Symposium on Informers Up Close: Informers in a Rearview Mirror – Impressions and Parallels from Drumbl and Holá’s Book

[Sergey Vasiliev is Professor of International Law at the Open University in the Netherlands]

Why bring a new book about the secret police (StB) collaborators in Communist Czechoslovakia, of all topics, into the burning, drowning, and splintered world of 2024? Can it serve purposes other than indulging one’s historical curiosity or wanderlust – an unaffordable distraction? I certainly thought so, if only because brooding over subjects which (seemingly) belong to the distant past and places often throws parallels with the near and the present into sharper relief. Having heard Drumbl and Holá speak about their forthcoming book in Amsterdam earlier this year, I could not wait following this pair of adventurers to communist Prague and back. My intuition was that it would tease out new insights and give food for thought about the more recent events elsewhere.

And gripped by the journey I was. By every standard, “Informers Up Close” overdelivers – by far. Built around the archived StB files and more, the book reveals hidden stories of survival and demise, coping and getting ahead, loyalty and betrayal in Cold War Czechoslovakia – stories which speak to universal themes and should be heard today and tomorrow. The authors do a masterful job of illuminating the frailties and contingencies of the human condition under authoritarianism and promote a deeper understanding of the motivations of people who collaborated with the ‘organs’. By highlighting the ever-shifting normative frames on informing, the book provides clarity on what, and how contingent, that wrong is, advocating powerfully for more humane, honest, and effective transitional justice responses to this (endemic) social practice. 

Back to the ČSSR 

The book’s central leitmotif is why people were clandestinely informing on each other to the Czechoslovak secret police; who they were, and what motivations and emotions drove such behaviour. These (e)motions – of which the authors foreground fear, resentment, desire, and devotion – are part and parcel of the human nature. As elsewhere, it is the toxic cocktail of these sentiments that enabled, sustained, and shaped citizens’ conversational interactions with the StB. Informing is present in the body politic not only of authoritarian regimes but also liberal democracies. Although its causes, mechanics, and assessments in these different contexts may appear incommensurable, there is more commonality than meets the eye. 

The authors set the scene with an exposé of the historical context to informing in Czechoslovakia, and the institutional, political, and emotional hydraulics of the StB’s ‘securitocracy’. Already first pages in, people who lived even shortly under ‘socialism’ or studied its history in other places, will be struck by overlaps in the glossary and practices of oppression. The inescapable clichés of ‘former people’, ‘kulaks’, ‘ideological diversion’, ‘reactionaries’, ‘class enemies’, and ‘parasitism’ sound all-too-familiar. The coercive and manipulative methods the StB used to recruit its informers – blackmail, threats, and exploitation of vulnerabilities alternating with appeals to patriotism, party loyalty, and socialist conscience – echo those associated with the sinister-acronym-organisations in other places. As a hallmark of the programmes to destroy the ‘hostile elements’ – nip any opposition in the bud and exercise ever-tighter control over the society – the USSR’s state-security nomenclature and related governance methods were imported to the socialist bloc countries, including Czechoslovakia, after WWII. There, the system was adjusted to the local context. Despite the Soviet constriction of those countries’ sovereignty (see Naimark), their authorities exercised a significant agency of their own in implementing that system. Drumbl and Holá push back against the soothing myths, entrenched after the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, that the regime in place was totally extraneous to the society, and emphasize its organic character. 

Drumbl and Holá’s historical account at the outset is indispensable to understanding that context and replete with leads that are all too tempting to follow. Did you know about the Czech rock band wonderfully called the Plastic People of the Universe (PPU) that, next to Václav Havel and Charter 77, was the notable voice of resistance during the post-1968 ‘normalization’? Or about the 1988 skirmishes between state security and students near the Lennon Wall which sparked the Velvet Revolution? Along with what reads like a tourist guide featuring poetic descriptions of the Czech transitional, not-fully-transitioned, architecture (Chapter 3), these bits really made me want to stroll around Prague again, this time to the soundtrack from the PPU’s back catalogue. For what it is worth, their 1977 song “100 bodů” (“100 points”) could have just as well been about the Kremlin’s response to the mourners of the slain Nemtsov and Navalny, its rampant ‘foreign agent’ and ‘extremist’ labelling of the dissidents, and its trademark brutality towards jailed opposition and antiwar activists:

They fear the dead and their funerals

They fear the graves and flowers which people put on those graves… 

They fear poems and books

They fear theatre plays and movies 

They fear records and cassettes

They fear writers and poets

They fear journalists

They fear actors and sculptors

They fear painters and singers… 

They fear political prisoners

They fear the families of political prisoners…

So why do we fear them?

