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History magazine - researches
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Nagornaya O.S. The Stasi of the GDP, East German Students, and the "Friendly Agency": Temptations and Boundaries of the Transnational "Intelligence History" of the Socialist Block

Abstract: The subject of the author's research is the yet unstudied aspects of the transnational history of the intelligence services of the USSR and the GDR in the sphere of controlling the educational system of the East German students in the Soviet Union: their mutual collaboration, the area of operation of the Stasi, the methods of recruitment and mobilisation of unofficial informers, and the conflict areas of the Socialist integration. On the basis of material from Russian and German archives, the author reconstructs the strategies of assessing reality and behavioural practice of the students, the reasons for collaborating with intelligence services, and the attempts to use uncontrolled niches for private benefit. On the methodological plan the article presents an interdisciplinary study, created at the intersection of new political, transnational, and social history, historical anthropology, and sociology of international relations. The student delegation became a Stasi channel, securing the effect of having a limited presence on the territory of the governing country, as well as a possibility to have an indirect influence on the internal affairs of the Soviet Union: the organisation of the educational process and control over Soviet and international students, and also over representatives of West Germany (entrepreneurs, scholars, tourists). The author notes the pragmatic flexibility of the intelligence services' discourse on interagency with respect to official propaganda words, and also confirms the fruitfulness of the refusal to universally consider all the agents of the Stasi as ingrained servants of dictatorship in favour of a differentiated approach to analysing the motives for collaborating with secret services.


Keywords:

East German students, Stasi, Comecon, Socialist bloc, history of the German Democratic Republic, intelligence history, transnational history, social group resistance, mobilisation practices, Cold War culture


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