Abstract This article re-examines the history of the Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN), using the organization as a lens to explore the workings of state-private networks in American political warfare during the Cold War. Previous scholarship on exile political organizations in the United States has either emphasized American strategy or reclaimed exile activities for national histories. These narratives often remain parallel rather than integrated histories. The ACEN operated simultaneously as a managed propaganda instrument that was part of the Free Europe Committee (FEC), a platform of East Central European political cooperation in exile, and a symbolic surrogate “voice of the captive nations” in international forums. The case of the ACEN illustrates how political warfare was co-produced by unequal yet interdependent partners. It also reveals that Cold War political warfare was not a unidirectional projection of US power but a negotiated partnership within state-private exile networks. Methodologically, the article addresses archival silences, inconsistencies, and selective preservation. These are not treated as gaps but as evidence of how both US sponsors and exile leaders sought to shape their own historical record. The Author critically re-examines her research journey across diverse regimes of documentation (exile, US American, and communist) and interviews to reveal methods for tracing exile agency. This perspective complicates rigid Cold War binaries and highlights the importance of methodological awareness when writing transnational history.

Abstract In this article I analyze the transgressive behavior of mathematician-dissident Mihai Botez by anchoring his political views within a scientific ethos of the search for truth and accuracy to which he was loyal in his metamorphosis from “technocrat” to regime opponent. I thus make a claim about the possibility of understanding dissident choices by integrating two approaches often perceived as opposites of each other: the consideration of dissidents’ moral stand together with the contextualization of their ambiguous process of becoming. To date, no such investigation has been carried out due to (1) the absence of core archival evidence; and (2) the persistence of diverging historical narratives regarding dissidents, which are partly influenced by archival epistemologies. While the state-socialist press was mostly silent about Botez, Radio Free Europe archives painted him as a hero, and intelligence agencies portrayed him as a duplicitous person. I propose a methodology that considers such Cold War subliminal archival classifications and then reconstructs the “context” of his dissidence by interweaving “the shadowy aspects of his life” with his politico-scientific work. Here, “context” is more than a background against which moral values and aspirations dissolve. It functions as a prism, making visible a person’s agency and exceptionality through a truthful rendering of the conditions, practices, and alliances that both hampered and enabled it.

Abstract This article addresses the peculiar challenges and opportunities of researching lived religion in archives produced during the communist era. Inspired by the material turn in the study of religions, this article discusses the significance and uses of collections of the material traces of religion found in communist-era archives in Hungary. Using the private archive of Zsuzsa Horváth (1950–1995), a sociologist of religion who worked in 1970s and 1980s Hungary as a starting point, I relate the context, affordances, and connectivities of material religious objects found in her collection to analogous collections in state security archives. These antagonistic archival collections of material religion are the product of the peculiar tendency of the secret police, scholars of religion, and Cold War western advocates of religious freedom – albeit in pursuit of vastly different aims – to collect material manifestations of religion – images, objects, publications, manuscripts, and spaces – as evidence of the persistence of religious life. I argue that the scholarly archive of Zsuzsa Horváth, with its assortment of religious ephemera, offers valuable insight into aspects of the sensorial and aesthetic worlds of religious communities and reveals the complex moral and methodological entanglements of a scholar of religion working in the shadow of the secret police. Approaching the problem of lived religion through such a material phenomenological lens offers the opportunity to place diverse and opposing archival collections in dialogue with each other in order to unlock their evidential potential for the study of religions during the communist era in Eastern Europe.

Abstract This essay introduces “Methodologies of Working in Cold War Archives,” a special issue of East Central Europe. It focuses on four broader questions raised by the contributions: the conceptualizations of historical methods when dealing with ideologically opposed sources, the connection between historiographic and ethical choices related to such sources, the possibility of reflecting on archives as discoursive fields while still mining them for facts and evidence, and, last but not least, the reconsideration of the moral intentionalities of the different historical actors and their documentary work. The introduction and the contributions argue in favor of critical yet empirical approaches to sources that belong to opposed truth regimes and yet are not symmetrical in the perspectives they offer. In this way, the introduction proposes the term of “critical neopositivism” for transgressing binaries and avoiding moral relativism.

Abstract The declassified archives of the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) have had a significant impact on transitional justice in postcommunist Germany. Evidence of an informant file has become the standard proof of collaboration, although it says little about a person’s activities or the harms of their collaboration with the communist regime in the German Democratic Republic. This article addresses the challenges of using archival evidence of collaboration from informers’ Stasi dossiers, arguing for the value of reading these records alongside ego-documents such as autobiography, witness testimony, and documentary film. While these types of testimony can help researchers gain a more nuanced understanding of collaboration and are useful for writing a history of emotions of secret policing, informer testimony is notoriously fraught. This article uses two case studies to explore approaches to reading Stasi files for gaps and archival framing (such as ministerial guidelines), features that can be corroborated by or contrasted with the truth claims made in informer testimony.

Abstract Five years ago, in 2018, an online Old Calendarist Orthodox community designed a Facebook group called “Archival Images of the Old Calendarist Orthodox Church,” which included approximately two posts translated into Romanian from the Hidden Galleries project database (hiddengalleries.eu). The community uploaded pictures from a secret police file on the Old Calendarist community in Bucharest with explanations of the images from the file. In the weeks after the Facebook post, a flurry of photographs were posted in the Facebook group by members of the community documenting the history of the community, complimenting or confronting the images from the secret police archives the administrators of the page had taken from the Hidden Gallery database. A decision was made by the Facebook group to use this site as an image archive documenting the recent past of the Old Calendarist Orthodox Church. The present article discusses the ways in which the archives of the secret police are being used to construct a historical narrative and build private archives for communities whose pasts can be mediated only (mostly) through the narrative of the secret police. Through interviews and research using online databases, Facebook groups, and internet sites, I want to offer a broader image of what an archive is and how the past is constructed. In building a narrative of their past from the secret police archives, I look at the questions members of these communities ask the materials produced by the secret police: how they deal with notions of truth, objectivity, ethics, and morality, and how they strive to understand and come to terms with documents that were collected in order to destroy them.

Abstract This article explores the development and impact of photography in Kyiv from its early days in the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of World War I. Initially introduced by British photographers documenting the construction of a bridge over the Dnipro River, photography quickly became a significant part of Kyiv’s cultural and social fabric. This study places Kyiv’s photographic history within the broader context of European cultural exchanges, demonstrating how the new visual medium influenced economic modernization and identity formation in urban Ukraine. Key figures in Kyiv’s photography scene of the era included Franz de Mezer and Włodzimierz Wysocki, both of Polish descent, who established prominent studios in the city and contributed to its reputation as a hub of photography. By the early twentieth century, Kyiv boasted numerous studios and a burgeoning community of both professional and amateur photographers. This period saw the emergence of photography’s dual role as both an artistic endeavor and a tool for documenting and shaping identities. Photographic societies played a crucial role in promoting artistic photography, organizing international exhibitions and fostering a sense of modernity and cultural engagement. The article also highlights photography’s role in nationalism, with Ukrainian intellectuals using the medium to capture and disseminate images that emphasized Ukraine’s cultural and historical uniqueness.