Secret Police Files Research Articles

An appreciation of Katherine Verdery’s My life as a spy: Investigations in a secret police file

An appreciation of Katherine Verdery’s <i>My life as a spy: Investigations in a secret police file</i>

The Text beyond Itself: Romani Social Construction in Romanian Secret Police Files

Romanian State Secret Police (Securitate) files produced before 1989 can be accessed today through a lengthy process that requires official research authorization through a government office, the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (Consiliul Național pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securității - CNSAS). The CNSAS General Document Fund includes large issue-related files under the umbrella of “The Gypsy Problem,” with thousands of pages of both national and county-level reports and recommendations. This paper teases out the granular documentary clues (spie, as Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg describes them) in some of the Securitate files to explore the way in which a pattern of documentary communication is built to frame Romani identity as idiosyncratically marginal, oriental, and parasitic. A particularly interesting aspect of the knowledge production imposed through these files is reflected by anecdotes that purportedly illustrate the character of the Roma. This study analyzes the relations of power built through hermeneutic devices and language choices which build “truth formulae” (Weir) that reify a particular view of Romani ethnicity, class, and gender. This archival (de)construction has implications for a long view of policy, political memory, and exclusionary societal attitudes today and in the future.

Memorability of Romanian dissidence: Ordinary people, secret files and artistic remediations

The article explores the conditions necessary for a narrative recounting of past events to become memorable and incorporated into collective memory. The analysis is focused on the role played by artistic remediations in creating such memorability. In Romania, as well as in other East Central European countries, the production of memorability and the management of the resulting collective memories are interlinked with the narratives of communism that dominate the memorialisation of the recent past. The article reviews several examples of acts of dissent, based on their representativeness and the existing literature, and question the memorability of dissident acts by considering the memory discourse on communism and the involvement of different agents of memory. It also interrogates the use of the Romanian secret police (Securitate) files in artistic productions, examining this acknowledgement of the role played by the Securitate in creating the narratives of the communist past. Two artistic productions based on reworkings of the Securitate files are analysed: a documentary theatre play staged by Gianina Cărbunariu, Uppercase Print (2013), and Radu Jude’s 2020 film of the same title, both presenting the story of Mugur Călinescu. The article argues that these productions question mainstream frames of memory by revisiting the narratives and biographies created by the Securitate files and give new, artistically mediated voices to victims, perpetrators and collaborators.

Dissidence of a Communist Yiddish Writer: The Soviet Life and Fate of Chaim Gildin

Abstract: The article focuses on the rise and demise of Chaim Gildin (1883/4–1943), one of the most vociferous Soviet Yiddish writers, a pioneer of proletarian poetry and prose. It is also aimed at providing a broader perspective on the perilous Soviet Yiddish literary terrain, especially during the Stalinist repressions. In 1936, Gildin lost his Communist Party membership but was spared from arrest. Nevertheless, the secret police came after him in 1940, generally considered as a “quiet year.” His attempts to organize a collective protest—to compel the authorities to reverse the process of closing down Yiddish institutions—might have played a fatal role in his fate. It seems that Yiddish writers of proletarian persuasion generally tended to be more prone to activism than their former “bourgeois” counterparts, and this—rather than their writings—made them more vulnerable during the purges aimed to make the population fully obedient. Although Gildin’s secret police file is full of diligently collected information about his “harmful” prose and poetry, his oeuvre clearly played a secondary role in the decision to prosecute him. It seems that this was the pattern for the entire period of Stalinist repressions: while Yiddish literati were not prosecuted specifically for literary motives, investigators would pay much attention to their writings, whose ideological “defects” helped them to make the indictment look more convincing.

