[Intelforum] book on Communist Security Apparatus in East Central Europe 1944-1989

[Jong, B.M. de]

List members may be interested in a book that is not readily available from regular English language book stores like Amazon:

A Handbook of the communist Security Apparatus in East Central Europe 1944-1989. Edited by Krzystof Persak and Lukasz Kaminski. Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw, 2005. 352 pp. ISBN 83-89078-82-1 (hard cover)

I believe the book is the outcome of a recent conference which was held in Warsaw in 2004. It contains articles of 50-70 pages each on the security service of the following communist countires in Eastern Europe (or East Central Europe as it is called here): the USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Poland and Romania. The article on the USSR covers the years 1917-1945, the other articles cover the period 1944-1989. Some of the contributing authors are well known, others less so. Among them are: Jordan Baev (Bulgaria), Pavel Zacek (Czechoslovakia), Jens Gieseke (GDR) and Dennis Deletant (Romania).

The emphasis in the articles is mainly on the internal security activities of the services concerned, numbers of staff and agents (informers) are listed and analysed and major reorganizations are discussed. Other topics are main fields of activity and the number of victims.  There are smaller sections on foreign intelligence activities as well, sections on the state of research and a bibliography. I don't know of any books in English that deal with the security services of countries like Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. I have always been curious for literature that allows a comparison of the services of the former communist countries, but there hasn't been much of it so far, to my knowledge. If only for that reason, this book looks like a very interesting volume.

The book can be bought from the Polish Internet Bookshop Merlin: http://www.merlin.com.pl/frontend/static_pages/info_first_purchase_how_to_buy_eng

The price is 42,00 zloty's (only about 11 euro's) + cost of mailing. Only a small section of the site is in English, however, and I needed help from a Polish speaker to complete the order. (For the sake of clarity: the book is all in English.)

Ben de Jong  

University of Amsterdam,  Netherlands

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