IMPLEMENTING POST-COMMUNIST NATIONAL MEMORY IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC AND SLOVAKIA

EUROPEAN STUDIES 30 (2013): 97-124 IMPLEMENTING POST-COMMUNIST NATIONAL MEMORY IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC AND SLOVAKIA Tomas Sniegon Abstract This chapter contains an analysis of two similar attempts to institutionalise ‘national memory’ in the Czech Republic and Slovakia after the fall of Communism and dissolution of Czechoslovakia. The study focuses on two documents that create a legal basis for such institutionalisation and on the main actors who initiated the decisions to create these institutes. It is argued that although the original reasons explaining the necessity to establish these new institutes in Bratislava and Prague were defined firstly as moral and scientific, the institutes became primarily ideological tools of the new governing post-Communist elites that served to centralise control of the collective ‘national’ memory. In 2002 and 2007, two similar institutes were established in the Slovakian capital Bratislava and the Czech capital Prague. The first one was named Ústav pamäti národa (ÚPN, The Nation’s Memory Institute), the second one Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů (ÚSTR, The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes). According to their founders, both these institutes were supposed to bring their societies moral satisfaction for struggling in the past, by disclosing unlawful practices of oppressive forces from two of the most brutal dictatorial regimes of the twentieth century, Nazism and Communism. Moreover, they were supposed to produce new scholarly works about these two regimes and contribute to the democratic education of new generations of young Czechs and Slovaks. 98 Tomas Sniegon Both institutes were supposed to deal with the period that began in the late 1930s and ended in the late 1980s when, with the exception of 1939 to 1945, Czechs and Slovaks were living in a common state with their lives heavily affected initially by the German occupation and the Second World War, and later by Soviet dominance and the Cold War. The key moments that the impact these two periods had on the life of the Czechs and Slovaks under Nazism and Communism became what the German historian Jörn Rüsen calls ‘borderline events’ (Rüsen 2001, 232-253). Due to the traumatic nature of these events for the Czechs and the Slovaks, and the fact that these changes could not be explained within already existing and previously dominating historical narratives, it is possible to classify them as ‘catastrophic events’ that made searching for a new sense of history and creating new historical narratives inevitable (Rüsen 2004, 46; Cavalli 2008, 169-182). Even though the vast majority of the Czechoslovak society saw the change from Communism to a pluralistic system as positive, the process of creating new post-Communist narratives was far from easy (Kopeček 2008, 232-264; Kolář and Kopeček 2007, 173-248). Public debates surrounding the Slovak ÚPN and Czech ÚSTR clearly illustrated these problems. This shared history has made the ÚPN and the ÚSTR special in the post-Communist part of Europe. Institutes of National Memory were also established in some other countries of the former Soviet Bloc, such as Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. None of these, however, were as closely connected by the shared past they were about to study as the Czech and the Slovak institutes. Similar subjects of study and similar characteristics of work do not necessarily mean that ÚPN and ÚSTR became mirror images of each other. Different perceptions of traumatic history in the Czech and Slovak republics and different development in these two successor states of the former Czechoslovakia turned these seemingly very similar institutes into two institutions with different priorities and even with partly different functions in their societies. The main purpose of this chapter is to show that while the original reasons explaining the necessity to establish these new institutes in Bratislava and Prague were defined firstly as moral and scientific, ÚPN and ÚSTR became primarily ideological tools of the new governing post-Communist elites that served to centralise control of collective ‘national’ memory. IMPLEMENTING POST-COMMUNIST NATIONAL MEMORY 99 Here, national memory cannot be understood as a network of symbols, values, rites, and local traditions, i.e. collective memory that is initiated and that comes from below. On the contrary, the ‘national memory’ that has been mentioned here is a centralised and institutionalised type of collective memory that corresponds with Aleida Assmann’s definition of political collective memory (Assmann 2006, 210-224), and is according to Jan Assman ‘a top-down institution which depends on the political organisation that institutes it’ (Assmann 2010, 122). The main concept used in this chapter, however, is not the concept of collective memory that connects the present and the past, but the concept of historical consciousness that inseparably connects these two time dimensions with the future. Historical consciousness is a mental process that illustrates how people orientate themselves in a flow of time, and search for their identity in time, by relating the understanding of their own