PRAGUE, Czech Republic—Archives of the former Czechoslovakian communist security police are now published on the Web in the Czech Republic. The Security Service Archive and the Institute of Totalitarian Regimes (ISTR) made the first part of the comprehensive archive available to the public earlier this month.
It is a follow up of the “open past” project, which the ISTR calls “a study and unbiased evaluation of the time of non-freedom and communist totalitarian power.”
Records show that in the period under communist rule dozens of Czech political dissidents were executed and more than a quarter million people were imprisoned. The secret police employed no fewer than 200,000 spies to keep watch over their fellow citizens. The online archive includes the names of former spies and informants.
“The materials are characteristic for that period, and the ‘thinking’ of a totalitarian regime. The hunger after the control of everything, up to the smallest details,” says Jiri Reichl from the ISTR.
According to Reichl, the institute has administered approximately 280 million pages of materials. Currently the online archive consists of several tens of thousands of pages of archival materials, and will be continually supplemented.
Former Czechoslovakia was ruled by communists for forty-one years. Until the non-violent “Velvet Revolution” put an end to it in 1989—the same year the Berlin Wall was torn down, which marked the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.
It was also the same year that Chinese students protesting on Tiananmen Square were massacred by the Chinese Communist Party, a regime that has lasted up to today.
With the publication of the archives, questions have arisen among the Czech public—who worked for the State Security (StB) during the communist rule and are there former spies or employees in the present government?
In 2007, it was revealed that Pavol Mihal former head of the Czech branch of Interpol (the world’s largest international police organization), was a former StB secret police agent. He was made to step down from his position.
It is a follow up of the “open past” project, which the ISTR calls “a study and unbiased evaluation of the time of non-freedom and communist totalitarian power.”
Records show that in the period under communist rule dozens of Czech political dissidents were executed and more than a quarter million people were imprisoned. The secret police employed no fewer than 200,000 spies to keep watch over their fellow citizens. The online archive includes the names of former spies and informants.
“The materials are characteristic for that period, and the ‘thinking’ of a totalitarian regime. The hunger after the control of everything, up to the smallest details,” says Jiri Reichl from the ISTR.
According to Reichl, the institute has administered approximately 280 million pages of materials. Currently the online archive consists of several tens of thousands of pages of archival materials, and will be continually supplemented.
Former Czechoslovakia was ruled by communists for forty-one years. Until the non-violent “Velvet Revolution” put an end to it in 1989—the same year the Berlin Wall was torn down, which marked the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.
It was also the same year that Chinese students protesting on Tiananmen Square were massacred by the Chinese Communist Party, a regime that has lasted up to today.
With the publication of the archives, questions have arisen among the Czech public—who worked for the State Security (StB) during the communist rule and are there former spies or employees in the present government?
In 2007, it was revealed that Pavol Mihal former head of the Czech branch of Interpol (the world’s largest international police organization), was a former StB secret police agent. He was made to step down from his position.
