The Prague Post Online: Opinion: Opening the files

August 29th, 2008

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Opening the files

Secret police recorded tiny details of Czech citizens
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December 12th, 2007 issue

By Barbara Day

Until a few years ago, I had assumed that all Czech citizens of good standing would want the country’s formerly secret StB files to be wide open. A conversation with my acquaintance Dagmar showed me how wrong I was.

Dagmar left Czechoslovakia in the early 1970s when the pressures of “normalisation” – specifically, the knowledge that someone in her circle was informing on her — became too much.

She spent almost two decades in the Netherlands, gaining a law degree and experience which she put to good use in Brno, south Moravia, in the 1990s. That was when I got to know her and to admire the passion she put into her work.

Then my life took me to Prague, where after several years we met again in the crush of German Reunification Day at Lobkowitz Palace. By then, she was one of Prime Minister Vladimír Špidla’s advisers in the Social Democratic government.

We got together for a cappuccino at the Café Louvre soon after. When I touched on the issue of the closed files, I was taken aback by the vehemence with which she attacked open access.

“How would you like to have your life laid open for anyone to read about?” she asked. “Who you met, where you went, what sort of films you watched? Do you know what kind of minds these people, these informers had? The whole lot should be destroyed, burnt, forgotten.”

“But I didn’t mean people should read your file,” I protested. “I meant the files of the fízlové, of the people who were reporting on you.”

“Who cares?” she replied. “What’s interesting about them?”

I couldn’t agree, although it reminded me how a number of people I knew had turned down the opportunity to see their files. They didn’t want to know, they told me. Or rather, they knew already, but, like the king in the fairy tale, they closed their ears and eyes to proof that a friend or relation had been disloyal. It was over, and they wanted to make the most of the rest of their lives.

It was only a few months ago that one of the most courageous of my friends went to read her file. Božena also objected to completely open access to the files. Hers was a shadow of a file, she told me. Nearly all the material that could have identified those who had persecuted her had been removed (during the confused days of December 1989, when no guard had yet been set on the files – many files, including mine, disappeared completely).

Almost all that remained of Božena’s file was the evidence of one kind but misguided friend who, in his interviews with the secret police, had tried to shelter her.

I heard a similar story from Helena, an actress who had been one of the first to apply to see her own file.

When I first knew her in the 1980s, Helena’s career had run aground — she worked freelance because no theater dared give her a permanent engagement; sometimes she toured with the Realist Theatre (now Švandovo divadlo), but was not allowed to perform with them in Prague. Her file was a disappointment, she said “because it broke off in the early ’80s, at the point when life really got hard for me.”

Nevertheless, Helena photocopied a few of the earlier reports and took them to the “friend” who had been informing on her.

“It wasn’t me,” said the rival actress. “I never did anything like that.”

“But this is all in your handwriting!” exclaimed Helena.

“Someone must have imitated it,” came the calm retort.

It took more than a decade to open up the archives of the secret police. The first work on them was carried out by the Office for the Documentation and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism (ÚDV), set up by Václav Benda in the early 1990s.

After Benda was elected to the Senate in 1996, the ÚDV continued its work with a team that included Jiří Gruntorád, founder of the Libri Prohibiti library.

In July 1998, the accession of a Social Democratic government was bad news for the ÚDV (although opinions about open archives do not necessarily run along party lines — while Dagmar is on the left of the political spectrum, Božena is proud to be on the right).

The ÚDV was one of the first of Interior Minister Grulich’s targets: By December 1998, his cohorts had produced a report proving to his satisfaction that the bureau was unprofessional and ineffective. However, there were calls for Grulich’s resignation in March 1999 when it was revealed that one of his senior members of staff, Jaroslav Saveljev, had prior to 1989 been a trusted Communist Party member responsible for training secret agents.

Meanwhile, Slovakia’s Mečiar years had drawn to an end, and several of ÚDV’s researchers relocated to Bratislava, to work with Mikuláš Dzurinda’s new coalition. Slovakia’s Ústav pamäti národa (Nation’s Memory Institute) was established by one of the most sparkling and original personalities to emerge from dissent and play a role in government.

Ján Langoš was Czechoslovakia’s first post-communist interior minister, returning to Slovak politics when the country divided. Langoš knew more than almost anyone about the links in the post-communist countries between the old secret services and new big business. His death in a road accident in June 2006 must have brought relief to a number of gentrified crooks, and not only in Slovakia.

The Czech Republic’s Nation’s Memory Institute is to some extent modeled on Slovakia’s, although it was longer in the making.

At its public inauguration Nov. 17 (the Day of the Fight for Freedom and Democracy), Senator Jiří Liška remembered that, back in 1999, officials had planned to call it the Památník doby nesvobody (Memorial to the Time of Un-freedom).

However, it was seven years before the idea could be re-presented. After a hard parliamentary battle, it emerged as the Ústav pro studium totalitních režímů (Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes).

Next to Liška Nov. 17 were president of the Senate, Přemysl Sobotka, mayor of the Prague 3 district, Milena Kozumplíková, director of the institute Pavel Žáček (a veteran of the ÚDV and Nation’s Memory) and Deputy Interior Minister Zdeněk Zajíček (also present were two ambassadors, Richard Graber of the United States and Jan Pastwa of Poland.)

Housed in the same Žižkov building (the former IT Ministry) is the Archiv bezpečnostních složek (Archive of Security Services). Decimated the files may be, but there is work there to keep researchers busy for many years. And not only here, but across the post-communist countries.

Some of those present Nov. 17 had spent the previous days in Bratislava, at a conference planned and prepared by Langoš before his death: “NKVD/KGB Activities and Cooperation with other Secret Services in Central and Eastern Europe 1945–1989.”

Five countries were involved: the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and Germany. Noticeably absent (except for one brave representative) was Mother Russia herself; the KGB files are firmly closed and will remain so, as long as the KGB sit in the Kremlin.

Bratislava was as much a mission as a conference; the first of a series, since (quoting the organizers): “The aims that arose out of communism’s ideology were global — infiltration, subversion and domination of the free and democratic parts of the world.” I asked one German researcher working on the Stasi files about his experience.

“Most of the material is very boring,” he said, “but it has to be opened up. Not for the sake of revenge, but for the sake of truth.”

Plundered, distorted, inadequate as they are, the files are mute evidence of a crime against humanity.

(Some names have been changed for the sake of privacy)
— The author is a founding member of the Prague Society for International Cooperation.

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