Zachránce z české obce Kupičov na Volyni – k životním osudům evangelického duchovního Jana Jelínka

The purpose of this text is to map out the vicissitudes in the life of the Evangelical clergyman Jan Jelínek on the basis of the sources available, in a bid to foster awareness of this prominent personage in the public realm and preserve his memory for future generations. Jan Jelínek was born in 1912 in Zelov (present-day Poland) to Czech exiles. Initially he worked as an accountant in the Jan Sláma company in Zelov, later graduating from the Missionary School in Olomouc and becoming a preacher. In the years 1937 – 1944 he served as preacher in the Czech village of Kupičov in Volhynia. During World War II he helped the persecuted, hiding Jews from the Germans, and Ukrainians and Poles from Bandera’s followers. In 1944 he and his wife joined the First Czechoslovak Army Corps in the USSR. In January 1958 he was arrested by the StB (the secret police of the Communist Czechoslovak state), and following three months of detention on remand, was sentenced to two years in prison for sedition and opposition to the establishment of the JZD (a network of Czech collective farms). He was released in 1960. Until his retirement in 1972, he worked as a labourer in the Paints and Varnishes company. Jan Jelínek died in Prague in 2009. On 28 October 2019 president Miloš Zeman posthumously decorated him with the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Class I.

Strictly Confidential Anthropology

Anthropological interest in secrecy and silence – and related aspects such as lying, knowledge, memory, and forgetting – has been long and precarious. Through what may be called personal anthropology, in this article, I describe both private and professional anthropological experiences including family memories, fieldwork sites, and academic practices. By recalling state socialist ideology, censorship, and family secrets, I illustrate how citizens have relied on each other in order to counter state hegemony. I highlight how surveillance in Romania expressly encouraged my informants as well as the secret police to engage in mutual intelligence and observation tactics as evasive tactics. Building on these strategies, I argue that academic life is not immune to secrecy, silence and covert action. I introduce an anthropologist who worked for the Hungarian secret police, and consider how academic life continues to rely on covert programs and an institutionalized hierarchy to promote and maintain its structures and interests.

Ethnopolitical views of Grigory Ivanovich Borisov (Stary)

Grigory Ivanovich Borisov, party alias Stary (Old) was born in the Bendery district of Bessarabia on December 9, 1880. He was forced to work from the age of seven. Since 1900, G. I. Stary took part in the revolutionary movement. For active participation in clandestine activities, he was repeatedly arrested by the police and served sentences in various prisons of tsarist Russia. G. I. Stary made a great contribution to the creation and development of the Moldovan ASSR. In 1924, he was appointed chairman of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of the Autonomous Republic. Then G. I. Stary was elected chairman of the Central Executive Committee. In 1926–1928 and 1932–1937, he worked as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the MASSR. Contemporaries assessed his position on the issue of “Moldovans or Romanians” as ambivalent. G. I. Stary denied accusations of opposing the indigenous policy: “It is wrong that I am against Moldovanization. I only take into account the difficulties, and this is taken as resistance”. He was repressed in 1937 and rehabilitated in 1955. The article was written on the basis of materials from the Soviet secret police (NKVD) archive.

The Problem of Transylvania in the Emigration Correspondence of Count Béla Teleki from the End of the Second World War to the Abolition of the Communist Regime

The aim of this study is to analyse the voluminous emigration correspondence of Count Béla Teleki in order to highlight his main thoughts about the future of Transylvania. Béla Teleki was one of the most important Transylvanian politicians in the middle of the 20th century. His political career reached its peak at the time when Northern Transylvania was regained by Hungary after the Second Vienna Award. At the end of the Second World War, Teleki was persecuted by the Secret Police of the new Hungarian Communist Regime. Starting from 1951, he lived in the United States until his death on 7 February 1990. During the decades of his life in emigration, he carried on a great correspondence with the leading personalities of the Hungarian emigration in the West, several members of the American Senate, and even with President Gerald Ford. In this way, Béla Teleki became one of the central personalities of the Hungarian emigration in the Western World. His opinion, his voice were determining. This study summarizes the most important theme Béla Teleki was preoccupied with, the future of Transylvania, as he imagined it, by making a short analysis of his correspondence consisting of thousands of letters.

In Dystopian Retrospect of a Crisis Mood: My Life as a Spy by Katherine Verdery

My essay bears a deliberately oxymoronic title as it offers, on the one hand, a reminiscence of 1984, as a most depressing year in the actual history of Romania and likewise in my own earliest career memories. On the other hand, it proposes a contemplation of George Orwell’s British postmodern dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Last but not least, it presents certain 1984 aspects as rendered by the following exceptional book, a great challenge for any scholar of my homeland and my generation: My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File (2018). Distinguished Professor Katherine Verdery, its author, a contemporary American scholar, belongs now also to our Romanian academic elite. Yet this book testifies to her darkest experience in our country, just before the Iron Curtain fell down. Although the parallel between these two books may seem risky at first sight, they share much more than meets the eye; and my claim endeavors to go beyond this visible pretext of the new COVID-19 pandemic, another crisis which has intruded upon all our lives – just like a spy.

Does State Repression Spark Protests? Evidence from Secret Police Surveillance in Communist Poland

Does physical surveillance hinder or foster antiregime resistance? A common view holds that surveillance prevents resistance by providing regimes with high-quality intelligence on dissident networks and by instilling fear in citizens. We contrast this view using formerly classified data from Communist Poland. We find that communities exposed to secret police officers were more likely to organize protests but also engaged in less sabotage. To ensure that the relationship is causal, we use an instrumental variable strategy, which exploits the exogenous assignment of Catholic “spy priests” to local communities. To trace the underlying mechanisms, we draw on qualitative interviews and archival sources. We document that Poland’s comprehensive use of surveillance created widespread anger as well as an incentive for citizens to reveal their true loyalties, thus facilitating antiregime collective action. Once on the streets, protesters refrained from sabotage to signal their political motivation to bystanders and authorities alike.