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

By Anthem Press

Whilst debates over secret agents and the public revelation of lists of former collaborators have fascinated both post-Communist societies and the wider world, it is surprising how little has been written either on the nature of Communist-era collaboration or the processes through which post-Communist societies have sought to make sense of what collaboration was, and how it should be dealt with in the present. This is surprising given the amount of work that has been produced on the themes of resistance and victimization.

Unlike more popular (and often lurid) accounts of collaboration, which naturalise the concept as an obvious and incontestable characterization of Communist-era behaviour, ‘Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration in Communist Eastern Europe’ rather interrogates the ways in which Post-Socialist cultures produce the idea of, and knowledge about, ‘collaborators’. It addresses those institutions which produce the concept and examines the function, social representation and history of secret police archives and institutes of national memory that create these histories of collaboration. This work seeks to provide a more nuanced historical conception of ‘collaboration’, expanding the concept towards broader frameworks of cooperation and political participation in order to facilitate a better understanding of the maintenance of Eastern European Communist regimes.

This work contends that secret police files are too often used to provide a one dimensional historical account of the ‘mechanisms of oppression’. It demonstrates, through case studies, how secret police files can be used to produce more subtle social and cultural histories of the socialist dictatorships. Of particular importance is the focus on the microhistorical. Contributions here explore the motivations and moralities of becoming an agent, the personal decisions and social consequences such steps involved as well as the everyday milieus in which agents lived and were active. This book analyses communities of cooperation, with particular focus on local and mid-level party organizations, organs of the church organs and artist or intellectual networks. Ranging across differing categories of collaborators and different social milieux across East-Central Europe, this work provides a comparative account of collaboration and participation with a range hitherto unavailable.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Sep 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781783087259

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

Anthem Series on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies

The Anthem Series on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies publishes original research on the economy, politics, sociology, anthropology and history of the region. The series aims to promote critical scholarship in the field and has built a reputation for uncompromising editorial and production standards. The breadth of the series reflects our commitment to promoting original scholarship on Russian and East European studies to a global audience.

Series Editor

Balázs Apor—Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Editorial Board

Bradley F. Abrams—President, Czechoslovak Studies Association, USA

Jan C. Behrends—Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam, Germany

Dennis Deletant—University College London, UK

Tomasz Kamusella—University of St. Andrews, UK

Walter G. Moss—Eastern Michigan University, USA

Marshall T. Poe—University of Iowa, USA

Arfon Rees—University of Birmingham, UK

Maria Todorova—University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

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

Edited by Péter Apor, Sándor Horváth and James Mark

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2017

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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© 2017 Péter Apor, Sándor Horváth and James Mark editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors.

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-723-5 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-723-4 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Collaboration, Cooperation and Political Participation in the Communist Regimes

Péter Apor, Sándor Horváth and James Mark

Part I. INSTITUTES OF MEMORY

Chapter 1.A Dissident Legacy and Its Aspects: The Agency of the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records of the Former GDR (BStU) in United Germany

Bernd Schaefer

Chapter 2.Goodbye Communism, Hello Remembrance: Historical Paradigms and the Institute of National Remembrance in Poland

Barbara Klich-Kluczewska

Chapter 3.The Exempt Nation: Memory of Collaboration in Contemporary Latvia

Ieva Zake

Chapter 4.Institutes of Memory in Slovakia and the Czech Republic: What Kind of Memory?

Martin Kovanic

Chapter 5.Closing the Past—Opening the Future: Victims and Perpetrators of the Communist Regime in Hungary

Péter Apor and Sándor Horváth

Chapter 6.To Collaborate and to Punish: Democracy and Transitional Justice in Romania

Florin Abraham

Part II. SECRET LIVES

Chapter 7.Resistance through Culture or Connivance through Culture: Difficulties of Interpretation; Nuances, Errors and Manipulations

Gabriel Andreescu

Chapter 8.Intellectuals between Collaboration and Independence in Late Socialism: Politics and Everyday Life at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague

Matěj Spurný, Jakub Jareš and Katka Volná

Chapter 9.Deal with the Devil: Intellectuals and Their Support of Tito’s Rule in Yugoslavia (1945–80)

Josip Mihaljević

Chapter 10.A Spy in Underground: Polish Samizdat Stories

Paweł Sowiński

Chapter 11.Entangled Stories: On the Meaning of Collaboration with the Securitate

Cristina Petrescu

Part III. Collaborating Communities

Chapter 12.Finding the Way Around: Regional-Level Party Activists and Collaboration

Marína Zavacká

Chapter 13.Wer aber ist die Partei? History and Historiography

Tamás Kende

Chapter 14.Just a Simple Priest: Remembering Cooperation with the Communist State in the Catholic Church in Postcommunist Slovakia

