Security Empire: The Secret Police in Communist Eastern Europe, 1945-1954

The current book manuscript, which Molly Pucci will complete as a Leibniz Fellow at the ZZF, compares the origins  of communist secret police institutions in the countries of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Eastern Germany after the Second World War.
Her book provides a lens through which to interpret the different foundational experiences of communist institutions in the countries of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany and the diverse paths of communist states from the 1950s to the present. It integrates archival materials in German, Polish, Czech, Slovak and Russian to explore how secret police officials linked their countries to the USSR and each other through intelligence networks, exchanges, and mutual observation trips to form a common security space in the region by the early 1950s.