Close-up on Informers

According to varying estimates collated by Drumbl and Holá, in the socialist Czechoslovakia, some 140,000-160,000 people passed through the ranks of StB of informers by 1968 while the total number was around 12,566 in 1980. The Czechoslovak case illustrates the pervasive character of informing in ‘participatory dictatorships’ (Mary Fulbrook). To guard themselves against real or putative enemies, such regimes feed on complacency of the passive majority and complicity of the active minority. As material, status-related, and ideological incentives often prove insufficient to secure the needed collaboration, they deftly cultivate and exploit people’s vulnerabilities: their keenness to conform and to belong, their fear of ostracism, of losing their jobs, livelihoods, and reputation, and the dread of punishment, death, or violence against the next of kin. Reliance on informers is a ‘divide and rule’ tactic that atomizes society. It enables the regime to sow mistrust among individuals, instil a climate of fear, and paralyze any resistance, thereby rendering the society pliable and controllable. Repression sustains itself on a myriad of interwoven acts of obedience and compliance, words and silences, lies and half-truths, and compromises big and small. While conditioned by the oppressive environment, informing is materially shaped by the subjects’ agency and choices driven by ideological fervour, survival strategies, tactics of navigating the ‘system’, petty desire to exact revenge and ‘get even’, and so on. 

In Chapter 4, which presents Drumbl and Holá’s empirical spadework, the authors paint granular portraits of six informers along with vivid accounts of their collaboration based on their StB dossiers. These are complemented by a further 17 file-stories referenced in subsequent chapters. The authors’ soberly humanistic approach to these personas made me think of the treatment Orlando Figes gave to the characters in his The Whisperers, shedding a sympathetic light on informers in the 1930’s USSR. There, too, people caught in unenviable circumstances were compelled to report on ‘foreign spies’ and ‘enemies of the people’, often implicating family, friends, colleagues, neighbours under the fear of reprisals or as they themselves were being ‘repressed’. 

Drumbl and Holá narrate the characters from StB dossiers as ‘victims who victimize’: 

often marginal, beset with personal struggles, private and health problems, vulnerable, woeful, and chronically surveilled – and being victimizers who betray and harm others, lord power over others, and inflict considerable pain on persons about whom they funnelled information to the StB. 

The ordinariness and humanity of these collaborators, doused in personal tragedies, struggles, faults, and frailties, serve as a mirror, a glance into which confirms one intuition. (Almost?) anyone swept under political violence can end up in the same place; only exceptional people will be invulnerable, principled, fearless enough not to give in to temptations or pressures. The point is driven home in this candid, introspective passage:

We have all informed at some stage of our lives, we have all deceived, we have all ratted someone out to an authority figure, nearly all of us have smeared someone for some purported advantage or because we felt we had to or that it was the right thing to do. 

Sergey Dovlatov famously queried, “We are endlessly blaming comrade Stalin and, of course, deservedly so. And still I wish to ask – who wrote four million denunciations?” Some deem this controversial: quite a number of those denunciations were motivated by political reasons, personal grudges or gain, but many more others were extracted by means of psychological and physical torture in NKVD dungeons – the methods used also in Stalinist Czechoslovakia.

It is odd to think that denunciation patterns are now tragically replayed in the warped reality of Putin’s Russia, a modern-day epitome of participatory dictatorship. The aggression against Ukraine, looped with the ultimate ‘tightening of screws’ back home, has seen the return of the epidemic of informing. In a repressed (and, in a sense, self-repressing) society, average people turn into cogs and wheels of the police state amplifying political violence. Spouses and family, co-workers, and neighbours rat each other out to the FSB, prokuratura, and other ‘law’-enforcement agencies, on account of real or perceived antiwar views and anti-government utterances. School teachers and pupils, lecturers and students, patients and doctors, and random fellow restaurant-goers overhearing scraps of conversations, voluntarily report on each other. At times, denunciations are done ostentatiously and with aplomb, as the way to enhance one’s public profile and curry favour with the powers-that-be. Such ‘professional complainants’ take it upon themselves to police the public discourse and artistic expression spheres and surf social media to identify the transgressors of wartime morality. The ‘disloyals’ and ‘unreliables’ are reported to the ‘organs’ or first strong-armed into apologizing for their sacrileges and retracting them on camera – a phenomenon pre-digital Czechoslovaks were fortunately spared.

Informers from Afar?

