Notes on a Century of Surveillance

Abstract

The formation of Greater Romania in December 1918 entailed building up its intelligence apparatus, both foreign and internal—a development crucial to its survival in the twentieth‐century system of national states. Events during the war and provisions of the peace treaty lent special urgency to this development, for the rise of the communist movement in Russia posed grave problems for Romania’s eastern border (regularly breached by both refugees and communist agents), and revisions of the border with Hungary increased the threat of Hungarian irredentism. The intelligence services were once again challenged by World War II and the communist takeover; the events of 1989 repeated these challenges. To examine this series of transformations is to ask, among other things, what it means for the form of the state or its ruling regime to change. The paper, delivered as a keynote address at the 2018 international conference organized by the Society for Romanian Studies in Bucharest, explores continuities across these various transitions.