Introduction

Summary

In a system of ubiquitous spying, where everybody may be a police agent and each individual feels himself under constant surveillance […] every word becomes equivocal and subject to retrospective “interpretation.”

—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

The Secret Police Files of the Eastern Bloc

WHEN THE SECRET POLICE SERVICES OF THE FORMER EASTERN BLOC were dismantled at the end of the Cold War, they left an ambivalent legacy for successor governments. The extensive historical archives that were salvaged during the transition—the copious quantities of paper documents either left behind in the confusion of shifting relations of power or rescued by farsighted reformers—are damning evidence of the activities of the disproportionately large political police forces that mushroomed in Central and Eastern European countries under communist rule. Unlike many physical remains of these regimes that have been consigned to the dustbin of history, the files have miraculously survived. As material remnants of the Cold War from a predigital era of surveillance, they have proved to be an invaluable source of knowledge about the pervasive systems of personalized secret policing of domestic populations that involved alarming numbers of collaborators. However, for each of the three countries at the center of this book—Germany, Romania, and Hungary— the secret police files have posed considerable challenges. The archives contain many personal and state secrets, and exposing these has been a fraught and controversial process. The files are for the most part textbased artifacts and must be read with particular care. Often encrypted in impenetrable textual formats and encoded in arcane language—the now historical lingo of Cold War espionage—the archives’ secrets must first be deciphered before they can be meaningfully used.

The secret police files reflect a textually mediated reality about Cold War surveillance practices that sheds light on the deeply suspicious mindsets of Eastern bloc regimes. When the activities of secret police services in Eastern Europe were first revealed in the early 1990s, it was not their foreign intelligence branches that came under most scrutiny but the surveillance of their own populations. While the communist regimes expected unconditional loyalty from their own citizens, all too often they refused to reciprocate this trust, turning individuals into “enemies of the people” and “traitors of the nation,” sometimes at the slightest hint of nonconformist behavior.