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Recent years have witnessed contentious public debates in Poland, as in other Eastern European countries, concerning the public uses of the Communist Secret Service files and the ensuing politics of history and memory of the state socialist past. The key terms of these debates are articulated mainly by the liberal and conservative elites, within an abstractly conceived national history/memory framework that does not address the conflicts across class lines, or recognize the “estranged” of the new Poland, who remember the recent past “positively.” Departing from the national history/memory framework, this paper calls for another kind of history: one that is minor as it is global. Drawing on a file compiled by the Polish Communist Secret Service on a certain self-identified socialist from Turkey, who migrated to Poland in the late 1980s, I attempt to provide a parallel history to the fall of the Berlin Wall. I read the file not only for what we can gather from it, but also for what we cannot know from what is positively presented by it. Concentrating on the fragmented, minor, inconclusive story of this politically engaged working man, I call for the use of Communist Secret Service archives to produce a global history of socialisms and of the Cold War that traces the lives and movements across the Second and Third Worlds. In so doing, I gesture to what Karol Modzelewski has suggested in a different but related context as “loyalty to the strangers/the unknown ones” (lojalność wobec nieznajomych).

Keywords: Global history of socialisms, Communist Secret Service archives, memory, life story, the Third World