Documents as weapons: secret police files in Communist and post-Communist Romania

PurposeThis study examined dossiers of informative pursual (DIPs), a particular type of secret police files, before and after the fall of Communism in Romania. These DIPs were often weaponized against citizens perceived to be anti-government.Design/methodology/approachBased on Buckland's (2017) concept of a document as an object with physical, mental and social parts, the study used thematic analysis to examine volumes of DIPs from 1945 to 1989 Communist Romania as well as several recorded reactions to the DIPs by the victims who were targeted by the Communist secret police.FindingsFour themes were revealed by the study's findings and discussed within the manuscript: DIPs as unreliable epistemic tools, DIPs as tools to construct the identity of the “People's Enemy,” DIPs as weapons to fight the “People's Enemy” and DIPs as tools that could be used in counterattacks during post-Communism, including in political-economic blackmailing.Research limitations/implicationsThere are two major limitations to research of DIPs. First, since many DIPs have been stolen, copied illicitly or even destroyed, it is difficult to articulate precisely their actual or potential social and political effects. Researchers may often detect these effects only indirectly, based on information leaks in the news. Second, many victims of surveillance practices during the Communist period have chosen not to leave records of their reactions to reading the DIPs that targeted them.Social implicationsCurrent and future comprehensive studies of DIPs can reveal possible parallels between surveillance by the Communist regime and the massive data-collection that occurs in democratic societies, particularly given the increased technical capabilities for processing data in these democratic societies.Originality/valueWithin documentation studies, secret police files and document weaponization have been particularly under-researched, therefore this study contributes to a small body of literature.

Churches, Memory and Justice in Post-Communism

Churches, Memory and Justice in Post-Communism

In Dystopian Retrospect of a Crisis Mood: My Life as a Spy by Katherine Verdery

Abstract My essay bears a deliberately oxymoronic title as it offers, on the one hand, a reminiscence of 1984, as a most depressing year in the actual history of Romania and likewise in my own earliest career memories. On the other hand, it proposes a contemplation of George Orwell’s British postmodern dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Last but not least, it presents certain 1984 aspects as rendered by the following exceptional book, a great challenge for any scholar of my homeland and my generation: My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File (2018). Distinguished Professor Katherine Verdery, its author, a contemporary American scholar, belongs now also to our Romanian academic elite. Yet this book testifies to her darkest experience in our country, just before the Iron Curtain fell down. Although the parallel between these two books may seem risky at first sight, they share much more than meets the eye; and my claim endeavors to go beyond this visible pretext of the new COVID-19 pandemic, another crisis which has intruded upon all our lives – just like a spy.

A Historian, the Securitate and the “Holy Party”. Reading the Secret Police Files of Ioan Dimitrie Suciu (1949-1982)

"A Historian, the Securitate and the “Holy Party”. Reading the Secret Police Files of Ioan Dimitrie Suciu (1949-1982). The following article describes the life times and events that historian Ioan Dimitrie Suciu has experienced in Romania after 1948, under communist rule. By studying his personal Secret Police Files drawn up by the Securitate officers over a period of more than 30 years, I propose an account of his life story focused primarily upon his relationship with the communist regime. As an anti-Fascist former student of Nicolae Iorga, until 1947 I.D. Suciu has managed to become a self-made man in the capital city of interwar Romania. In 1949, he has got into a first conflict with communist authorities when he tried to flee the country. After spending over 3 years in jail, he was released in 1952, only to be soon again arrested and incarcerated for 6 years, for committing the crime of “conspiracy against the social order”. Between 1964 and 1975 I.D. Suciu has worked as a researcher at “Nicolae Iorga” History Institute in Bucharest, before being sent to jail for a third and last time (1975-1977). Never becoming a political dissident, during his last years of life, he experienced a growing discontent towards the regime and expressed abundant critiques against the Communist Party and its leaders. Keywords: Romanian Communist Party, Securitate, Ioan D. Suciu, condemnation. "

Verdery, Katherine. My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File.

Verdery, Katherine. My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File.

Contested Documents: A Neo-Documentalist Approach to Secret Police Files in Post-Communist Romania

This paper is about a certain type of contested documents (the secret police files known as “informative notes”). It employs a neo-documentalist framework and thematic analysis to examine informative notes on four major intellectuals in communist Romania. The paper focuses on three emerging themes: the power effects that the materiality of informative notes has had, after 1989, on Romanian society; the reasons informers interpreted the writing conventions of this textual genre in radically different ways; and the epistemic aspects of this type of document. I emphasize that, despite their nature as historic documents, secret police files have uncanny relevance for understanding the present-day societies of mass surveillance. Cet article porte sur un certain type de documents contestés (les fichiers de la police secrète appelés «notes informatives»). Il utilise un cadre néo-documentaliste et une analyse thématique pour examiner des notes informatives sur quatre intellectuels majeurs de la Roumanie communiste. Le document se concentre sur trois thèmes émergents: les effets de pouvoir que la matérialité des notes informatives a eu, après 1989, sur la société roumaine; les raisons pour lesquelles les informateurs ont interprété les conventions d'écriture de ce genre textuel de manières radicalement différentes; et les aspects épistémiques de ce type de document. J'insiste sur le fait que, malgré leur nature historique, les fichiers de la police secrète ont une pertinence incroyable pour comprendre les sociétés de surveillance de masse actuelles.

