The 20th century in the Soviet Union is characterized by mass police violence and a lack of external control over the police apparatus. The socialist and their comrade communist governments, facing questions regarding their legitimacy, often used violence as a method to control the populace and minimize the political opposition. Crimes were seen as a political act which harmed the country itself, thus demanding a fitting retribution. However, violence is a double-edged sword, and this became clear later as the soviet state cut itself on the challenge of legally regulating such violence. Meanwhile, the complicated social and economic situation stirred discontent in the populace; illustrated by such events as a mass exodus of citizens out of East Germany to western democracies in the early 1950s.

This section discusses a transnational perspective upon the effect of the new measures taken by socialist governments in the post-Stalin era which strove to restore control over legitimate uses of force. Specifically, attention will be paid to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, to the Ukrainian and Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republics, the People’s Republic of Poland and the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Stalin’s death brought major changes to the use of mass violence and brought awareness to the importance of communication between governments and the general populace. IMMO REBITSCHEK (Jena) opened the panel by presenting the political situation in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death and his successors’ direct changes to the organization of police forces, to their institutions as well as their investigative methods.

Rebitschek defined three major paradigm shifts in the transformation of a Stalinist dictatorship into one with a more precisely defined monopoly over the legal use of force – a change in which the prosecutor’s office played the leading part. First was the dismissal of Stalin’s police state, in which an increase of communication with the public hoped to legitimize new approaches. In contrast, under Stalin, the police and its various branches possessed important political and legal privileges as they were only placed under military supervision, providing them a high level of freedom and independence and isolating them from the critique of the prosecutor’s office and the general populace. Second, the reform of the Gulag enabled a structural change in the functioning of the camps. Petty criminals were released, and others saw their terms cut in half while a new form of punishment – exile into remote regions – was introduced. The intended objective in restructuring the Gulag system was not only to hinder the rising rate of recidivism of small-time criminals, but also to relieve the financial strain which the camps system placed on the economy. However, prisoners’ expectations of system-wide amnesty fomented unrest among the remaining inmates, which in turn endangered the stability of the system. February 1954 nevertheless saw the transfer of the Gulag system from the secret police to the supervision of the prosecutor’s office, placing an external control on the system. The third paradigm shift in the post-Stalin transformation was the reform of the police itself and the process of rebuilding the citizens’ trust in law enforcement forces. The low literacy rate among militia members and the lenience of supervising military institutions encouraged abuses, arbitrariness and corruption in the ranks of the militia while the prosecutor’s office did not possess enough authority to maintain the quality of the trials. In September 1953, the police and its departments were placed under conventional jurisdiction, giving the responsibility of supervision directly to the prosecutor’s office. For the first time since the 1920s, the police were subject to external control, and arbitrariness and violence were officially labeled as inappropriate and susceptible for prosecution. Three years later, the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union took place in which Khrushchev denounced the atrocities of Stalin’s rule. It would have been interesting to see in Rebitschek’s presentation whether this speech had any other internal consequences on the reforms of police forces.

Violence, in its original form, became superfluous in a fight against political opponents – as the majority had already fallen victim to Stalin's extensive purges. However, the secret police still held on to some importance in the system, especially with regard to the monitoring of students and religious groups – both of which presented a myriad of potential dangers for Socialism. The post-Stalin Soviet secret police did not require a massive herd of agents as it did before, but it now needed operatives on which it could completely rely. Quality, therefore, replaced quantity in the early 1950s. By analyzing archival documents from Vilnius and Kiev, JANE LEZINA (Potsdam) clarified the new methods of manipulation and regulation that the secret police developed in order to enforce the regime’s ideological control over the society; techniques that reached their peak in the late 1950s and 1960s. The prevailing means of control over the society became the profilaktika and the approach of razlozhenia. The former focused on preventing the spread of oppositional ideas and behavior in both secret and public spheres. Notably, this would most often take place under the guise of innocent meetings. Profilaktika replaced the conventional method of arrests which proved too costly and ineffective. The latter method consisted of disrupting anti-Soviet organizations internally with use of such tactics as discrediting organization leaders, intensifying internal conflicts, provoking distrust among organization members, encouraging rivalries between members and ideologically manipulating the public through mass media.

