To Repress or Concede? the Evolution of the Secret Police Apparatus in Socialist East-Central Europe

European state-socialist regimes facing similar threats followed widely divergent paths of repression over the period 1948-1989. In East Germany, the response to mass uprisings in 1953 was a dramatic increase in the size of the secret police apparatus, its network of informants and power within the regime. In Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, the size and power of state security institutions peaked in the early 1950s and declined through de-Stalinization and a period of mass instability. I explain this variation as the product of strategic interaction between governing elites and the state security apparatus. Party elites could choose to make concessions to the public, including reforms which decreased levels of repression, when they were sufficiently powerful vis-à-vis state security elites. This was the case in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Where party elites could not replace powerful Soviet-trained secret police chiefs and subordinate their institutions to civilian control, they chose to rely on repression to manage mass threats. This was the case in East Germany and Romania. I test this argument using a new cross-national dataset on state security institutions and secret police chiefs, and also using sub-national data on the distribution of state security agents across East German districts.