Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration in Communist Eastern Europe

(Hardback)

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Whilst debates over secret agents and the revelation of lists of former collaborators have fascinated both post-Communist societies and the wider world, it is surprising how little has been written either on the nature of Communist-era collaboration or the processes through which post-Communist societies have sought to make sense of what collaboration was, and how it should be dealt with in the present. This is surprising given the amount of work that has been produced on the themes of resistance and victimization. Unlike more popular (and often lurid) accounts of collaboration, which naturalize the concept as an obvious and incontestable characterization of Communist-era behaviour, this work rather interrogates the ways in which post-socialist cultures produce the idea of, and knowledge about, 'collaborators'. It addresses those institutions which produce the concept and examines the function, social representation and history of secret police archives and institutes of national memory that create these histories of collaboration.

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Journal Europe-Asia Studies

Author Bio

Sandor Horvath is a permanent Research Fellow and the Head of Department for Contemporary History at the Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. James Mark is professor of history at University of Exeter. His research addresses the social and cultural history of state socialism in central-eastern Europe, the politics of memory in the area during both socialism and post-socialism. Peter Apor is a permanent research fellow at the Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences.