When John Connelly was writing his excellent book on captive universities some 30 years ago, he decided to take a closer look at three countries dominated by the Soviet Union after the Second World War: Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. This comparative approach was a fruitful way of studying the modern history of the region. Molly Pucci uses a similar approach in her book on Communist states’ internal security organs, focusing on the institutionalization and anthropology of the repressive agencies. By tracing the history of these agencies’ rank-and-file, she seeks “to place the early history of communist secret police institutions back into the entangled and violent history of Europe and Russia in the twentieth century” (p. 284).
Pucci's well-written book offers a great narrative and is a pleasure to read. She goes further and wider than have other historians who focused only on single countries. The book offers an illuminating...