Promiscuous pioneers of morality: The code of ethics of a secret service functionary in communist Poland as set by law and practice, 1944--1989

In recent years the historical literature on the communist system has grown to significant proportions, yet it has not made a comprehensive attempt to answer the empirical question of how successful communist regimes were in inculcating their moral principles into societies. But the empirical conflict between ethics and reality is crucial to understanding why communism eventually failed. My dissertation makes the first attempt to juxtapose the communist code of ethics, the morality it preached, and the ideal it championed, with ethical dilemmas, moral transgressions, and legal violations of the "purest of the pure" -- communist security functionaries.;I pursue this theme by following the Polish security apparatus as the microcosm of an effort to transform it into an army of communist pioneers. Throughout this dissertation I have tried to identify key components of the communist ideal. Each chapter addresses one of its chief virtues: lawfulness, knowledge, secrecy, transparency, atheism, diligence, and sobriety. Although the structure of the code of ethics did not much differ from contemporary democratic canons, its implementation was often contradictory to ideals the officialdom preached.;Most historians explain this paradox as a deliberate policy. Nonetheless, in the course of my research I came across a large number of documents that prove the opposite. Without challenging the canonical conceptions of Marxist theory, I argue that in reference to the Polish security functionaries, even in Stalinist times, not everything promoting the system was considered acceptable and tolerated. The internal code of ethics of the security service was therefore not as instrumental as one would think. I conclude that the authorities were serious about implementing the code of ethics upon security cadres. Despite full-fledged campaigns of moral renovation, they were unable to exact moral responsibility for behavior of their subordinate officers. I argue that the moral crusade was from the start both the unsuccessful means and ends of a set of utopian moral transformations. As a result of this failure, security functionaries remained poorly equipped to meet the multifarious problems imposed upon them by the communist regime.