Agáta Šústová Drelová

Chapter 15.Unofficial Collaborators in the Tourism Sector (GDR and Hungary)

Krisztina Slachta

Conclusion

Péter Apor and Sándor Horváth

Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION: COLLABORATION, COOPERATION AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION IN THE COMMUNIST REGIMES

Péter Apor, Sándor Horváth and James Mark

The Memory of Collaboration

Following the fall of the communist dictatorships in East Central Europe in 1989, the question seemed obvious: Should one forget or remember? Post-1989 governments of the region responded to this question by establishing various commissions, specialized archives and institutes of memory charged with the task of clarifying the recent past, uncovering the truth, and furthering the search for justice.¹ The urgency of the issue was also palpable in questions raised over what would happen if the past were to begin to fade and no one were able to exercise any control over what was actually remembered of it. The mission statement of the largest memory institution in the region, the Institute of National Remembrance in Poland, reflected this understanding: it characterized its work as preserving the remembrance about a great number of victims, losses and damages suffered by the Polish Nation and the patriotic traditions of the Polish Nation’s struggles with occupiers as a race against time to honor the heroes who have been consigned to oblivion for years.²

Dealing with collaboration became one of the central questions for those who advocated a reckoning with the recent past. In postcommunist Eastern Europe it was generally argued that societies had to follow the example of Western European ways of coming to terms with the issue of collaboration with the Nazi regime, which became a pressing issue, particularly in Germany and France after 1968.³ In Eastern Europe, a variety of approaches emerged. For some, it was simply an impassioned call to make the files of the secret police and the lists of operatives and agents accessible to the public—an act that had the potential to reveal the truth about the exercise of communist power: truth that had been kept secret for so long. Victims’ associations, often backed by pressure groups and public intellectuals, connected postcommunist morality to questions of transparency and sincerity about the past: if the perpetrators could now be discovered, then, on moral grounds they had to be.⁴ For many civil rights activists, the opening up of files and—for some—the cleansing of public life of the perpetrators of the previous system through so-called lustration, were emotional demands for the truth.⁵ These campaigns were also conceptualized as an important test of postcommunist society’s moral strength to face up to its dictatorial past.⁶ For others, making the files accessible and pursuing lustration would strengthen the growth of democratic institutions and values. They argued that freedom of speech required the freedom to access files produced by a non-democratic regime without restrictions. In other arguments, it was imperative for economic growth: without it, corrupt self-interested economic networks forged in the late socialist period would continue to have a deleterious hold over the postsocialist economy.⁷

Some opposed such understandings. The use of files to decommunize society was an undemocratic act based on intolerance and was in itself a reproduction of the modus operandi of the communist system.⁸ Others, including ex-communists and former dissidents, called for reconciliation over revenge in the spirit of the negotiated transitions of 1989.⁹ Some former dissidents initially argued that avoiding lustration in fact assisted the reintegration, into the new system, of forces that supported dictatorship, thereby enabling the gradual reshaping of their values of former collaborators over the longer term—although faced with the maintenance of late socialist economic networks in postcommunism, some were later to reject that view.¹⁰ Others reacted to the over-politicization of collaboration and victimhood by anticommunist conservatives from the 1990s, coming to view the issue more as a deleterious and divisive aspect of contemporary politics than a sincere reckoning with the past.¹¹

Regardless of the merits of so-called de-communization, both public discussions and scholarship about collaborators are carried out in quite narrow terms. Frequently institutionalized in the work of researchers employed to archive and research the records of the former secret police, the topic becomes limited to lists of, and sensationalist stories about, informants and agents—an approach encouraged by the need for scandal in the media, too. This limits our understanding of collaboration: it became most commonly conceptualized as an individualized act carried out by the morally deficient, who can now be blamed, rather than a phenomenon with a history and broader societal context; as evidence of totalitarian control of state over society, rather than as evidence of the complexities of the relationship between state and society; and, finally, as a phenomenon that should be limited to cooperation with the most demonized institutions of the former regime, such as the secret police. In short, it still seems difficult to go beyond the fascination with agent-hunting stories presented as evidence of a totalitarian evil past. These broader public framings of collaboration have influenced wider scholarship. Only a little research goes beyond this, discussing the complexities of state–society relations embedded in stories of collaboration, or addressing the complex issues of constructing and interpreting narratives about secret agents and the hunt for them.¹²

This book aims to go beyond such secret-agent hunting stories. Rather, it asks: How and why has collaboration become a central organizing concept for understanding the past in postcommunist societies? How have contemporary values shaped understandings of what constitutes collaboration? How might we develop a more sophisticated approach to research on this topic? To these ends, Part I of the book analyzes the social functions of the institutes and public debates regarding former secret agents and explores how they shaped the memory of collaboration with the communist regimes. It then asks the following questions: How have these public debates over collaboration affected the way in which historians have approached the study of cooperation with communist authorities? Can we, through questioning these dominant conceptualizations, enable new ways of understanding political engagement with the institutions of former communist regimes? In parts II and III, through the stories of both individual collaborators and collaborating communities, we examine the various ways in which the history of cooperation might be incorporated in broader histories of regime power, legitimacy, social participation and everyday life.