Law in Action in Romania, 2008–2018: Context, Agency, and Innovation in the Process of Transitional Justice

This article tackles a hitherto-unnoticed innovative mechanism of transitional justice. Creatively interpreting the legislation, CNSAS, the institution dealing with the former secret police files, gradually transformed itself from a vetting agency into a fact-finding commission. While the law restricted the meaning of collaboration, CNSAS produced an openaccess electronic database including digest versions of the screening process and providing quick access to excerpts from secret police documents. This repository demonstrates the multifaceted nature of collaboration, the wide variety of information gathered and the complicity of individuals originating from all social, cultural, and professional backgrounds. The edatabase created by CNSAS offers not a simple list of wrongdoers, but evidence of wrongdoings according to rule of law principles. In brief, this registry of shaming represents a para-legal mechanism of transitional justice, which allows moral judgement, promotes transparency, and legitimizes the mission of CNSAS in fostering democracy by widely illustrating what democracy is not.

The North Iraq Dataset (NIDS) files: Northern Iraq under Baʿthist rule, 1968–911

The first archival collection from Saddam Hussein’s regime to receive the attention of researchers in the early 1990s was the large number of documents secured by Iraqi Kurdish rebels in the March 1991 uprising. The documents have been referred to variously as the Iraqi secret police files, the Anfal files, the North Iraq records, and are today known as the North Iraq Dataset (NIDS). In addition to being the first of several collections of Baʿth-era documents removed from Iraq by the US military as a result of the 1991 and 2003 wars, the NIDS was also the first collection returned to the country by the US government in 2005. This article discusses the history of the NIDS, the contents of the archive, efforts to digitize and study the documents, along with investigating the fate of the original records.

What Is too Long and When Is too Late for Transitional Justice? Observations from the Case of Romania

Nearly 30 years after the end of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime, what is too long and when is too late to use public disclosures about secret police complicity in the past to influence the composition of public office holders in the present? This article examines Romania’s public disclosure measures from 2010 to the present, drawing on the reports of the secret police file repository agency—the C.N.S.A.S.—in order to better understand the temporal parameters surrounding their continued use. First, the article shows that despite contentions that there are no more spies left to unmask, Romania’s vetting process continues to disclose the collaborator backgrounds of current political candidates, at both the national and local levels, and individuals being considered for appointments in high‐ranking political and social institutions. Second, contrary to expectations that citizens might be too fatigued with the public disclosure process to consider them politically salient, citizen engagement with their personal files remains robust. Together, these findings suggest that preconceived temporal parameters for this type of transitional justice measure might have underestimated the duration of its utility and political relevance.

Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing ed. by Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis, and Corina L. Petrescu

