Slovak government posts communist secret police files on web

Slovakia has marked the 15th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution by becoming the first former communist country to post the complete archive of the communist secret police on the internet. That's quite a lot of archive - sixty thousand files with over 21 thousand names.

If you type www.upn.gov.sk you can access a website that displays electronic copies of basic registration logs of the Slovak branch of the Czechoslovak communist secret service, the infamous StB. The files include data about all people on whom the secret service were interested from the mid-fifties to the year 1989. No, this paragraph is not an excerpt form the script of a new James Bond movie but a real initiative of the Memory of the Nation Institute, a state body which has been researching the archives of the communist regime for the past two years. Fifteen years after the Velvet Revolution Slovakia has become the first post communist country to make such documents available to the public, according to Jan Langos the director of the institute.

"We, as a public institute, received Parliament's authorization to make public these files because we think that they are of important value for researchers who are still trying to complete the picture of life under communism. And of course there are many ordinary people who are curious to find out who spied on them or who had the right to shoot all those attempting to cross the border to Austria."

But are ordinary Slovaks still interested in how repressive life was before 1989?

"From the point of view of future I am definitely not interested in what happened in the past, I don't think it's important who did what, it's more important what people do now."

"I think it is very important for our nation, for example my father could not go to university because he was not a member of the communist party. We definitely have a lot of people who said something bad about him, we don't know who was it but we would like to find out."

"I think that now it is not necessary to discuss a lot about what was before. It was useful to be in the party or in something like KGB. If you wanted to prepare a better life for your family it was necessary to be a member of communist party."

In July this year the current Slovak secret service demanded that Parliament keep the StB's files confidential because communist spies had gathered embargoed information on sophisticated technologies, therefore being made public could lead to an international court row. The Parliament rejected the request and historians such as Dusan Deak say that Slovakia has only to gain from publishing these files:

"People tend to throw pages of real history too easily to the garbage bin. You can't shape your future if you ignore your past. The secret service shouldn't be afraid of any negative consequences as long as it had already purged itself of communist spies."

A week after the first lose leaf files were posted on the net, a few high ranking politicians are sweating. The files indicate them as possible informers. However, their response has been so far that the files are not reliable.