James A. Kapaló and Kinga Povedák, eds. <i>The Secret Police and the Religious Underground in Communist and Post-Communist Eastern Europe</i>

The installation of a Communist Party government with a monopoly of power in 1948 strongly influenced all aspects of life in East European countries. The religious institutions operating there, presented as quite solid bodies until that year, also had to face difficult and even dramatic challenges from the new Stalinist regimes. Until the fall of Communism, churchgoers and believers of all denominations were persecuted and discriminated against, while many of them were surveilled and harassed by the secret police. Research on this complex historical process has been challenging both because of the great extent of the phenomenon and the lack of documentation, as the Communist government destroyed the archives, libraries, and other documentary sources of the religious institutes in the 1950s, and these could hardly be recovered during the recent period. One possible avenue for research was provided by the archives of the former secret services, which contained numerous materials on the churches and religious communities that these services targeted for several decades. Opting for this approach, the collective volume The Secret Police and the Religious Underground in Communist and Post-Communist Eastern Europe addresses the complex intersection of secret police operations and the formation of the religious underground in Communist-era Eastern Europe. It discusses how religious groups were perceived as dangerous to the totalitarian state, while also being extremely vulnerable and yet at the same time very resourceful. It explores how this particular dynamic created the concept of the “religious underground” and produced an extremely rich secret police archival record. In a series of studies from across the region, the volume explores the historical and legal contexts of secret police entanglements with religious groups, presents case studies on particular anti-religious operations and groups, offers methodological approaches to the secret police materials for the study of religions, and engages in contemporary ethical and political debates on the legacy and meaning of the archives in postcommunism.What can be the novelty of the book in terms of its methodological approaches? First of all, until now the investigation of the relationship between the churches and the secret services has been carried out within a narrow national framework. Here however, as a result of the international cooperation of the region’s researchers, we are offered a comparative research model on the complex intersection between religion and state security in communist and postcommunist societies. The volume brings together studies from the Soviet Union (Ukraine, Moldova, and Lithuania); and Eastern European countries such as Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia. The national case studies do not simply reflect on the historical situation in individual states but also take into account the characteristics of other countries in the region. Another common methodological characteristic of these studies is that where possible the authors engaged in dialogue with other types of sources, such as local and personal archives of religious communities, contemporary testimonies, and oral stories collected from interviews.The four parts of the volume are as follows: the historical and legal contexts of constructing the enemy; anti-religious operations; methodological approaches to religion in the secret police archives; and the study of these archives in postcommunism from the point of view of politics, ethics, and communities. The question is whether these four aspects are suitable for considering this region’s countries as a common set based on their secret services’ activities against the churches.From the point of view of the creation of the enemy, the presentation of religion in propaganda, and the efforts to liquidate it, the answer is definitely yes. The theory of the class struggle, with its Marxist roots but validated with Leninist-Stalinist updates, heralded the elimination of the exploiters, regardless of its meaning and varying from age to age. From an ideological point of view, only religious faith, through its deep traditions, could compete with the teachings of Marxism. Thus, the churches became one of the central and constant enemies for the Communist party-state. Another question is what regional differences the common ideological background and designated enemy showed during the secret service fights against them. And because all of the churches searched for alternative ways of surviving, they were forced to become invisible for the secret services. The volume employs the umbrella term “religious underground” to document the diversity of religious activity that the Communist states targeted. According to Michal Kasprzak the idiom of “religious underground” was based on the testimonies and reports of religious dissidents and émigrés, as promoted by the US-funded Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.1The differences were partly due to the discrepancies in which churches became historically established in each country. While in East European countries the “main religious enemy” was mostly considered by the secret police to be the Catholic Church, they monitored the existence of Protestant churches and sects with the same attention. Several chapters in the volume examine Jehovah’s Witnesses and the operational measures against them, with Corneliu Pintilescu writing about the Romanian example, Éva Petrás about the Hungarian, and Igor Casu about the Soviet Moldavian context.In the eyes of the state security agencies of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, Jehovah’s Witnesses were a particularly dangerous sect. Their teaching is couched in an anti-communist spirit. Their doctrine proclaims the coming establishment of a world theocratic form of government, headed by Jehovah (the so-called kingdom of God on earth), preceded by “a holy war” (“Armageddon”), in which all socioeconomic systems and their supporters who do not share Jehovist beliefs will be destroyed. As such, Jehovism “predicted” the destruction of the socialist states. Despite its relatively small numbers, because of its aims and methods, Jehovah’s Witnesses were deemed the most dangerous of the illegal sects. Its members’ activities are characterized by strict secrecy and centralization, the subordination of lower echelons to higher orders, regular accountability, perfecting forms of camouflage, and the use of secret means of communication: contact men, couriers, dead letter boxes, clandestine meeting places, ciphers and prearranged phrases in correspondence, and the publication of illegal literature.The same security activity can be observed in the case of other sects. Dumitru Lisnic writes about operations against Inochentism in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s, Maciej Krzywosz examines the actions of the Polish Security Service against the miracle of Zabłudów in 1965, Rasa Pranskevičiūtė-Amoson looks at life as a Hare Krishna devotee in the Soviet Republic of Lithuania (1979–89), Ondřej Matějka explores the Czech protestant milieu, and Iuliana Cindrea-Nagy investigates the history of neo-Protestant churches through the secret police archives in Romania.Since the aforementioned countries—due to well-known political and historical circumstances—were all members of the Warsaw Pact, it is no coincidence that they also uniformly applied the methodology developed by the KGB in their domestic state defense work against the churches. In the USSR only Christian sects were allowed to operate officially. The state security agencies had the right to carry out agent-operational work; to conduct searches, detentions and arrests; to conduct inquiries and investigations; to carry out special measures; exercise secret control of the whole society; fight against anti-Soviet elements among church people and members of sects, and the like. Moreover, the religious beliefs of individuals could often be used to forcefully recruit them into the service of state security and to task them with carrying out assignments targeting churches. Particularly important was the recruitment of persons of greater influence and general recognition within a church or sectarian environment because their views on issues of faith, and also on a range of other issues, were accepted by believers as incontrovertible truth.2Of special importance for Hungarian studies is that the first project workshop of the volume’s underlying topic was hosted by the Historical Archives of Hungarian State Security in 2017, where a number of the papers included in this volume were first presented. Among the Hungarian-related studies of the volume, the coeditor and coauthor of the introduction, Kinga Povedák, also authored a chapter analyzing the photographs of the religious underground. Here she highlights the fact that although the most essential information for the exploration of the past can be found in the documents of the archives, the discovery of alternative sources—like photographs—can be highly useful in understanding the topic at hand. The same methodological diversity is reinforced by Ágnes Hesz, who used the information found in the archives of the secret services to study vernacular religion. Furthermore, Szilvia Köbel’s article examines from a legal-historical perspective the context of religious activities in Hungary between 1945 and 1989/90.Overall, the collective volume proposes new and promising methodological approaches, combined with a comparative research model for the study of religion and state security in communist and postcommunist societies. It is a valuable contribution to the field, promising to become a reference point for further research on the topic.

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