Reviewed by: Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing ed. by Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis, and Corina L. Petrescu Cristina Plamadeala (bio) Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc: Between Surveillance and Life Writing Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis, and Corina L. Petrescu, editors Camden House, 2016, xiv + 238 pp. ISBN 9781571139269, $90.00 hardcover. When the Berlin Wall fell, the Stasi had about 180,000 informers, Romania's Securitate had 144,289, and Hungary's State Protection Authority had 7,203. They were spies. Many of them were even writers of some sort, playing their part in producing secret police dossiers, which are now part of archives that welcome curious researchers, former victims, and collaborators to peruse them. Indeed, it is a fascinating and chilling experience—the opening of a secret police file, the reading of which requires patience to understand the cryptic language employed. Interpreting such a file is a difficult task for a researcher, who, having found something similar to a time capsule, assumes the task of deciphering the message, explaining the purpose of the objects found in it, and writing the story of how it was put together, all with very few tools to guide them. The book in question adds to the tools available to help read such archival dossiers, but not only that. What can the files that the secret police agents and their informers helped produce tell us about the times when they could decide the fate of a human being, one's promotion or demotion, incarceration or prison release, right to travel abroad, and even death? How should we treat these "witnesses" of a rather recent gruesome past now, thirty years after the abrupt collapse of the regimes that made their production possible? Can these files ever deliver justice if they were created in conditions of violence, human rights violations, suspicion, discrimination, and oppression? What role can they have in understanding a nation's tumultuous history and how civilians were involved in the human rights violations of their governments? Secret Police Files from the Eastern Bloc tackles these questions, offering the reader an impressive, well-documented account of what it was like to live under surveillance under communism in the German Democratic Republic, Romania, and Hungary, where there was extensive collaboration with the communist regimes. Divided in three equally insightful parts, this edited volume sheds light on how these files can be read to illuminate the times and conditions in which they were produced: as "file stories" that serve as models for narrating biographies of those targeted by the police (Part I); as a means for perpetrators and victims alike to revisit their past and discern the truth, in juxtaposition with the memories that both may have of the events narrated in these files (Part II); and as the basis for aesthetic and artistic productions aimed at helping readers learn about history (Part III). How do we go about writing a biographical narrative of a person depicted in one of these files? Such a narrative is based on documents that were written decades earlier, with goals far different than the one the researcher may have in mind. If we [End Page 474] are to treat such files as life writing accounts, what are the implications of doing so? What do these files tell us about collaboration and the intricate dynamics in which the secret police's targets often fell into by acquiescing to be recruited? The first three chapters authored by Alison Lewis, Valentina Glajar, and Corina L. Petrescu, respectively, deliver convincing responses to these very questions by taking as case studies the files of several German and Romanian writers whose lives were intimately affected by being under the surveillance of their countries' secret police. The lives of German writers Paul Wiens, Sascha Anderson, and Wien's daughter Maja Wiens are under the magnifying glass in Lewis's chapter, and as the author argues, the files on these individuals shed light on these writers' habitus and identity, as defined by their at times fluctuating relation to the secret police. As these files show, collaboration with the Stasi police was not always a straightforward endeavor or a transactional process...

My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File by Katherine Verdery

Reviewed by: My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File by Katherine Verdery Meghanne Barker Katherine Verdery, My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. 344 pp. Katherine Verdery introduces My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File as a "polyphonic" work. Indeed, it masterfully interweaves Verdery's voice at the moment of writing, that of herself during her fieldwork in the 1970s and 1980s, and the voice of the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, who were surveilling her throughout her research. My Life as a Spy works through Verdery's many identities—those produced by the secret police and those that emerge as she changes over time. She shows how the intimate friendships made in her fieldwork profoundly transform who she is and have important implications for others, ultimately revealing that the preoccupation of the Securitate with whether or not she was a spy was a less preposterous notion than she originally expected. By reading her Securitate file and working through it with many who appear within it, Verdery finds that, in fact, ethnography and spying have much in common. A rigorous scholar through and through, even in her autoethnography, Verdery could not be accused of navel gazing. She frequently relates her own encounter with her file to others' accounts of the topic, such as Sheila Fitzpatrick's A Spy in the Archives (2015) or Timothy Garton Ash's The File: A Personal History (1998). Nonetheless, My Life as a Spy has the ability to continually humble the nascent ethnographer with the realization or reminder that only an extraordinary field worker would have achieved such a file as Verdery's. The archive is no less than 2,781 pages, beginning with her first visit as a graduate student in 1973, when a 25-year-old Verdery on a motorbike accidentally goes down a road she doesn't know is forbidden [End Page 1641] to her, a mistake that has lasting repercussions. The file follows her into the 1980s, when she gets herself into new trouble by beginning her monograph with jokes reflecting on ethnic relations that were not hers to retell, and by having a suspiciously Hungarian-seeming name. These accounts of Verdery's fieldwork offer instruction to the young anthropologist, but Verdery recounts these more in order to help the reader understand the repercussions they had for the Romanian secret police's beliefs about her. Stylistically, the book is consistently engaging, mixing humor, pathos, and acute political commentary. Verdery expertly blends the intrigue of the secret police file with painfully honest reflections on the complexity of intimate relations in the field. She makes herself vulnerable, while always pushing toward a rigorous analysis of her own conduct and its consequences. The book is divided into two parts: "Research under Surveillance" and "Inside the Mechanisms of Surveillance." Structurally, the organization of the first chapters into decades (with Chapter 1 focusing on the 1970s and Chapter 2 on the 1980s) seems less elegant than the rest of the book. However, the split between decades aligns with a number of differences: Cold War tensions increased; Romania's World Bank loan led to severe austerity measures on the local population; Verdery shifted field sites; and, moreover, her position within the community changed with the publication of her controversial first book. These issues were all interconnected to the Securitate's impressions of her and the actions taken against her and her associates. In later chapters of Part II, "Reflections" and "Revelations," Verdery works to understand how reading her file revealed who was informing on her, ultimately allowing her to realize that her actions not only motivated reactions from the Securitate surveilling her, but that the Securitate's interest in her had far more profound consequences for those around her than she ever imagined. By the end of the book, having worked through her file and having sat down with friends who informed on her and even a few Securitate officers involved in her surveillance, Verdery observes that these latter—the Romanian secret police—were not the invisible, aloof specters she had imagined but were in fact enmeshed in a complex...