Producing concepts of collaboration

Part I of the volume seeks to interrogate the ways in which postsocialist cultures produce knowledge about collaborators or political participants. The chapters examine the functions, social representation and history of those national institutions, secret police archives and institutes of national memory that played key roles in the production and promotion of the idea of the collaborator—such as the Stasi Records Agency (BStU) in Germany, the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, IPN) in Poland, or the secret police archives in other East Central European countries. In addition to making critical institutional histories a subject of inquiry, the first six chapters also explore how these institutions themselves contribute to the shaping of the memory of collaboration.

Although the idea of establishing official state-supported processes to address the legacies of a dictatorial past was common to many so-called third-wave democratizations, in East Central Europe this took a very particular form: institutions such as the BStU in Germany, the IPN in Poland, the Nation’s Memory Institute in Slovakia, the Historical Office (later State Security Archives, ÁBTL) in Hungary, or the National Council for Studying Security Archives (CNSAS) in Romania. These were founded only in order to safeguard the documents of the state security services or, in some cases, also to publicize the crimes of the past or pursue lustration. Such types of institutions, which made claims about their capacity to reveal the truth about the past based on their custody of huge amounts of material produced by the communist regime’s security forces, were the product of a set of specific historical circumstances. In one sense, they were part of an emerging global culture of memory, defined by a growing power of liberal human rights that emphasized the importance of remembering atrocities and state crimes against the individual.¹³ Yet its particular fetishization of the file as the repository of truth—particularly striking given that, in effect, it contained the one-sided witnessing by the perpetrators of acts they often framed as subversive or criminal behavior—was the product of regional understandings of the communist experience. First, many in postcommunist populations believed in the authenticity of these security service documents because, before 1989, they had been hidden: Why were they kept secret if they did not reveal important facts that ordinary people were not supposed to see? Second, unlike other third-wave transitions in which oral testimony was part of the work of state-sponsored recoveries of memory (e.g., in history commissions), there was particular power granted to the written record of the past. Oral history—in spite of several important research initiatives—remained marginal in the construction of the public image of the pre-1989 period.¹⁴ This was connected to the nature of regional historical cultures, which usually held up the written bureaucratic document as the ideal historical source, imbuing it with the values of precision, reliability and authenticity. This may have been a legacy of the enduring sociocultural status of state service and bureaucracy derived from the historical experience of former Austrian- and Prussian-directed bureaucracies—a reputation that survived the communist period. And why were large permanent institutions, rather than short-term history commissions or investigative bodies, attractive in many cases? This may well have been one of the communist era’s parting gifts: If the truth of the past was contained in the gargantuan collections of Communism’s bureaucracies, then a project of equal size had to be constructed in order to contain it and turn it back against itself. Moreover, the founders of these projects often believed that the mentalities of the communist past still had a strange hold over postcommunist populations: hence, only a long-term, committed, institutionalized project of re-remembering the past could save postcommunism from the grip of history. The belief that this could only be achieved through major new institutions was also a result of disappointment with the nature of the political settlement, which in many countries had never seriously challenged the maintenance of old communist-era networks in other ministries—thus sprang the belief that only an institution constructed from scratch, staffed by the politically reliable with little relationship to the former regime, could be trusted to carry out such duties.

It was striking that such institutions were careful to avoid discussions over the political movements or the context that lay behind their foundation.¹⁵ They were committed to presenting an apolitical image of themselves as impartial arbiters of a complex and difficult past that stood above politics and that could call on the authority of the archive to overcome the legacies of the communist era. Yet they were deeply political interventions. Indeed, the very idea that citizens need to be compensated for the denial of information by dictatorships in the form of free access to secret service files (so-called informational compensation), or that their records on those who had held state office could be used to support the processes of lustration, were of course shaped by political attitudes toward both the past and present.¹⁶ It was only after having fulfilled these functions that they served as archival resources for scholars and researchers.¹⁷

In a manner that at first glance may seem somewhat paradoxical, the institutions that were originally created in order to safeguard the documents of the state secret services and further the process of lustration, did not always facilitate research into the files. Indeed, often everyday academic work at these institutions was more difficult than it was in ordinary public archives, where party and governmental documents and court cases of the communist period, were normally kept. This was due neither to the practices of the archivists who worked in them, nor to financial constraints. Indeed, these bodies had significantly more funding than the other archives with communist-era collections and had to struggle with financial problems.¹⁸ Rather, these institutions, founded in acts of elaborate political ritual—spectacular symbolic acts of lawmaking broadly publicized by media and often with major political figures sitting on these institutions’ boards—were then required to grant the documents of the state secret services a particular status and protection, often out of concern for the protection of information or personal privacy. Sometimes they had only vaguely defined missions.¹⁹

