This eclectic yet engaging collection tackles a controversial topic: the role of the secret police in former communist systems and the churches, which is controversial because some heroes of the revolutions of 1989 have been tarnished by complicity with the secret police and also because the revelations from the files have produced contested memory and history.
While not avoiding the issue of complicity entirely, the authors of this volume seek to use the secret police records as a window into the functioning of the secret police itself and its perception of religious groups. The contributors focus primarily, though not exclusively, on the underground existence of minority religions, seeing them as understudied and offering particular insights into resilience, adaptation, and agency by religious groups. Within this subset, most of the contributors explore the “lived experience” of religious groups, rather than their institutional relationship with the respective regime. In doing so, as James Kapaló notes, they find that the secret police files offer insights into the “unintended archival ‘traces’ of religious material worlds and agencies” (261).
Although all are viewed as subversive by the regimes, the groups vary in terms of the circumstances of their marginalized existence. Some are schismatic groups (such as the True Orthodox Church in Soviet Ukraine, New Orientation Protestants in Czechoslovakia); others are sectarians (Hare Krishna in Soviet Lithuania, Baptists in Romania, Jehovah's Witnesses in Hungary, Romania, and Soviet Moldavia); still others are forced into illegality (monastic orders, Greek Catholics). The authors suggest certain common features of these groups—repression that pre-dated the communist period, an affinity for clandestine activity, apocalyptic views, and relative lack of hierarchy—which made them more suspect to the secret police than the traditional national churches. In some cases, their vulnerability was heightened by foreign/transnational ties (Inochentists to Romania, Jehovah's Witnesses to the US) and their indirect resistance to regime norms (rejection of military service and political participation, and tendency to proselytize).
Official archives chronicle primarily state relations with the legally registered churches; the underground churches maintained few records themselves. Filling this double vacuum, the secret police files, though subjective and motivated/distorted by ideology and efforts at control, offer scarce and credible evidence regarding these marginal religious groups.
Though the authors’ findings confirm the well-documented methods of the secret police (surveillance, infiltration, control, subversion), they shed light on some of the unintended consequences of their practices. The use of “model criminal cases” (70–72), templates of reporting, and career training all suggest a certain bureaucratic routinization and professionalization; yet plagiarized masters degrees (202–4), application of conservative norms of sexual morality (310–13), not to mention the primitive understanding of religion and church practices all reveal an organization too rigid and ill-equipped to do more than exercise coercion and seek control over a putative hidden enemy or a “co-constructed clerical reaction” (202).
Quite innovative and intriguing is the application of participant-observation and ethnographic approaches to analyze “vernacular religion” through the lens of the secret police (Ch. 10). Curtailing pilgrimages to the site of a 1965 apparition of Mary in Poland (Ch. 7; use of “photo elicitation” in studying the case of a crackdown on an underground Pentecostal group in Hungary (Ch. 11); food and financial records of Inochentists in Romania (Ch. 12), all are used by the respective authors to develop alternative narratives to that of victim and oppressor. One need not be convinced of the theoretical notion of “performative religion” to see the need for a corrective framing and value in the methods used.
In the final section, authors approach the question of coming-to-terms-with-the-past by the religious groups, albeit not systematically. The Romanian case gets more treatment in excellent chapters on the politics of the Securitate files, the work of the presidential commission, the neo-Protestant reckoning, and the braking action of the Romanian Orthodox Church (Ch. 13, 15). Closed files in Yugoslavia make accountability very difficult (Ch. 14). The efforts have been halting, uneven, and politicized, and the editors highlight the “varieties” and “complexity of interpretation” (27, 28). Key cases such as the former GDR and Poland are not dealt with in this volume, but the evidence of the Romanian Orthodox Church mirrors the experience of these traditional national churches in their reluctance.
Some limits of this collection should be noted. Though affirming the need for comparative work, the cases tend to focus heavily on a few countries (Romania and Hungary, in particular) and several western Soviet republics. Jehovah's Witnesses enjoy treatment in several chapters; it could be useful to study Mormon or Christian Scientist groups, as has been done extensively in the case of the GDR. In some cases, more context would be useful (extensive Catholic samizdat in Lithuania as context for the Hare Krishna phenomenon). This reader found himself looking for treatment of the oppositional “Catholic base communities” in the Hungarian cases.
On the issue of resistance, the editors see the religious groups as exercising “conscious and unconscious forms of defiance, resilience, and creative agency” (11), not merely the artificial construct of the regime nor derivative of their apolitical identity. In their view, “the concrete actions taken undermined or disrupted the state's ability to pursue its social, cultural and economic policies” (10). Yet the traditional churches, or dissenters in them, likely did more to “undermine or disrupt” the regimes in places like Poland, East Germany, or even Czechoslovakia.
The editors highlight the “enormous potential for further research” on underground religions (11). The heavy reliance on Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Moldovan archives for the Soviet cases underscores that much of this potential lies in Russian secret police archives that continue to remain beyond the reach of scholars. The lessons from the Romanian Orthodox Church offer some insight into why that potential remains unrealized.
