
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book Here

Book Description
New essays exploring the tension between the versions of the past in secret police files and the subjects' own personal memories-and creative workings-through-of events.

Security Empire

Security Empire PDF Author: Molly Pucci
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300242573
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
A compelling examination of the establishment of the secret police in Communist Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Eastern Germany ​This book examines the history of early secret police forces in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War. Molly Pucci delves into the ways their origins diverged from the original Soviet model based on differing interpretations of communism and local histories. She also illuminates the difference between veteran agents who fought in foreign wars and younger, more radical agents who combatted "enemies of communism" in the Stalinist terror in Eastern Europe.

The Secret Police and the Religious Underground in Communist and Post-Communist Eastern Europe

The Secret Police and the Religious Underground in Communist and Post-Communist Eastern Europe PDF Author: James A. Kapaló
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000426068
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This book addresses the complex intersection of secret police operations and the formation of the religious underground in communist-era Eastern Europe. It discusses how religious groups were perceived as dangerous to the totalitarian state whilst also being extremely vulnerable and yet at the same time very resourceful. It explores how this particular dynamic created the concept of the "religious underground" and produced an extremely rich secret police archival record. In a series of studies from across the region, the book explores the historical and legal context of secret police entanglement with religious groups, presents case studies on particular anti-religious operations and groups, offers methodological approaches to the secret police materials for the study of religions, and engages in contemporary ethical and political debates on the legacy and meaning of the archives in post-communism.

Hidden Galleries

Hidden Galleries PDF Author: James A. Kapaló
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643912633
Category : Hungary
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
In a series of richly illustrated short essays, Hidden Galleries presents the ways in which the secret police of the communist-era and before collected and curated material religious images and objects in their archives. Based on painstaking documentation by a team of eight historians, anthropologists and scholars of religion in archives in Hungary, Romania, Ukraine and Moldova, this volume offers a rare window on the creativity of underground religious life, and its ideological representation as well as exploring the significance for religious communities and wider society today of this legacy of repression and surveillance.

Police Aesthetics

Police Aesthetics PDF Author: Cristina Vatulescu
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804775729
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The documents emerging from the secret police archives of the former Soviet bloc have caused scandal after scandal, compromising revered cultural figures and abruptly ending political careers. Police Aesthetics offers a revealing and responsible approach to such materials. Taking advantage of the partial opening of the secret police archives in Russia and Romania, Vatulescu focuses on their most infamous holdings—the personal files—as well as on movies the police sponsored, scripted, or authored. Through the archives, she gains new insights into the writing of literature and raises new questions about the ethics of reading. She shows how police files and films influenced literature and cinema, from autobiographies to novels, from high-culture classics to avant-garde experiments and popular blockbusters. In so doing, she opens a fresh chapter in the heated debate about the relationship between culture and politics in twentieth-century police states.

Secrets and Truth

Secrets and Truth PDF Author: Katherine Verdery
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 6155225990
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Nothing in Soviet-style communism was as shrouded in mystery as its secret police. Its paid employees were known to few and their actual numbers remain uncertain. Its informers and collaborators operated clandestinely under pseudonyms and met their officers in secret locations. Its files were inaccessible, even to most party members. The people the secret police recruited or interrogated were threatened so effectively that some never told even their spouses, and many have held their tongues to this day, long after the regimes fell. With the end of communism,ÿmany ofÿtheÿnewly established governments?among them Romania?s?opened their secret police archives. From those files,ÿas well asÿher personal memories, the author has carried out historical ethnography of the Romanian Securitate.ÿSecrets and Truthsÿis not only of historical interest but has implications for understanding the rapidly developing ?security state? of the neoliberal present. ÿ

Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe

Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe PDF Author: Valentina Glajar
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1640121986
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Book Description
During the Cold War, stories of espionage became popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, capturing the imagination of readers and filmgoers alike as secret police quietly engaged in surveillance under the shroud of impenetrable secrecy. And curiously, in the post-Cold War period there are no signs of this enthusiasm diminishing. The opening of secret police archives in many Eastern European countries has provided the opportunity to excavate and narrate for the first time forgotten spy stories. Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe brings together a wide range of accounts compiled from the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate, and the Ukrainian KGB files. The stories are a complex amalgam of fact and fiction, history and imagination, past and present. These stories of collusion and complicity, betrayal and treason, right and wrong, and good and evil cast surprising new light on the question of Cold War certainties and divides.

Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration in Communist Eastern Europe

Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration in Communist Eastern Europe PDF Author: Péter Apor
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1783087250
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
The collection of essays in Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration in Communist Eastern Europe addresses institutions that develop the concept of collaboration, and examines the function, social representation and history of secret police archives and institutes of national memory that create these histories of collaboration. The essays provide a comparative account of collaboration/participation across differing categories of collaborators and different social milieux throughout East-Central Europe. They also demonstrate how secret police files can be used to produce more subtle social and cultural histories of the socialist dictatorships. By interrogating the ways in which post-socialist cultures produce the idea of, and knowledge about, “collaborators,” the contributing authors provide a nuanced historical conception of “collaboration,” expanding the concept toward broader frameworks of cooperation and political participation to facilitate a better understanding of Eastern European communist regimes.

Iron Curtain

Iron Curtain PDF Author: Anne Applebaum
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385536437
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 803

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Book Description
In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.

A State of Secrecy

A State of Secrecy PDF Author: Alison Lewis
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1640124853
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Secret police agencies such as the East German Ministry for State Security kept enormous quantities of secrets about their own citizens, relying heavily on human modes of data collection in the form of informants. To date little is known about the complicated and conflicted lives of informers, who often lived in a perpetual state of secrecy. This is the first study of its kind to explore this secret surveillance society, its arcane rituals, and the secret lives it fostered. Through a series of interlocking, in-depth case studies of informers in literature and the arts, A State of Secrecy seeks answers to the question of how the collusion of the East German intelligentsia with the Stasi was possible and sustainable. It draws on extensive original archive research conducted in the BStU (Stasi Records Agency), as well as eyewitness testimony, literature, and film, and uses a broad array of methods from biography, sociology, cultural studies, and literary history to political science and surveillance and intelligence studies. In teasing out the various kinds of entanglements of intellectuals with power during the Cold War, Lewis presents a microhistory of the covert activities of those writers who colluded with the secret police.