In the profession's present turn to cultural history, state institutions are often neglected. Here they are the center of attention. This new study focuses on the internal cultures of the postwar political police in communist eastern Europe. Molly Pucci draws widely on primary sources to compare the practices and personnel of the agencies and then formal institutions set up to secure the new communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. She demonstrates more differences in their origins and their evolution than we might expect from the presumption of an imposed Soviet blueprint. Differences are most prominent in her first part, the creation of communist regimes from 1945 to 49, less so in the second part on their consolidation and crises from 1950 to 54.
The first chapter begins appropriately with Poland. Large armed bands mainly on its eastern borderlands resisted the new communist regime into 1947. To put them down, a new Security Office (UB) was hastily assembled. Less than half were party members, many wartime partisans with no communist ties. A new security ministry, MPB, with party members to oversee the UB and suppress looting, especially of departing Germans, struggled to establish centralized authority into 1949. Only then were non-party members excluded and did Soviet advisors arrive.
For different reasons, creating ministries with powers as political police also went slowly in Czechoslovakia and East Germany. There was of course no communist government in Czechoslovakia until the coup in 1948. The large Communist Party (KSČ) presence in the displaced coalition had allowed it to create its own security service (ZOBII) in 1946, but with no powers of arrest. From February 1948, the new KSČ regime hastily organized Action Committees to suppress or arrest political opponents. By 1949, Soviet advisors had joined Bulgarians, the Czechs, and Hungarians for the Slovaks to assist in forming a formal security service. On their example, a separate institution, the StB, was set up alongside the Interior Ministry. In Soviet-occupied East Germany (SBZ), the Soviet NKGB held such powers until 1949. It arrested large numbers and quickly put them in labor camps. From 1947, the East German authorities were allowed to set up a regular police force (the Volkspolizei), staffed by returning POWs, and a small K5 unit of political police to process cases from the NKGB. In 1949, the Soviets closed their camps, and only in February 1950 could the East German regime set up its own Ministry for State Security (MfS).
The book's second part begins with the László Rajk trial in Hungary in September 1949. Its prosecution of a Communist Party leader provides the focal point for the three further country chapters. After sending members to attend and learn from the trial, their respective security services and their personnel adopted “Bolshevik practices.” They used prolonged torture in interrogations, expanded surveillance with networks of informers, and established schools for training their increasing numbers. We see only brief mention of the separate sections for foreign intelligence created in 1951 and some attention to the arrest of peasants resisting collectivization. Pucci's last three chapters concentrate instead on the services’ own Stalinist search for internal enemies in the party leaderships and in the security services themselves. Their trials relied on brutal interrogations and the self-criticism forced on Rajk.
In their consolidation, we learn how the Polish and Czechoslovak security services took contrasting advantage of antisemitism. In Poland, PRB investigations of party members culminated in August 1951 with the arrest of Władysław Gomulka, party secretary since the Soviets recreated it in 1943. Its new Department X then used charges of wartime or prewar-antisemitism, which led to arrest and forced confessions from other party leaders in 1952. But the death of Iosif Stalin and a leader's defection in 1953 discredited Department X, the dismissal of its Jewish members sowing seeds for future antisemitism. Released from prison in 1955, Gomulka returned as party secretary after the 1956 worker strikes. In Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, Stalinist antisemitism fed the arrest of party Leader Rudolf Slansky in November 1951, and after his public hanging, the arrest of major Jewish figures and others in the StB like Josef Pavel. Released from prison in 1955, he returned to head the briefly reformed StB in the Prague Spring of 1968.
The East German MfS faced no such internal turmoil. Its major challenge was the workers’ large-scale uprising in June 1953, put down by Soviet troops. The Stazi was subsequently able to expand its membership to by far the largest of the three security services. With no wartime resistance fighters to vet, only a few prewar party members were purged. Current members and the population, what Pucci calls transnational Stalinism, with more surveillance but less violence, could live on unbroken to 1989.