The Kurdish Files of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Regime: Struggle for Reconciliation in Iraq

The U.S.-led wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 resulted in the seizure of vast quantities of internal state security documents from the former regime of Saddam Hussein. Following Iraq’s 1991 defeat in Kuwait, the Kurds staged a popular uprising against Saddam’s dictatorial rule, capturing tons of secret police files that detailed vast humanitarian crimes, including corroborating evidence of the “al-Anfāl” (referring to Quran: “The Spoils of War”) genocide, against the Kurds in the late 1980s. These files were transferred to the U.S. where they were digitized and analyzed for a possible genocide case against the Saddam regime. Another estimated 120 million pages of documents were seized by U.S. forces in the 2003 war in the failed hunt for evidence of Saddam’s alleged unconventional weapons and ties to al Qaeda. Most of the seized Ba’athist records, along with digital copies of the Anfāl files, have since been returned to Baghdad and various parties in Iraqi Kurdistan. The state security files of Saddam’s regime hold considerable historical importance and value for the peoples of Iraq. The documentary legacy of Saddam’s Ba’ath regime should be used to help Iraqis come to terms with their tragic history and initiate sweeping democratic reforms on behalf of reconciliation and the rule of law. This has proved difficult to achieve. Corruption and the cycle of revenge in both Baghdad and Erbil have fueled the increased exploitation and weaponization of these state security records against political and sectarian rivals. In Baghdad, the sectarian misuse of the files has helped to fuel new waves of still escalating tensions, confrontations, and the continuing destabilization of Iraq. The Kurdish political parties also have exploited the Anfāl files against their political adversaries, raising the specter of new infighting, division, civil war, and the continued supplication to foreign influence. Nonetheless, several positive and countervailing developments have fostered greater access to these documents in digital form among Iraqi Kurds in the hope of promoting human rights, the rule of law, and learning from Iraq’s recent history under Saddam’s homicidal regime. This article explores these topics in detail, including the seizure and restitution of the records, the political and sectarian misuse of the files, and the recent positive trends that hold the possibility of using the files in the spirit of human rights and the rule of law in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region. It also outlines a number of concrete steps that Iraq’s political leaders can take to reinforce these positive trends with the help of international supporters.

Teaching in East Germany in the 1980s

This essay reflects on Morrison’s experience teaching in East Germany in the 1980s through an exchange programme between Brown University and the (former) Wilhelm-Pieck-Universität Rostock. Of particular note is Morrison’s Stasi – or secret police – file. While some sections are typewritten, the pages from the IMs or “unofficial collaborators” are hand-written. Focusing on an incident from September 1985, when Morrison was in charge of the programme’s “wall newspaper,” this essay reflects on a student’s controversial article about “Good Women in the Soviet Union.” This was not received well by university authorities and threatened to undermine the delicately negotiated exchange programme. Research on the nature of secret police files from the former East Germany and other eastern European countries as literary narratives suggests that those drafting such files can be understood as fiction writers, including making totally innocent material sound shady. While one “unofficial collaborator” suggests that Morrison would be a good partner with Rostock in the future, some have suggested that he might have been intending to “turn” Morrison as a spy for East Germany.

