Péter Apor (PhD), a permanent research fellow at the Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary, is a specialist in the social and cultural history of East-Central European countries after World War II.

Sándor Horváth (PhD), a permanent research fellow and the head of department for Contemporary History at the Institute of History, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary, is the founding editor of the Hungarian Historical Review.

James Mark (PhD) is professor of history at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom.

Frameworks: Collaboration, Cooperation, Political Participation in the Communist Regimes By the editors; Part 1: Institutes; Chapter 1: A Dissident Legacy, The 'Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records of the Former GDR' (BStU) in United Germany, Bernd Schaefer; Chapter 2: In Black and White? The Discourse on Polish Post-War Society by the Institute of Polish Remembrance, Barbara Klich-Kluczewska; Chapter 3: The Exempt Nation: Memory of Collaborationism in Contemporary Latvia, Leva Zake; Chapter 4: Institutes of Memory in the Slovak and Czech Republics - What Kind of Memory? Martin Kovanic; Chapter 5: Closing the Past - Opening the Future. Hungarian Victims and Perpetrators of the Communist Regime, Péter Apor and Sándor Horváth; Chapter 6: To Collaborate and to Punish. Democracy and Transitional Justice in Romania, Florin Abraham; Part 2: Secret Lives; Chapter 7: 'Resistance through Culture' or 'Connivance through Culture.' Difficulties of Interpretation; Nuances, Errors, and Manipulations, Gabriel Andreescu; Chapter 8: Intellectuals between Collaboration and Independence. Politics and Everyday Life in the Prague Faculty of Arts in Late Socialism, Matej Spurný; Chapter 9: Tito and Intellectuals - Collaboration and Support, 1945-1980, Josip Mihaljevic; Chapter 10: Spy in the Underground. Polish Samizdat Stories, Pawel Sowinski; Chapter 11: Entangled Stories. On the Meaning of Collaboration with the Former Securitate, Cristina Petrescu; Part 3: Collaborating Communities; Chapter 12: Finding the Ways (around). Regional-level Party Activists in Slovakia, Marína Zavacká; Chapter 13: 'But Who is the Party?' History and Historiography in the Hungarian Communist Party, Tamás Kende; Chapter 14: Forgetting 'Judas'. Priest Collaboration in Slovak Catholic Memory after 1989, Agáta Drelová; Chapter 15: Informing as Life-Style. Unofficial Collaborators of the Hungarian and the East-German State Security (Stasi) Working in the Tourism Sector, Krisztina Slachta.

The collection of essays in Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration in Communist Eastern Europe addresses institutions that develop the concept of collaboration, and examines the function, social representation and history of secret police archives and institutes of national memory that create these histories of collaboration. The essays provide a comparative account of collaboration/participation across differing categories of collaborators and different social milieux throughout East-Central Europe. They also demonstrate how secret police files can be used to produce more subtle social and cultural histories of the socialist dictatorships. By interrogating the ways in which post-socialist cultures produce the idea of, and knowledge about, "collaborators," the contributing authors provide a nuanced historical conception of "collaboration," expanding the concept toward broader frameworks of cooperation and political participation to facilitate a better understanding of Eastern European communist regimes.