Objemné kompendium komunistických tajných služeb
A Volumnious Compendium of the Communist Secret Services

Summary/Abstract: The comprehensive publication "Čekisté: Orgány bezpečnosti v evropských zemích sovětského bloku" [The Chekists: Security Organs in the European Countries of the Soviet Bloc] by the editors Krzysztof Persak, Łukasz Kamiński, Pavel Žáček and Petr Blažek is the Czech edition of the work produced by an international team of historians, which emerged from a project run by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. The book was originally published in English in 2005 in Warsaw under the care of the two Polish editors with the title "A Handbook of the Communist Security Apparatus in East Central Europe, 1944–1989". A German edition followed in 2009 in Göttingen, and finally, in 2010, the Polish translation "Czekiści: Organy bezpieczeństwa w europejskich krajach bloku sowieckiego 1944–1989", which forms the core of the Czech version. None of the editions, however, are a mere translation of the previous one. With each edition, new texts appear and existing ones are expanded and updated. The reviewer compares the different editions and presents the chapters which deal with the history of the communist secret services in the former Eastern Bloc countries (the Soviet Union, and more specifically in Estonia and Latvia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Poland and Romania), paying the closest attention to the Czechoslovak chapter, which is also the first synthetic treatment of the subject. Despite various partial shortcomings, including the lack of an attempt at a concluding summary, the reviewer believes that the volume as a whole provides informed readers with a generally clear, factually reliable and highly detailed picture of the origins, organization, development, multifaceted activities, crimes and victims of the secret services in the former communist European countries.

• Details
• Contents