In recent decades, these institutions have undergone a change in image. Increasingly distanced from the politicized moment of their founding, and blessed with resources, they have attracted some of the best professionals away from other academic and archival posts and have attempted to present themselves less as institutions of the state and more as specialized archives and professional research institutes. Nevertheless, historians and archivists have often encountered professional conflicts—their identities as state bureaucrats in competition with their identities as scholars and historians. The political mission of the uncovering of the criminal past to protect the present from the legacies of Communism, on one hand, and the ideal of a nonpolitical, civic professional virtue of providing historical information or ensuring that the files are accessible to the public, on the other, can often come into conflict with each other.²⁰

These institutions, and the files they contained, helped create very particular postcommunist scholarly understandings of collaboration: that secret police files were treated as privileged documents—the kind that offered more promise of objectivity than the usual historical source. In the years immediately after the collapse of state socialism, those researchers who held that party elites hid the real objectives of political measures behind decorative ideological reasoning, hoped that secret police reports would contain this allegedly ideology-free, rational, authentic political content that would reveal the realities of the exercise of power by the party center. This sense of anticipation abated rather quickly in countries such as Germany, since it became clear that that documents of the secret services had been composed using the same language as other institutions of the socialist state and often revealed little that was new.²¹ Moreover, they were used to help establish the reality of the totalitarian model of communist rule—a paradigm that exerted extensive influence over public opinion with regard to the past after 1989. Indeed, the very existence of such material was often taken as historical evidence of the totalitarian practices of the regime. Secret police files were used to prove the authority that state security services were afforded to keep the totalitarian state in power, and the capacity that state had to keep every corner of society under close observation.²²

Moreover, these institutes’ public revelations of lists of former collaborators, and their work on individual agents, have consistently fed an appetite for scandal and sensationalism. They have also, as Lavinia Stan claims, contributed to the emergence of certain powerful myths: that everyone had a secret file; that justice amounts to assigning blame; that agents had committed more wicked transgressions than party officials; and that informants were victims themselves.²³ These approaches based on secret files have in general limited the question of collaboration in the communist era to one of politicized agent hunting. It also led to files being used by one faction against another, thereby enabling leading political and intellectual figures to forget (at least in public) their active support of the communist regime.

The chapters in the first section of the book address the question of the production of the idea of collaboration in the context of memory institutes, secret police archives and other cultural institutions across the region. Where did the impulse for this specific institutionalization of reckoning with the past emerge from? The decision makers in most Eastern European countries refer to the German BStU as the model on which the institutions in their countries were based. Undoubtedly, the process of making the documents of the secret service organs of the East German socialist dictatorship accessible for research and informational compensation occurred much earlier than similar measures taken in the other postsocialist countries. The institute responsible for preserving the files of the Stasi and making them accessible to the public was opened between 1989 and 1992. As Bernd Schaefer notes in Chapter 1, BStU occupies a position that differs from the positions of the other archives of East Central Europe in many ways. The opening of the files was hailed both by the German media and the German political elite as a success story and a significant step on the path toward an effective confrontation with the dictatorial past. At the same time, the success of the institution concealed the fact that the manner in which it was created, and the image it presented of the history of the GDR, were closely tied to the East German dissident tradition. From many perspectives, the archive monopolized the processes of construction of the image of the agent and, through this, the true nature of the socialist dictatorship. The influence of the dissident tradition and postsocialist public opinion pushed the institution to disclose primarily examples of unofficial collaboration—that is, those informers who provided information about their social networks, but were not registered as official members of the secret services—for instance representatives of the Catholic Church or people who had infiltrated dissident circles. This populist pressure worked to obscure far more general and widespread forms of collaboration with the party and other official organs of state. Schaefer observes that it was only after some ten years had passed that such initial simplifications could be set aside and the secret service files could become part of the mainstream currents of the writing of social history.

The secret histories of perpetrators could nevertheless become an important tool in postcommunist political legitimation, although this varied widely between countries. Chapter 3 by Ieva Zake and Chapter 5 by Apor and Horváth examine how the debates concerning collaboration fit into the larger projects of providing (re)interpretations of national history. In Hungary and in the Baltics (in particular in Latvia) after 2000, narratives that presented the nation as a mere observer or victim of historical processes won increasing acceptance—in close interconnection with the apparent usefulness of postcommunist anticommunism as a tool of political legitimization. In both Hungary and the Baltic states these processes found expression in museum exhibitions and, in the end, they presented a narrative of history that exonerated the given society of all historical responsibility.