present situation to, on the one hand experiences and memories of the past while on the other hand, expectations and fears in relation to the future (Jeismann 1979, 42). This chapter is not an analysis of all the activities of the ÚPN and ÚSTR. Instead, it focuses on two laws – one Czech and one Slovak that became essential for the constitution of the institutes and clearly demarcated fields of their activity. Since both the institutes were statecontrolled, all potential deviations of the work of their employees from these laws could be eventually classified as unlawful. Both laws are treated here as products of historical consciousness of those forces that dominated the process of their creation. Such an understanding of both institutes as manifestations or products of historical consciousness of various individuals and groups in the Czech and Slovak republics makes an analysis of time and circumstance against decisions about the institutes more important than the analyses of the periods that are the institutes’ main focus. Historical consciousness is possible to study only if we study its concrete manifestations. Swedish historian, Klas-Göran Karlsson, described the process during which these concrete manifestations are created as usage of history. To use history, according to Karlsson, means to activate historical consciousness to concrete actions. This means that the question of how history is produced becomes more central than the question of how history is received. In order to study differences and similarities between different manifestations of historical consciousness, 100 Tomas Sniegon Karlsson developed a typology of various uses of history: existential, moral, ideological, political and scholarly-scientific (Karlsson 2003, 38-43). Three of them – moral, scholarly-scientific and ideological – are central to my argument since they correspond with the main goals formulated by those who supported the laws about the Czech and Slovak institutes. In Karlsson’s functionalist model, scientific use of history is defined as a history usage that has been developed around the question of what is true or false in the interpretation of the past. It is based on a professional and exclusive theoretical-analytical and methodological system of rules within the scientific discipline of history as a taught subject. Moral history usage expresses thoughts about questions of right and wrong in history, about good and bad. History is activated here and becomes a moralpolitical power in a time when political liberalisation or another radical change makes it possible to bring earlier unnoticed or consciously suppressed historical questions into the political-cultural agenda. Ideological history usage arises in connection with questions about power and legitimacy; it is connected to those systems of ideas that exploit history in order to justify a position of power. The goal is to invoke ‘historical laws’ and ‘objective needs’ in order to construct a relevant contextual meaning which legitimises a certain power position and rationalises it by portraying history in such a way that mistakes and problems on the road to power are toned down, banalised or ignored. The borders between these attitudes are not always exactly clear and different ways of using history can be combined. Therefore the typology is not intended to be used in a normative way. However, with its help it is possible to better understand needs and intentions of the main actors. Provided that the use of history in the cases of ÚPN and ÚSTR indeed was primarily ideological, however, who are the winners and which moments have been toned down or ignored? Inspired by the German and Polish Models The main inspiration for most of the institutes of national memory in post-Communist Europe became the German Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, (Office of the Federal Commissioner Preserving the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic, or simply BStU) that was established in 1990. After its first director, former East German theologian, journalist and politician Joachim Gauck, the IMPLEMENTING POST-COMMUNIST NATIONAL MEMORY 101 BStU became known as the ‘Gauck Institute’. The main task of this institute was to make the documents of the former East German secret service Stasi accessible to those who were affected by the Stasi’s activities. Former citizens of the GDR were able to visit the institute to find out what the Stasi knew about them and who the informants were. The institute was also trying to reconstruct documents that the Stasi tried to destroy during the GDR’s final days. During the Stasi era the archive was used against those who became victims of the East German regime, while after the fall of the GDR attention focused on former perpetrators. Thanks to the Gauck Institute, the public could learn about the structure and activities of the Stasi and the victims should get, at least, moral satisfaction. Such an idea became attractive for the founders of the ÚPN in Bratislava and ÚSTR in Prague. Instytut pamieci narodowej (IPN, Institute of National Memory) in Warsaw became another source of inspiration for Prague and Bratislava. IPN was established by the Polish parliament in Warsaw in 1998. It started its work in 2000 but could not be seen as an exact copy of the Gauck Institute in Berlin. Its