Katherine Verdery: My Life as a Spy. Investigations in a Secret Police File

Katherine Verdery: My Life as a Spy. Investigations in a Secret Police File

With “Kathy” and “Vera” in Communist Romania My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File Katherine Verdery (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018)

With “Kathy” and “Vera” in Communist Romania My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File Katherine Verdery (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018)

Politicising the Communist Past: The Politics of Truth Revelation in Post-Communist Poland by Szczerbiak Aleks (review)

REVIEWS 589 Kovalev leading a team of experienced negotiators who proved themselves to be invested in improved East-West relations. The major negotiators from the Western side often sent junior diplomats, mainly to signal that they ‘would be prepared to walk away if the Soviets refused to compromise’ (p. 113). By focusing on all the different actors involved, Cotey debunks the myth of the Helsinki Process being solely a bilateral, superpower project. Even if the process and the outcome of the Helsinki agreement greatly influenced the way the Cold War developed, giving the West an upper hand on pretty much ‘every significant point’ (p. 5), no actor was too small to have a voice in the process; no political culture was by default out of the loop. Of course there were dominant actors, but the detailed descriptions of the actual negotiations make it clear that this was a diplomatic project. Cotey also takes into account the parallel structure of established Cold War organizations, such as NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It was not obvious to especially the Western leaders to leave disarmament off the agenda for Helsinki, but in the end, Nixon and Brezhnev reached a compromise which the other leaders accepted even if some felt like it had been a secretive process governed by the superpowers. Cotey has succeeded in creating an effortless narrative of a complicated international diplomatic process while highlighting its far-reaching importance. The Final Act is based on archival research in eight countries, a long list of published diplomatic documents, interviews and periodicals, and an excellent command of the existing historiography. It is hard to imagine a more balanced account. This book is sure to become the standard work of reference for research focusing on topics as varied as human rights, trade relations, activist groups and international diplomacy in the 1970s and 1980s. Department of History and Classical Studies Rósa Magnúsdóttir Aarhus University Szczerbiak, Aleks. Politicising the Communist Past: The Politics of Truth Revelation in Post-Communist Poland. BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies, 121. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2018. vii + 198 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliographies. Appendix. Index.£115.00. As as one would expect from this author, Politicising the Communist Past provides an authoritative and balanced analysis of the post-Communist political scene. Aleks Szczerbiak’s study of the convoluted politics of transitional justice and truth revelation in Poland will particularly interest students of Central and Eastern Europe, but also provides food for thought to readers interested in the dilemmas of enacting transitional justice in other SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 590 countries across the globe. The book investigates why — despite initial talk of drawing a line under the past — dilemmas around transitional justice refused to go away in Poland after 1989. They have frequently dominated the political agenda, and remain acutely painful and polarizing today. Poland is an interesting case study of a country which, having failed to deal energetically with matters of transitional justice in the early days of the post-Communist regime,foundthepoliticsofthepastintrudingagainandagainintothepolitics of the present. Moreover, Szczerbiak argues that the Polish case illustrates the impossibility, in post-Communist Europe, of disentangling the two strands of political debate concerning historical truth revelation procedures. The first strand concerns the extent and nature of access to Communist-era secret police files. The second concerns lustration policies, aimed at vetting and screening public office-holders to reveal who had been associated with the communist regime, particularly its security services. Szczerbiak considers in detail why such matters could not be swept under the carpet. He shows how a sequence of sensational revelations — some occurring almost by chance — helped keep the issues alive across the decades. However, the main focus of the book is on the role played by politicians: Szczerbiak weighs the evidence in support of competing interpretations as to why the arguments proved so difficult to resolve. On the one hand, ‘instrumentalstrategic ’ explanations focus on how politicians manipulate and even manufacture the debate for political purposes. On the other, ‘programmaticideological ’ explanations place more emphasis on political actors’ beliefs that genuine democracy can only be constructed on the basis of openness about the past, and their concerns that...