In the case of Hungary, this process is interesting in part because for a long time—at least in comparison with the Polish, Czech and Slovak cases—the question of the secret service documents seemed to remain independent of any direct political considerations. The Hungarian Historical Office and its successor, the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security, strove first and foremost to provide open access to information and support for historical research. Until the formation of the NEB (Committee of National Remembrance) in 2013, in Hungary the secret service documents were not connected on the institutional level with the practice of dispensing justice retroactively. This was not the case in Poland, the Czech Republic or Slovakia. As Barbara Klich-Kluczewska demonstrates in Chapter 2, the creation of the Institute of National Remembrance (or IPN) in Poland was seen as an example to be followed, first in the Czech Republic and later in Slovakia. In Poland, initially the IPN was closely tied to questions of political legitimacy and the identification of perpetrators, not to mention the idea of national martyrdom. However, the desire of the many hundreds of young historians working at the institute to establish and maintain the scholarly and professional reputation of the IPN has moved the institute in the direction of more nuanced approaches to the study of recent history—approaches that yield more measured interpretations. Chapter 4, by Martin Kovanic, clearly shows that, like the Polish institution, the Slovak Nation’s Memory Institute, which opened in 2003, and the Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, in operation since 2007, were given not only the task of preserving the documents of the secret services, but they also played a kind of investigative role. At the same time, while the Czech institute is closely tied to a right-wing anticommunist subculture,²⁴ the Slovak institute enjoys more significant esteem among historians. The IPN in Poland also functions as a serious and respected research center.

Chapter 6 by Florin Abraham presents the extremely complex case of Romania. The violent collapse of Romanian socialism and the significant continuity between the leading elite under Ceausescu and the governing elite of the 1990s provided a context that led more readily to a demand for a confrontation with the activities of the secret service in the recent (communist) past—certainly to a greater extent than in the Visegrad countries, in which the secret services had not played quite as prominent a role. In 2000, after a decade of a politics and social strategy of forgetting,²⁵ the creation of the Consiliul Naţional pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securitaţii (CNSAS) constituted a radical step. Although the CNSAS had an investigative function from the outset, the slow transfer of the documents of the former state secret services encumbered the work of the institution. The establishment in 2006 of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of Communist Dictatorship constituted a genuine shift. The commission, the mission of which from the outset was to examine the crimes of the communist system, interpreted collaboration in the context of discrediting postcommunist socialists through a militant anticommunism. Thus, in Romania, as in most of the countries of the region, the question of collaboration is politicized, permeated with anticommunist views and visions.²⁶ Although the CNSAS has begun to function increasingly as a specialized archive, the mission of identifying and revealing criminals of the past remains a palpable element of Romanian politics of history.

Rethinking the history of collaboration

This work also examines the various ways in which the history of collaboration might be embedded in broader social and political histories of the communist period. First it should be noted that there is still little serious and sustained historical work on the experience of collaboration, although a few studies of extraordinary everyday forms of collaboration and resistance have emerged in the past years.²⁷ Much more work has been carried out on victims—driven by the urge to pay homage to those who once suffered, often by scholars institutionalized in offices that preserve material on victims of the former political police; or resistors—whose stories fit more readily into teleological narratives that anticipate the end of the communist regime or enable postcommunist elites to write their national story into a European narrative of overcoming dictatorship as part of a united Europe.²⁸

Such works have had immense power to shape public understandings of the communist experience, promoting images of failure, shortcomings, mismanagement and mistreatment: the innocence of nations under externally supported totalitarian rule; the vast distance between state and society; and the inevitability of the system’s fall.²⁹ These approaches do not, however, provide a full picture of communist Eastern Europe. In particular, by separating out the question of collaboration from broader historical themes they ignore the role that cooperation played in the maintenance of these regimes. They offer little to explain the fact that the socialist dictatorships of East, Central and Southeastern Europe demonstrated a remarkable stability—in spite of a state of permanent (if varying) oppression, recurrent economic disasters, shortages in the supply of consumer goods, environmental degradation, increasing poverty, censorship in the public sphere and an inability to represent social interests and political alternatives. The communist parties of these countries successfully reproduced political elites and their respective political classes and managed continually to reconstruct the frameworks within which communist power was exercised for 40 years. The increase in the number of people who belonged to the party (and the number of agents), even in the late socialist period, could be read as a sign of the strength of the party (and the state security forces).³⁰

Yet, almost entirely missing from the historical scholarship on the period has been a more nuanced appreciation of the types of support for, cooperation with and forms of legitimacy granted to the pre-1989 party state systems.³¹ In order to facilitate a better understanding of the operation of socialist societies and the maintenance of Eastern European communist regimes’ power, the present work attempts to expand the concept of collaboration toward broader frameworks of cooperation and political participation. In the absence of a plural system of political institutions, cooperation with official organs and integration into the official institutional structure were often necessary preconditions of political participation.³² Those living under socialist regimes who strived for social improvement or economic change had to work through official party-political or professional structures. Party membership or cooperation with the state security forces could provide a sense of active political participation. Naturally, with regard to the various modes of expressing acceptance of the power structure, one must draw a distinction between providing information for the secret services, collaboration, active cooperation in institutional programs or open participation in social and political activism within the state institutions.

