A glance inside the monolith Security Empire. The Secret Police in Communist Eastern Europe, by Molly Pucci, London, Yale University Press, 2020, ISBN 9780300242577
A glance inside the monolith Security Empire. The Secret Police in Communist Eastern Europe, by Molly Pucci, London, Yale University Press, 2020, ISBN 9780300242577
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庞大的安全帝国一瞥。
DOI：
10.1080/16161262.2021.2018821
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发表时间：
2022
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Richterova D
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Richterova D
情报研究经常因三大罪过而受到指责：狭隘的地理关注;厌恶比较分析;不愿挑战根深蒂固的冷战神话。博士莫莉Pucci二十世纪欧洲，苏联和东欧的历史学家纠正所有这三个罪在她的波兰，捷克斯洛伐克和东德秘密警察部队从1945年至1954年的早期历史的比较研究。《安全帝国》聚焦于东欧秘密警察的基础时期，这一时期的特点是暴力且往往令人费解的清洗、公审、逮捕和处决。它调查了奠定波兰安全局，捷克斯洛伐克StB和东德Stasi基础的个人的动机和背景。在这样做的同时，它消除了关键的神话，并确定了持久的遗产，这个早期的冷战时代的国家和安全警察建设。这本书是方法上的杰出和令人耳目一新。普奇精通多种语言，他收集了大量波兰语、俄语、捷克语、斯洛伐克语、德语和法语的第一手和第二手资料，以重建这三个精选安全机构的早期历史。此外，她采用了一种令人耳目一新的新方法来研究制度史通过建立这些复杂安全网络的（大多数）人的传记来讲述这些网络的故事。这种方法使她能够将安全机构描述为“不是一个非个人的权力机构，而是一个包含人际关系、地位、经济地位和语言的社会世界”（第10页）。《安全帝国》的主要贡献在于它消除了关于东欧、共产主义制度和莫斯科在冷战中的作用的持续神话。首先，普奇挑战了这样一种信念，即由于苏联顾问的细致工作，莫斯科的卫星以某种方式“采用”了苏联的安全政策模式。通过介绍早期东欧安全官员的不同群体，她发现解释这一过程的最佳方式是“不完美的翻译，而不是复制或移植”（第5页）。虽然她
Intelligence Studies are often berated for three cardinal sins: narrow geographic focus; aversion to comparative analysis; and a reluctance to challenge deeply-rooted Cold War myths. Dr Molly Pucci–historian of twentieth-century Europe, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe–rectifies all three of these sins in her comparative study of the early history of Polish, Czechoslovak, and East German secret police forces from 1945–1954. Security Empire zooms in on the foundational period of Eastern European secret police, a time characterised by violent and often incomprehensible purges, show trials, arrests and executions. It investigates the motives and backgrounds of individuals who laid the foundations of the Polish Security Service, the Czechoslovak StB, and the East German Stasi. While doing so it dispels key myths and identifies enduring legacies of this early Cold War era for state and security police building.The book is methodologically outstanding and refreshing. A polyglot, Pucci assembled an impressive array of primary and secondary sources in Polish, Russian, Czech, Slovak, German and French to reconstruct the early history of the three select security establishments. Moreover, she adopted a refreshing new approach to institutional history–retelling the story of these complicated security networks through the biographies of the (mostly) men who built them. This approach enabled her to depict the security institutions ‘not as an impersonal apparatus of power but as a social world that encompasses interpersonal relations, status, economic standing, and language’(p. 10). Security Empire’s main contribution lies in its dispelling of persistent myths about Eastern Europe, communist institutions, and Moscow’s role in the Cold War. First, Pucci challenges the belief that Moscow’s satellites somehow ‘adopted’the Soviet security policy model thanks to the meticulous work of Soviet advisors. By introducing different groups of early Eastern European security officials, she finds that the best way to interpret this process is as one of ‘imperfect translation rather than of reproduction or transplantation’(p. 5). Although she