EN
From the second half of 1944 the People's Militia recognised the need for a network of secret collaborators but documents related to this problem both during the period of the existence of this formation and after its abolition have been protected with great care.It is therefore impossible to become acquainted with the scale of the phenomenon and the normative foundations of conducting so-called operational work, which also encompassed agents. The author characterizes the operational work performed by the militia with so-called personal sources of information- a name given to agents and informers - in the 1944-1957 time span and defines several stages. The first, least effective, was linked with the years 1944 -1949, when professionally incompetent militia officers uncritically emulated methods applied by the security apparatus, a procedure which did not yield the anticipated results. The second stage (1949 -1954) was marked by the creation of the militia's own internal normative bases referring to the principles of winning secret collaborators, their classification and cooperation. The following phase (1955-1957) signified another attempt at devising principles and norms which were to eliminate the basic errors previously connected with the activity of the militia, i. e. winning the cooperation of persons, frequently coerced to collaborate, who from the professional point of view did not present so-called operational value. This tendency was evidenced by consecutive verifications of secret coworkers, whose considerable part was dismissed.