The second and third parts of the book focus on the micro-historical and the comparative, a combination that offers in-depth understandings of the various ways in which the processes of cooperation played out in different socialist societies. Studies based on these comparative everyday approaches have been realized in the cases of Fascist and Nazi regimes, but not in a similarly systematic fashion for the communist ones.³³ Thus, the second group of chapters includes socio-historical biographies of everyday secret agents. Contributions here explore the motivations and moralities of becoming an agent, the personal decisions and social consequences these steps involved, and the everyday milieux in which agents lived and were active. Unlike many works that analyze the mechanisms of oppression on the basis of secret police files, Part II concentrates on the characters of collaborators themselves and examines the uses of such source materials in furthering a more-subtle understanding of the broader social and cultural histories of the socialist dictatorships.

One of the most important issues that Part II addresses is the collaboration of intellectuals. Intellectuals, if we understand them as a coherent social group, had ambivalent relationships with the political elites of the socialist dictatorships. On the one hand, particularly in the first decades of these regimes, many were attracted by the promise of sweeping large-scale social transformation that communist parties offered. On the other hand, driven by ideals of just and equal societies, they were often radically disappointed by the actual state of their societies—some of course were to choose dissent. In Chapter 7, Gabriel Andreescu explores the intellectual trajectory of one of the most important Romanian philosophers, Constantin Noica. Andreescu demonstrates how the idea of a pure apolitical intellectual activity led several prominent intellectuals in Romania to take on collaboration with the communist secret services. Noica, together with a group of younger followers, developed the idea of resistance through culture, which for them meant the simultaneous distancing from politics and the cultivation of classical high culture among elite intellectual groups. By this they hoped to preserve universal values of true culture independently of what they considered ephemeral political regimes. However, if true resistance meant engagement with classical philosophy, they argued, then one could collaborate with the actual, supposedly transitory, political regime without being compromised. Cristina Petrescu explores Romanian intellectuals in Chapter 11. Focusing on the case of Mihai Botez, she uncovers the complexities of distinguishing between dissent and collaboration. Botez himself gained credentials as a prominent dissident, while at the same also providing information to the secret police about another dissident, Dorin Tudoran. To complicate the issue further, as Petrescu explains, Botez occasionally helped Tudoran to publish his writings abroad. Chapter 8 by Matěj Spurný, Jakub Jareš and Katka Volná focuses on the strategies of Prague intellectuals following 1968 and investigates the various modalities of collaborating with or opposing party authorities. Similar questions feature in Chapter 9 by Josip Mihaljević, who asks how prominent intellectuals in socialist Yugoslavia came to support Tito and his dictatorship. By contrast, in Chapter 10 Paweł Sowiński tells the story of the collaboration of the working-class Górski brothers. By uncovering the biography of a prominent dissident and secret informer, this chapter examines the difficulties in defining the frontier that separates collaboration from opposition. In this regard, they reflect a major difficulty. There were many communist-era groups and institutions whose actions are rather difficult clearly to categorize as either collaboration or opposition—such as the reformist communist politicians during the 1950s in Poland, Hungary or Yugoslavia: those who had helped establish one-party rule but also became ardent critics of Stalinism; Marxist revisionists of the 1960s who had helped regimes refine their ideological languages but also became the most ardent advocates of democratization of socialist societies; or those members of the Church hierarchy, who decided to cooperate with the state authorities in order to protect the integrity of their institutions, while often collaborating in the disciplining of their own non-conformist religious groups.

Chapters in this section highlight the subjective experience of those people who actually decided to work with the regime. These contributions privilege the analysis of personal sources, such as letters, reports or oral testimony, which allow the historian to investigate how those who cooperated narrated their decisions to themselves—stories that have not received as much attention as secret police files did in the years since the end of Communism. These chapters also try to situate individual decisions to collaborate in the context of broader social relations and networks. Such approaches, which privilege subjective attempts to make sense of often complex and difficult personal decisions, effectively enable the historian to avoid judging actions simply as bad collaboration or good resistance.³⁴

