In recent decades, there has been an explosion in scholarship on communist secret police forces in Central and East Europe, extending from studies of the Stasi in the west to the KGB in the east. This new literature can be difficult to access, however, since the many new books and articles on the subject appear in a variety of different languages and, as a result, are not always in close conversation with each other across national and linguistic lines.

Molly Pucci's new book is a groundbreaking addition to the scholarly literature that addresses this problem through an analysis of the creation of communist secret police forces in three countries: Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. Pucci examines the security police's history in each country between World War II and 1953, making her book a useful study not just of policing, but of transnational Stalinism, communist state-building, the use of purges and show trials in the region, and the establishment of communism in Central and East Europe more broadly. Where past studies have too often portrayed the Eastern Bloc as an “appendage of the Soviet Union” (284) and have viewed the secret police throughout the region as an “impersonal, monolithic apparatus” (3), Security Empire shows that there was a striking level of diversity in the motivations of secret police officers and in the development of secret police forces across the region. The book provides detailed vignettes of security police officers in each country, traces the history of each police force in the early Cold War era, and makes a compelling case that the establishment of Central European surveillance states was a complex and locally specific process rather than the simple imposition of a Soviet model of policing.

The book is divided into two parts, each of which includes chapters on the secret police in each of the three countries under study. Part I analyzes the establishment of the security police in the context of the communist revolution across East Europe, showing that the secret police forces of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany took shape in different ways between 1945 and the end of the decade. In Poland, the MBP police force had its origins in military-style organizations that took part in the conflict between communists and noncommunists for control of the country. In Czechoslovakia, the security police force known as the StB arose from communist party networks that provided information to the party leadership before Action Committees purged state institutions of noncommunists in February 1948. In East Germany, by contrast, the Stasi—or MfS—had its origins in an elite branch of the criminal police known as K5, which collaborated closely with Soviet occupation authorities in denazification campaigns and other regime priorities. The creation of new security police forces did not follow a single cookie-cutter approach pushed by the NKVD, Pucci shows, but rather followed a subtly different process in each country, responding to the distinct political situations in each locale and building on the agency of a variety of actors (both domestic and foreign) in each national context.

Part II examines the creation, consolidation, and development of all three secret police forces from the late 1940s until 1953, touching on questions of party-police relations and looking at the purges and show trials that followed the arrest of László Rajk in Hungary in 1949. Each country, Pucci shows, experienced high turnover in police ranks, as a more radical generation took over from its battle-tested predecessors. Pucci discusses the growth of blanket surveillance (as opposed to more targeted policing methods) and of efforts to monitor officers' private lives and to purge the politically unqualified from the ranks. Her comparison of the Stasi to the MBP and StB is particularly telling: the Stasi was slower to build blanket surveillance networks than its Czechoslovak and Polish counterparts, and the MBP oversaw more agents and informers and made use of more sophisticated policing methods as late as 1953. Pucci argues that the Stasi set the groundwork under late Stalinism for its later expansion but questions the idea that the secret police was the main implementer of Stalinist policies in East Germany in the years covered by this book.

Security Empire is based on the judicious and intelligent analysis of archival sources in five languages, and its comparative analysis alone would make it a worthy addition to the literature. Pucci is convincing in her argument that Central European surveillance states were not imposed smoothly by Soviet power, and her reading of sources is careful and insightful: she writes sensibly of the problems with reading interrogation transcripts uncritically and shows keen attention to operational details and local particularities in her sources. Overall, she is convincing in arguing for a “middle ground” between arguments for the primacy of local perpetrators and that of Soviet actors, arguing that “while the Soviets frequently set a general line from above, particularly after 1948, campaigns were acted on or ignored, and succeeded or failed, based on local initiative and participation” (16–17).

To be sure, there are ways in which the book might have been improved. Although Pucci is generally effective in arguing against the monolithic nature of the region's police states, her chapters reveal many similarities between them—and a larger number of direct comparisons could have helped her sharpen her analysis and better explain the interaction between local and regional factors. The nature of Soviet influence also could have been elucidated further: Security Empire notes the role of events like the anti-cosmopolitan campaign in shaping Central European trends, but Pucci's descriptions of party-police relations and state purges sometimes had parallels in the Soviet politics of late Stalinism that could have been investigated further. Still, these are at most minor flaws in a major study that deserves the close attention of scholars interested in communist policing and party politics in Central Europe and beyond.