Arrests at the Midnight Hour:Public Perceptions of the Secret Police in Germany and Russia

Abstract

East Germany and Russia both made use of a secret police/political police force in the twentieth century; both are also former communist states and European countries. But the public in those two countries perceived the secret police very differently. In East Germany, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (the Stasi) were hated, while in Russia, the KGB (Committee for Government Safety) was tolerated, with its thrice-elected president being a former agent himself. Post-Communism, unified Germany chose to release the files that the Stasi had kept, allowing people to read them, a luxury that Russians have not yet had. Finally, in Russia alone was the political police reorganized and reappropriated by the government, as the FSB. This thesis looks at each of those three points separately, and derives three conclusions.