Introduction

A veritable flood of memoirs, plays and even movies have dealt with the topics of Communist espionage, secret police forces and terror. In the first postwar decade the totalitarian theorists, led by Hannah Arendt, Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, brought initial intellectual attention to the secret police and terror as integral aspects of Communist regimes. But in terms of theory it was almost two decades until 1971 when the next significant contribution appeared — Alexander Dallin and George Breslauer's Political Terrorin Communist Systems, with its structural-functional and personality orientation. Indeed, many of the most vital and dramatic events in the history of Communist politics have involved terror, espionage, and secret police. Unlike military leaders who usually were disqualified from competing for the top leadership position in Communist countries, secret police chiefs have frequently bid for supreme power. A final theory is the "barbaric" one, which sees Communism as inherently inhumane and barbarous, as requiring repression and coercion on a large scale.