Drumbl and Holá get us uncomfortably close to StB informers. (How) can this intimacy be disentangled and a safe distance reclaimed? This implies, at least, a possibility of distinguishing condemnable informing from commendable informing. Promises of safe distance are, however, illusory, and sterile distinctions are far from a silver bullet for transitional justice architects. Drawing a full circle, the authors conclude their study with the pithy point that whereas in some settings informing is deemed a legitimate activity of vigilant, law-abiding citizens (e.g. reporting crime or public health regulations violations in liberal democracies), in others – in states emerging from the dark times of repression and human rights violations – the ancien regime’s informers face opprobrium and harsh consequences for their deeds. Like with the worn-out ‘terrorist versus freedom fighter’ dichotomy, one person’s courageous whistleblower will be another’s despicable snitch. 

Where does the line go between just and unjust informing and when is informing wrong? Drumbl and Holá spark an important conversation on this. They propose a heuristic for understanding the social practice of informing, constituted of its actual or anticipated harms, the degree of coercion employed, duration of collaboration, underlying motivation, the content of the information furnished, and the informer’s awareness. While not a precise rubric that pretends to algorithmize legal (let alone moral) evaluations, it is helpful and goes some way to providing normative guidance, a compass of sorts to navigate this moral morass. Both the context (e.g. the nature of the regime, the oppressiveness of the political climate, and methods used) and the individual’s motives and circumstances matter. Neither is fully and unconditionally determinative in and of itself. Indeed, in a vast majority of cases, the person will be both a ‘rat’ and a ‘whistleblower’ at the same time. Like vices and virtues, these categories are not really dichotomous but, to use Quentin Skinner’s turn of phrase, in ‘neighbourly relations’.

On the one hand, moral judgements on informers are always contingent on, and have traction only in tandem with, the prevalent ideology as a regulatory system of enforceable convictions and its sustaining power structures. When the political firmament such moral judgements are tethered to collapses, informers’ fates get reversed momentarily. The downgrade of the ‘system’ post-transition to repressive, unjust, and evil, recasts its acolytes, sycophants, and fellow travellers as reprehensible and treacherous delinquents, so much so that they will have limited room to rebut this transformation with reference to noble personal motives and inexorable circumstances. 

On the other hand, the person’s struggles and motives that have led to and sustained informing are also material – justificatory or merely excusatory as it were – albeit not decisive either. Resort to coercion or blackmail to spark and maintain collaboration will have – and, arguably, should have – some excusatory effect, although, as the authors note, the duration of such encounters and the intensity of duress applied throughout will be consequential to the assessment. Informing for selfless motives – the desire to prevent or halt a crime, fight abuses of power, protect the vulnerable, especially when decoupled from the political meta-context – is more likely to be morally acceptable than informing propelled by selfish motives such as avarice, careerism, or revenge. 

A whistle-blower puts her safety, job security, and other personal interests on the line by appealing to an external (higher, remote) authority or the public to promote a just cause: e.g. to disclose abuses of power and violations of the law. Think of insider witnesses to core international crimes or the whistleblowers who publicized facts of torture at the US’ Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or, most recently, the horrific abuses of Palestinian detainees at Israel’s Sde Teiman camp. By contrast, an informer (in the negative sense) deliberately causes harm to others, often for the sake of her own or her family’s safety (well-being, prosperity, fulfilment). Whether the causes and circumstances of informing are coupled with self-sacrifice more than self-interest on the informer’s part, tends to colour the judgement. Yet, even selfless motives still entail censure when steeped in a (discredited) ideological superstructure (‘love for the Fatherland’, loyalty to the state, counteraction to the ‘fifth column’). And, paradoxically, informing in the name of salutary socio-political goals, albeit legal, might still not fully cleanse the moral stain of inter-personal deception or treacherous betrayal of trust. 

Parting Words

Superbly researched and beautifully crafted, Drumbl and Holá’s book is a major event in the critical transitional justice scholarship. It must be widely read and will be unmissable for every transitional justice scholar and policy-maker. The book brushes against the grain of comfortable, reductive narratives which hold sway in most transitional societies, retelling secret service collaborators as a few ‘rotten apples’ to be excised from the healthy body of an otherwise innocent nation (the ‘evil traitors’ versus ‘heroic resisters’ binary). Drumbl and Holá deliver a nuanced critique of scapegoating and punitive streaks in transitional justice and politics and plead compellingly for a humanistic approach to dealing with past regime’s informers. 

Admonishing against the deleterious consequences of a self-serving political capture of transitional justice, Drumbl and Holá also make a powerful case against inadvertent perpetuations of cruelty via its mechanisms and processes (the unrestricted opening of secret police archives and harsh, indiscriminate lustrations being common examples). One of the many takeaways we owe to them is the imperative need to centre informers’ individual motives, personal circumstances, and relational dynamics of their collaboration. These variables ought to be taken seriously when fashioning the politics of memory and legal policy responses to the (ubiquitous) phenomenon of informing.