ISTR damaged archive material through negligence

The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes has lost and damaged important archive documents relating to the communist years, the daily Lidove Noviny writes in its Saturday edition. The paper says that documents relating to the case of Jan Palach, who set himself on fire in August of 1969 in protest of the Soviet occupation, and others on whom the communist police kept files are missing or incomplete. The paper puts this down to negligence in the way the documents were lent and handled as well as to their scanning for digitalization which often left pages torn and crumpled.