Securitas Imperii 37 (2/2020)

The 100th anniversary in 2017 of the establishment of the Soviet Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage) provided the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes an opportunity to organize an international conference on the history of Soviet-type security services, political police, and intelligence in Communist Party dictatorships. It focused on the repressive apparatus that arose out of the revolution and on the further development of its organizational structures, as well as various phenomena connected with politically motivated oppression in countries under Communist Party rule.
This volume of Securitas Imperii contains nine articles, which are extended versions of papers presented at the conference. Not all of them could be included because of limited space. Despite this constraint, we believe we have gathered a set of articles that suitably reflect the diversity of the conference program. The articles cover topics from the Soviet Union, both from the Moscow centre and at the level of the regional republics (Estonia, Moldavia, and Lithuania). There were also papers on Soviet bloc countries: Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland. Somewhat unusually, we also brought Yugoslavia to attention, especially insofar as the Stalinist period of 1945-1953 was concerned. One study focused on the Spanish Republic during the civil war, something that lies outside of the standard framework commonly used for studying Soviet-type regimes and their security forces.