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Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, scholars are still exploring how socialist states and institutions behind the Iron Curtain functioned, often drawing on previously secret documents that have gradually become available since the 1990s.Not least because it conjures up the spectre of international espionage and totalitarian control, few other institutions in socialist Eastern Europe have incited more interest than the secret police.Publications ranging from file-based autobiographies like Sheila Fitzpatrick's recent A Spy in the Archives: A Memoir of Cold War Russia (2013) or Timothy Garton Ash's The File: a Personal History (1997), to histories and ethnographies such as Dennis Deletant's Ceauescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965Romania, -1989Romania, (1993) ) promise insights into the workings of the Soviet KGB, East German Stasi, or the Romanian Securitate.What does Katherine Verdery, a distinguished anthropologist of socialism and post-socialism in Romania and Eastern Europe, bring to the table with her most recent book?
Diana Georgescu (Tue,) studied this question.