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The Stasi: The East German Intelligence and Security Service, 1917-89. By David Childs and Richard Popplewell. New York: New York University Press, 1997. 320p. $45.00. Henry Krisch, University of Connecticut, Storrs
A central characteristic of modern dictatorships is a "political" (often misleadingly called "secret") police. The leaders of regimes "revolutionary" in both domestic and international politics see in their transformational rule the justification for a politically deployed coercive agency.
The scholarly literature about these agencies has generally been of two kinds. One is devoted to establishing and elucidating the record of political police activity, and the other offers conjecture about the relationship of such agencies to the larger political system. The Nazi defeat in 1945 resulted in the availability of records and led more to scholarly narratives than to theorizing about the role of such agencies in the state. This situation seems to be repeating itself with the collapse of communism.
The security forces of the (East) German Democratic Republic present an excellent opportunity for scholars both to explain and explore the GDR's security agencies and to conceptualize their role in the larger political system. Was the GDR's Ministry for State Security-the infamous Stasi-an essential component of the political system? Was it simply a copy of Soviet practice? Was it perhaps an economic drain and social disorder that helped bring down the regime? Which of its activities were peculiar to the system in which it operated and which (as the foreign espionage chief, Markus Wolf, likes to claim) were operations common to modern states?
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