The Stasi: The East German Intelligence and Security Service, 1917-89. (book reviews)

by dint of David Childs and Richard Popplewell. recent York: New York University Pres 1997 320p $4500

Henry Krisch, University of Connecticut, Storrs

A central characteristic of recent dictatorships is a "political" (often misleadingly called "secret") police. The leaders of regimes "revolutionary" in the one and the other domestic and international politics behold in their transformational rule the justification for a politically expanded coercive agency.

The scholarly literature about these agencies has generally been of brace kinds. One is devoted to establishing and