Translating the State: Czechoslovakia's Search for the Soviet Model of the Secret Police, 1945–52

Abstract

Translating the StateCzechoslovakia's Search for the Soviet Model of the Secret Police, 1945–52 Molly Pucci (bio) In January 1948, a month before the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, Czech secret police official Jindřich Veselý went on an observation tour of the Polish secret police. His aim, as he wrote to the Central Committee in Prague, was to "become closely familiar with the organization of the Ministry of Public Security of Poland and, above all, the work of the state security organ and intelligence services."1 While there, he conversed with Polish secret police officials, took notes on the organization of their forces, and compared and contrasted what he saw with the policing institutions of his own country. His notes reveal the differences in the communist secret police forces that had been built in each country since the end of World War II. Since there was no equivalent in Czechoslovakia to the institution Veselý was touring in Poland, he described what he was seeing to leaders in Prague in terms of analogy: the authority of the Polish secret police and its affiliated militia approximated the force of Czechoslovaks' civil police, criminal police, and regional and district government authorities. Veselý had helped organize communist secret police networks in Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1948. He was observing the Polish secret police forces created during the same era. Although these institutions were supposedly built on the same "Soviet model," they had developed different [End Page 317] structures, personnel, and methods of violence from the mid- to the late 1940s. As Veselý discovered, the Polish Communists and their Soviet advisers had created a military-style force of around 30,000 officials who worked from 1945 to 1947 in a state governed by martial law.2 Polish secret police officials, most recruited from communist partisan groups and military units, carried weapons and had the authority to arrest citizens and hold them for up to 48 hours.3 In contrast to Czechoslovakia, Veselý noted, all political trials in Poland took place in military courts. By 1948, the Polish secret police had developed a massive infrastructure that reached into most areas of Polish public, civic, and state life and could, as Veselý described, "allow or ban meetings, allow or ban clubs, distribute permits to carry weapons, etc., etc.," and conduct surveillance on political parties, the youth, the intelligentsia, the church, and the state administration. As was evident from his conversations with local officials, Veselý concluded that the "Ministry of State Security is a decisive power factor in Poland. There is no area in which it does not intervene in a decisive way."4 The Czechoslovak secret police he had helped organize, in contrast, was a network of around 200 agents who were not allowed to carry weapons or arrest suspects. Communist intelligence agents in Czechoslovakia dressed in civilian clothing and worked covertly in the official intelligence services of the National Front, a democratic multiparty government, to collect information on noncommunist political parties for communist leaders.5 Veselý's trip to Poland was one of several covert observation tours that East European secret police agents took to each other's countries between 1946 and 1954, the foundational years of communism in the region. What do these trips tell us about how East European agents learned to build communist policing institutions after World War II? What do they reveal about how East European Communists interpreted the Soviet model of political policing? As the Czechoslovaks' tour of the Polish forces shows—Veselý's trip was one of several—answering these questions requires adopting a multinational, comparative approach to policing between the mid-1940s and the 1950s. Such an approach is not only a methodological decision; it is [End Page 318] a reflection of the decision-making processes and self-perceptions of agents and officials at the time, who consciously studied and integrated the practices of the policing systems of other countries of Eastern Europe. Almost a decade before the creation of the Warsaw Pact in 1955, agents, ideas, surveillance technologies, organizational practices, and institutional models crossed the national borders of the countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, allowing Communists to coordinate their security forces and study...