The Condition of National Minorities in Eastern Europe in a Secret Cia Report From 1965

Abstract

In the context of the Cold War, detailed knowledge of the opponent and espionage were fundamental elements in the security policies of the two antagonistic sides. The CIA, the United States’ foreign intelligence service, identified the condition of ethnic minorities as one of the possible vulnerabilities of the Eastern Camp, judging from the perspective of the restrictive policies that Communist states held regarding rights and freedoms. Our study is based on the analysis of a document prepared by the CIA in 1965, a memorandum that took data from the latest official censuses in Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Albania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, and recorded the effects of assimilation policies on national minorities within the Eastern Communist states. The document is all the more interesting as the issue of national minorities rights’ in the Communist world was taboo.

Keywords

• eastern europe, the cold war, communist regimes, demographic statistics, the minorities issue