JOACHIM VON PUTTKAMER (Jena) focused on the systemic boundaries of a socialist self-restraint over its police apparatus; exemplified, in this case, by Poland’s 1984 established investigative authority. The Zarząd Ochrony Funkcjonariuszy (ZOF), an institution for the protection of public officials, showed that controlling misdeeds in the police apparatus was a very hard task. As von Puttkamer showed in his presentation, the ZOF mostly focused on the problem of corruption among the police, while neglecting the issue of abusive use of force. This disregard is demonstrated by the case of the first lieutenant of Danzig, notoriously known for physical abuse of prostitutes, and yet not investigated by the ZOF. However, it is clear that the ZOF was well equipped to address such problems of abusive use of violence. With the permission from the Minister of Interior himself, the ZOF could use the same tactics as the secret service in their investigations. Under this rule, surveillance monitoring of the targets, observation and shadowing were all allowed. Although having the potential of bringing the abusers to justice through the use of these methods, the investigators showed a high tolerance for physical abuse. Furthermore, the ZOF had an unequal understanding of violence and criminality with relation to gender: in the archived files that von Puttkamer could access, women were mostly represented in the roles of wives, girlfriends or prostitutes. A further understanding of the police apparatus and the limits of its control in other communist countries would be in this moment very enlightening. However, as von Puttkamer noted, this topic represents a major gap in contemporary research.

The last presenter GERHARD SÄLTER (Berlin), presented research focused on the conditions at the borders of the GDR, which – with its particularly violent and controversial methods of border protection – claimed around 650 victims between 1949 and 1989. He analyzed the context of a standardization of the use of firearms and the regulations of violence on the border, including its problems and consequences. A gradual militarization of the border police, the utilization of it against its own population and an underdeveloped system of communicating orders are prominent examples of police brutality under socialism. As Sälter argued, this resulted in a certain dependency and clientelism in the internal communication of GDR. One would ask why the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), presenting itself as a progressive party, would install such a controversial system. Next to the conventional argument of halting a wave of emigration to the West, Sälter presented three other motives for the creation of a border regime in the GDR. First, a certain type of tradition plays a role, drawing inspiration from the border regime of the Soviet Union, with its own strict set of rules and constant surveillance. Second, the early 1960s saw a surge in emigration to the West. At the time, this was understood by the regime as outright defiance to the leadership of the SED. The violent means with which this wave of emigration was met contrarily sparked new desire in the population to escape to the West. And lastly, the SED was struggling with a lack of legitimacy, on a national as well as international level. The introduction of a border regime, its symbolic documentation and a feigned systematic control over the situation were all in effort to regain composure. However, this was poorly communicated down the line to those who would put such policies in place. The SED’s doctrine of verbal commands created a strong dependence on one’s superior while presenting a dangerous amount of order distortion. For instance, it was only in 1982 that a border law on the use of firearms was officially put in place.

The final discussion focused on the question of legitimacy of violence from an emotional and gender perspective, which was linked to Joachim von Puttkamer’s thesis of a predominantly male-oriented criminal world, and on the matter of transnationality of police history. However, as there is a research gap concerning other former socialist countries, and the thorough examination of their police apparatus is missing, the presenters could mostly only refer to their own research. Nevertheless, as Joachim von Puttkamer and Gerhard Sälter highlighted at the end of their contributions, this section may inspire more future research.

Section overview:

Section organiser: Immo Rebitschek (Jena)

Immo Rebitschek (Jena): Vom Ende der Unantastbarkeit. Die sowjetische Kriminalpolizei nach Stalins Tod 1953–1956

Jane Lezina (Potsdam): The Soviet State Security: From Mass Terror to Mass Social Control

Joachim von Puttkamer (Jena): Dienst unter Aufsicht: Die „Behörde zum Schutz der Beamten“ und der Umgang mit Polizeibrutalität in der späten Volksrepublik Polen

Gerhard Sälter (Berlin): Norm, Rechtsbindung und Klientele: Die rechtliche Normierung des Schusswaffengebrauchs an den Grenzen der DDR und ihre permissive Implementation

Discussion