Part III analyzes what we term communities of cooperation, with particular focus on local and mid-level party organizations, organs of the Church and artistic or intellectual networks. The way in which communities as a whole collaborated, and later tried to make sense of those choices, has been little investigated in the region. The section focuses on two important and particularly sensitive issues: party membership and the role of the Church. As demonstrated by Chapters 12 and 13 by Marina Zavacká and Tamás Kende, respectively, although membership in the ruling communist parties used to be the main form of everyday social collaboration, its real content was far from being unambiguous. Not only did rank-and-file party members have a variety of motives for joining the party, ranging from sheer careerism to sincere belief—as Zavacká points out—their ways of acting out duties and tasks were often very different from how the party centers themselves imagined appropriate behavior and proper ways of speaking the language and doing the work of the regime. Here, they argue—in a similar fashion to other works of recent scholarship on communist parties—that the content of party membership was shaped largely by the local settings of ordinary members, who had to meet the expectations of their local communities and the party center at the same time.³⁵ Chapter 15 by Krisztina Slachta eloquently argues how important it is to integrate the studies of the secret services into the broader context of social collaboration. In her contribution on Hungarian and East German agents, individuals are presented as having similarly variable, sometimes very mundane, reasons to join the ranks of the secret services—and that they often used this as an opportunity to pursue building their own professional careers. Agáta Drelová takes a different path and focuses on the Church in Slovakia, one of the most important communities to be persecuted by the socialist state. However, as Drelová points out, Church personnel also had to make difficult choices when adapting to the party-state. In order to protect the organization or pursue their own careers, several members of the clergy cooperated with the communist authorities, including even providing information for the secret services.

This work seeks to provide a more nuanced historical conception of collaboration, expanding the concept to encompass broader frameworks of cooperation and political participation in order to facilitate a better understanding of the maintenance of Eastern European communist regimes. The authors who have contributed to this volume contend that secret police files are too often used to provide a one-dimensional historical account of the mechanisms of oppression: here we demonstrate, through case studies, how secret police files can be used to produce more-subtle social and cultural histories of the socialist dictatorships. Of particular importance is our focus on the micro-historical: contributions here explore the motivations and moralities of becoming an agent, the personal decisions and social consequences such steps involved. By ranging across differing categories of collaborators and different social milieux, the present work provides a very broad-ranging comparative account of collaboration/participation across East Central Europe.

Notes

1 We would like to express our gratitude to the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS), and to the Hungarian Scientific Foundation (OTKA/NKIFH K-104408) for the support of the project at the Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences on which this book was partially based.

For more on the institutes for transitional justice, see: Lavinia Stan, ed., Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: Reckoning with the Communist Past (New York, 2009); Monika Nalepa, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe (New York, 2009); Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions (New York and London, 2001); and Lavinia Stan and Nadya Nedelsky, eds., Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice. Vols. 1–3 (Cambridge and New York, 2013).

2 See the mission statement at: http://ipn.gov.pl/en/about-the-institute/mission (accessed on March 25, 2015).

3 For more on the memory of the Vichy regime, see: Éric Conan and Henry Rousso, eds., Vichy: An Ever-Present Past (Paris , 1996); Richard J. Golsan, Vichy’s Afterlife: History and Counterhistory in Postwar France (Lincoln, NE, 2000). On the German Historikerstreit (Historians’ Debate), in which the relationship to the Nazi past was a key point, see: Helmut Donat, Dieter Koch and Martin Rohkrämer, Bibliographie zum Historikerstreit, in Auschwitz erst möglich gemacht? Überlegungen zur jüngsten konservativen Geschichtsbewältigung, ed. Helmut Donat and Lothar Wieland (Bremen, 1991), 150–214; Steffen Kailitz, ed., Die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit. Der Historikerstreit und die deutsche Geschichtspolitik (Wiesbaden, 2008); and Wulf Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics After Auschwitz (Athens, OH, 2006), 31–85.

4 From the mid-1990s, right-wing parties tried to construct a political identity around this moral issue.

5 On lustration in Eastern Europe, see: Herman Schwartz, Lustration in Eastern Europe , Parker School Journal of East European Law 1 (1994): 141–71; Lavinia Stan, The Vanishing Truth? Politics and Memory in Post-Communist Europe, East European Quarterly 40 (2006): 392–410; Maria Lo, Lustration and Truth Claims: Unfinished Revolutions in Central Europe, Law and Social Inquiry 20 (1995): 117–61; Alexander Mayer-Rieckh and Pablo de Greiff, eds., Justice as Prevention: Vetting Public Employees in Transitional Societies (New York, 2007).

6 Cf. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions , 223–24.

7 Cf. Timothy Garton Ash, Trial, Purges, and History Lessons, in History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s (New York, 1999), 256–77. http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/h/history/trials-purges-and-history-lessons-timothy-garton-ash.html (accessed December 15, 2015). For an attempt at an empirical study of this notion (the findings of which were not terribly persuasive), see: Natalia Letki, Lustration and Democratisation in East-Central Europe, Europe-Asia Studies 54 (2002): 529–52.

