The secret police in Central and Eastern Europe played a critical, if not the crtical, role in the formation of the communist states in the region. They were also central to the transfomation of both institutional religion and lived forms of religiosity during the communist era. Although formed under different circumstances in each national setting in the immediate post-Second World War context, the secret police institutions across the region, from Poland to Romania, were intimately connected through Soviet ‘advisors’ and deep personal and professional connections forged through the communist party prior to and during the war. At different stages in the evolution of secret policing their actions were characterised by repressive force, indiscriminate violence and mass surveillance.
This paper presents a summary of some key findings of the Hidden Galleries project (ERC project, 677355) which, through a comparative visual and material approach to secret police anti-religious operations, aimed at addressing a gap in scholarship on forms of lived, vernacular religion transformed and forged during times of repression and control. One of the key strands of the research that encompased four distinct national settings, Hungary, Romania, and Soviet Ukraine and Moldova, relates to the secret police construction, through discursive, visual and material practices, of the so-called religious underground and it’s relationship to the forces and motivations behind the formation of complex forms of lived reliigon. In contrast to institutionally focused research on religion during communism, the Hidden Galleries project explored the entangled relationship between the emergence of new religious formations and the practices of the secret police, which included arrests, detention and internment, raids and confiscations, mass surveillance, blackmail and agent infiltration on the one hand and on the other, new forms of religious secrecy practices, accomodation, compromise and new moral communities. This paper will elucidate through key examples drawn from diverse settings how secret policing, generated comparable yet distinct forms of religious practice, community and conflict. I argue that the legacy of the secret police and their practices remain central to understanding the contemporary religoius landscape in Eastern Europe as we move from a post-Cold War era to a Europe increasingly defined by war, populisms and the redrawing of boundaries.