Security Empire by Molly Pucci;

Author:Molly Pucci; [Pucci, Molly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

A Revolution in a Revolution in Czechoslovakia

Just as there can be no factory without planning, there can be no state security without planning.

—Czech security agent, 1949

“I HAVE A strange feeling that doubtless applies to no other prisoner,” wrote Štěpán Plaček in a letter to Rudolf Slánský written from prison in 1950. “During interrogations I hear young comrades from the working class use the terms I invented as if they were completely self-evident. They direct themselves according to principles they do not understand. Principles that I fought to introduce to the system.”1 Several years later, in January 1954, Plaček, one of the founding agents of the Czechoslovak secret police (StB), was put on trial in front of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court in Prague and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.2 Although he had been removed from his position, it was difficult for him to detach himself from the world he had helped create: “In spite of the burden of solitary confinement and the fact that the investigators treat me like a prisoner, there are moments when I almost forget I am the one being investigated. It seems I am at my workplace among my colleagues, comrades, and friends from state security.” And yet much had changed in the StB since his time in the service. Secret police agents understood their work differently from the way he and his comrades had. They were no longer expected to debate rules, organizational principles, or professional terminology. They were expected to implement them. In Plaček’s words, “[My interrogators] act with reserve as their duties and service regulations demand. But I observe with joy their incomparable skill in carrying out investigations and the improvement in their work conditions.”

The StB was turned into a communist political police force in the years 1949–52, the subject of this chapter. In planning to reorganize the force, Czech and Slovak agents set off in 1949 for Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania to study the policing methods and training programs of services built under Soviet-led Allied Control Commissions. As the language of the class struggle and the search for enemies in the party engulfed domestic and international airwaves in 1949, the KSČ built a centralized party organization in the StB to pressure agents to engage more actively in political life and collect information on security employees. Together with leading StB agents, the Soviet advisers, who arrived in late 1949, began to implement major changes in the service’s structure, personnel, and methods. Within a few years they had centralized the secret police, built a foreign intelligence service, trained a new interrogation department, and introduced agents to different forms of arrest procedures, standards of evidence, and techniques for recruiting informers.

Between 1949 and 1954 StB officials put these practices to use in campaigns against party leaders, kulaks, church figures, military officers, and citizens with Western contacts. They helped spread these methods by organizing show trials in districts, regions, and villages across Czechoslovakia, the most prominent of which were the trials of the National

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