8 Adam Michnik , The Velvet Restoration in The Revolutions of 1989, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu (London, 1999), 239−45.

9 Cf. e.g. Aleksander Kwaśniewski, Polish Radio 1, December 13, 2001. James Mark, The Unfinished Revolution. Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe (New Haven, 2010).

10 See the case of Havel, who abandoned the rhetoric of dealing with collaborators in the early 1990s but returned to it in the 2000s: James Mark, Muriel Blaive, Adam Hudek, Anna Saunders and Stanisław Tyszka, 1989 After 1989. Remembering the End of State Socialism in East-Central Europe in Michal Kopeček and Piotr Wcislik, eds., Thinking Through Transition: Liberal Democracy, Authoritarian Pasts, and Intellectual History in East Central Europe After 1989 (Budapest and New York, 2015).

11 For this debate, see Mark, The Unfinished Revolution , 13, 29–30.

12 Cf. Barbara Miller, Narratives of Guilt and Compliance in the Unified Germany : Stasi Informers and their Impact on Society (London and New York, 1999), 138–39; Jens Gieseke, The History of the Stasi. East Germany’s Secret Police, 1945–1990 (New York, 2014).

13 On the emergence of this global culture, see for instance, Anette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca, NY, 2006); Aleida Assmann, and Sebastian Conrad, eds., Memory in a Global Age (Basingstoke, 2011).

14 This was despite a number of important initiatives in both the late and postsocialist periods, such as those organized by the KARTA Centre in Warsaw or the 1956 Institute in Budapest . These mainly emerged from former dissident circles and sought to give a voice to other experiences under socialism.

15 On the necessity of this neutral self-definition, see Mark, The Unfinished Revolution , 47.

16 Mark S. Ellis, The Current State of Lustration Laws in the Former Communist Bloc, Law and Contemporary Problems 59 (1996): 181–96. According to Ellis, alongside political motivations (which seem certain), other factors play roles in informational compensation, such as: the desire to hold the accused responsible; compensation; rehabilitation ; and reprisal.

17 Cf. Chapters 2 , 4 and 5 .

18 Cf. the case of Dorin Dobrincu in Romania ; Dobrincu called attention to the untenable position of the state archive at the time of the creation of CNSAS , which was established in order to ensure that the documents of the state security services would be accorded special treatment: Monica Ciobanu, Criminalising the Past and Reconstructing Collective Memory: The Romanian Truth Commission, Europe-Asia Studies 61 (2009): 313–36, 333.

19 For more on the consequences of vague legal phrasing in the case of the CNSAS , see Lavinia Stan, Spies, Files and Lies: Explaining the Failure of Access to Securitate Files, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 37 (2004): 341–59. On the legal problems that arose because of the absence of clear legal definitions in the case of the archive that holds the documents of the Hungarian state security services , and the muddled phrasing of the proper tasks of the archive, see Zoltán Ripp, A jogi szabályozás változásai [Changes in Legal Regulation], in A Szakértői Bizottság jelentése, 2007–2008, 26–39. http://mek.oszk.hu/08400/08450/08450.pdf (accessed December 15, 2014).

20 For more on this, see the subjective confession of György Gyarmati, the head of the Hungarian ÁBTL: György Gyarmati, Kísértő közelmúlt avagy a rendszerátalakítás egyik deficitje [The Haunting Recent Past, or One of the Deficits of the Transition] (Budapest , 2011), 7–25.

21 Ralph Jessen, Diktatorische Herrschaft als kommunikativ Praxis, in Die Texte der DDR , ed . Peter Becker and Alf Lüdtke (Berlin , 1997), 57–86, 60.

22 One of the earliest formulations of the totalitarian paradigm also identifies state security forces as a determining element of a totalitarian state : Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA, 1956). On the reasons for the renaissance of the totalitarian paradigm: Achim Siegel, ed., The Totalitarian Paradigm after the End of Communism. Towards a Theoretical Reassessment (Amsterdam and Atlanta, 1998). One of the reasons for the renewed popularity of the paradigm is the traditional centrality of political and national concerns in Eastern European historical scholarship, as well as the desire, after 1989, to use the tools of the historian to shed light on the history of the omnipotent state and the oppression of civil society. One should also consider the tradition of lamenting wounds to national pride , the practice of collective forgetfulness (which rested on the perception of socialism as a form of foreign rule and national oppression), and the right-wing ideological endeavors of postcommunist parties to discredit political parties that were successors to the communist regimes. For instance, Sigried Meuschel, Legitimation und Parteiherrschaft in der DDR (Frankfurt , 1992); David Priestland, The Red Flag: A History of Communism (New York, 2009).