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This book is an outcome of the project Creative Agency and Religious Minorities: "Hidden Galleries" in the Secret Police Archives in Twentieth-Century Central and Eastern Europe, which was funded by the European Research Council. The book offers vivid insights into the measures and tools that the secret police in Central and East European countries applied during the Cold War and afterward in order to control and repress underground churches. After World War II, the ministries of the interior of these countries were heavily supported by the Soviet NKVD/KGB, which had collected broad experience in suppressing churches since the first days of the October Revolution in 1917. Because the churches and religious communities in the newly occupied countries were regarded as possible enemies of the newly established communist regimes, they were closely examined and put under pressure. The book focuses mainly on the Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church, and the Protestant Churches but also on minority communities like Jehovah's Witnesses, the Hare Krishna movement, and the Inochentists in Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union generally, and in Russia and the Baltics.The editors, James A. Kapaló (University College Cork, Ireland) and Kinga Povedák (University of Szeged, Hungary), broadly describe the aim of the book and the theoretical approach in the excellent introduction; they also summarize the most important observations of the articles to follow. The idea is to study the real conditions for religious groups underground during the Cold War, provoking, on one side, the glorification of victims of communist religious persecution in Western propaganda and, on the other, the demonization of religious people and their ability to destroy the regimes as promulgated by the Communist Party and the secret police. A big part of the historical truth may lay between these two poles, and the description of the "normal" life under political pressure is also one main achievement of the publication. Another is the work with large fonds preserved in the archives of the secret police forces in Eastern Europe. Here, systematic records were collected on the general population, but also on marginal groups here and on believers. They were suspected of behaving in an oppositional manner and thus categorised as hostile, therefore subjected to particularly close intelligence service scrutiny. However, there are hardly any such reports in the state archives. So, according to the editors, the secret police files have a special value and can even be used as a substitute for nonexistent ethnographic data because the authors of secret reports often provide vivid insights into the everyday lives of religious groups under state surveillance.The studies interpret the different sources compiled by the secret police agents very carefully and critically, but there are probably also in each postcommunist country additional archival sources that might add value to the secret police fonds. In the Soviet Union, for example, after World War II, state commissions for religious affairs were established as a direct link between political organs and the churches. The inclusion of their findings might bring additional information on the secret agency of the state on the one hand and of the believers on the other hand, who had to cope with the constant threat of being jailed for their supposed political illoyalty.The four sections of the publication address different questions. Section 1 reconstructs historical and legal contexts. Here, it becomes clear that the repression of "sects" in Eastern Europe and in Russia has a long history that did not start with the communists but was already prevalent before World War I. Section 2 focusses on antireligious operations. These include mass deportation of Jehovah's Witnesses from Bessarabia to Siberia in 1951 in order to eliminate their resistance to the collectivization of agriculture, measures taken by the Polish security service against a Marian apparition in a small village in 1965 (fake news was spread, and pilgrims were intimidated and threatened), the 1980s campaign against the Hare Krishna organization in Lithuania, and the attempt to split the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren from within by a group of collaborators. The secret police forces based these large-scale measures generally on what they called the antisocial character of the groups and accused them of being harmful to health, among other accusations. The following questions remain, however: What was the real reason these small communities were repressed? Did they really have the potential to threaten the regime? Wast the great effort to put them down really justified?Section 3 is dedicated to the methodological approaches to religions in the secret police archives. Here, the value of special sources from the police archives is discussed, including the meaning of the informer files and the interpretation of photographs. The topic of food as an example for human activities performed in underground churches is a new aspect of religious transactions, and it is also presented in secret reports. Communal feasting and fasting were pivotal moments for believers, and this form of material communication among the members of a religious group could lead to arrests and imprisonment, when they provided their brothers and sisters in faith not only with spiritual guidance, but also very practically also with products for their feasting in order to follow their special food requirements.Section 4, "Secret Police Archives in Postcommunism: Politics, Ethics and Communities," discusses the obstacles historians had to face after 1989 when dealing with secret files that revealed the collaboration of clergy members with the communist regimes. Such information ignited fierce pushback on the part of official church representatives. Another problem is that access to secret police files is not granted everywhere. For example, Serbia did not adopt a law on the opening of secret records and restricts permission to native historians. It is quite difficult to trace political prisoners who were confined because of religious reasons because lists of prisoners often do not contain data on their confession or the motives for the imprisonment. Comparing findings with other archival materials, especially from the Federal Commission for Religious Affairs, can help. Another article discusses ethical questions and the moral judgments that police officers relate in their observation reports of clerics. Moral behavior as an important aspect of societal life is thus a striking topic for the secret police as well. For historiography, the connection of religious and socialist norms as well as personal behavior offers telling hints on communist orthodox values.The publication provides readers with a highly professional, international research effort. It allows synchronic and diachronic comparisons of the situation for underground churches. The diligent explanations on the interpretation of these special historical sources will stimulate similar research areas explaining everyday life during the Cold War.
Katrin Boeckh (Wed,) studied this question.