POWERS OF THE SECRET POLICE IN COMMUNIST EAST CENTRAL EUROPE
This research paper discusses the powers of the secret police in the communist-controlled nations of East Central Europe--East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary--and their role in controlling the populations of these countries during the Cold War.
In his speech of March 4, 1946 in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill said the following:
From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line all the capitals of the ancient States of Central and Eastern Europe -East Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia. All these famous cities and the populations around them lie in the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and increasing measure of control from Moscow (Gelb, 1986, p. ix).
All these countries, except for Yugoslavia, were conquered from the Nazis by the Red Army in 1944-1945. At first content to exercise control through coalition governments, except in East Germany and the Soviet zone of East Berlin, which was under direct Russian military control, Djilas (1963) says that the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin by the fall of 1947 "sought solutions and forms for the East European countries that would solidify and secure Moscow's domination and hegemony for a long time to come" (p. 177).
Germany had experienced totalitarian rule under the Nazis which was exercised with the assistance of the Gestapo and the S.S. Poland and Hungary had been ruled in the late 1920s and 1930s by authoritarian regimes which had their own secret police. Only democratic Czechoslovakia until 1938 had relied on regular police. The Russians, however, imposed on these nations a more comprehensive and pervasive secret police system. How did the Russians and the local communist regimes use the secret police to seize and consoli...