role in Polish society was intended to be more important than the role of its Berlin counterpart in Germany. One of the most important differences was the fact that the Gauck Institute, according to German law, was not supposed to affect new German ‘national memory’ and thus directly influence the process of creation of a new German national identity. The Polish institute, however, was supposed to do this. It was, for example, supposed to preserve the memory of ‘Polish patriotic traditions’.1 It has its branches not only in the capital but all over Poland. While the Gauck Institute focused exclusively on the period of the so-called German Democratic Republic, i.e. the development only in one part of what became a re-united Germany and its development only after the end of the Second World War, the Polish institute focused on Polish history both during the Second World War and during the postwar period. The Gauck Institute was understood much more as a part of the biography verification process than as a part of de-communisation of German society. The documents of the former East German secret po- 1 The Institute of National Remembrance Guide. http://www.ipn.gov.pl/portal/ en/1/2/Institute_of_National_Remembrance__Commission_for_the_Prosecution_of _Crimes_agai.html 102 Tomas Sniegon lice were not automatically used as a compromising material against top politicians of the ‘new’, i.e. re-united Germany (Mink 2008, 469-490). The last aspect I want to mention due to its relevance for the debates in Bratislava and Prague is the fact that the name of the Polish institute became The Institute of National Remembrance – Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation. This means that the IPN was supposed to take part in investigations of Communist ‘crimes against the Polish nation’. While the institutional involvement in investigations of the crimes of Communism will be discussed later, it is also necessary to point out that due to a complicated ethnic situation in Czechoslovakia it was more problematic to see just one single nation as a victim of ‘anti-national’ activities from the outside. When they were planning to found ÚPN and ÚSTR, the initiators of these ideas in Prague and Bratislava had a chance to follow and analyse all aspects of the work of the institutes in Berlin and Warsaw. The Slovak and Czech development, however, showed that the German and Polish experience with their institutes was not taken very seriously despite the fact that comparative analyses of the Gauck Institute and IPN could avoid some important structural problems that both UPN and ÚSTR had to struggle with. The texts of the laws about the institutes adopted in the Czech Republic and Slovakia show this ignorance to these crucial aspects very clearly. National Memory in Slovak Law The Nation’s Memory Institute in Bratislava was created by a special ‘Nation Memory Act’ 553/2002, adopted by the Slovak Parliament on 19 August 2002.2 National memory is supposed to be influenced by allowing the Slovak public access to documents of former ‘oppressive institutions’ from the periods of Nazi and Communist dictatorships from the years 1939-1989, which are treated as a single ‘period of oppression’. Such a definition, however, is highly problematic. A periodisation like this pays no attention to differences in the development of Slovakia between 1939 and 1989, though at least five different stages can be studied during this time: 1939-1944, 1944-1945, 1945-1948, 1948-1968, 2 Act on Disclosure of Documents Regarding the Activity of State Security Authorities in the Period 1939 - 1989 and on Founding the Nation’s Memory Institute (Ústav pamäti národa) and on Amending Certain Acts. http://www.upn.gov. sk/data/pdf/553_2002_en.pdf IMPLEMENTING POST-COMMUNIST NATIONAL MEMORY 103 and 1968-1989. During the first and second period, Slovakia became for the first time in history a nation state. However, it was not created by a free democratic choice of the Slovak people but by Hitler’s Germany that totally controlled Slovakia’s foreign and defence policy. Led by a Catholic Priest, Joseph Tiso, as ‘Führer’ and by the Hlinka´s Slovak People’s Party (HSLS), Slovakia became one of the closest allies of the Third Reich. During the first period, Slovakia was not occupied by German troops. The occupation came during the late summer of 1944 when resistance against the Tiso regime culminated. By the end of the Second World War, the first ever Slovak state in history ceased to exist and Slovakia became a part of a renewed Czechoslovakia that it previously had belonged to during the interwar period. Thus, the period between 1945 and 1948 meant on one side a renewal of a pluralistic parliamentary democratic regime, but on the other side, paving the way to a Soviet-type Communist regime. The support for Communism was stronger among the Czechs than among the Slovaks. Despite numerous political problems, however, the character of this regime was very different from both the Tiso regime before 1945 and the Communist regime after 1948. The Slovak law completely ignored this difference. Between 1948 and 1989, Czechoslovakia became a part of the Soviet Bloc dominated by the Soviet Union. All political power belonged to the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) and its Slovak offset, the Communist Party of Slovakia (KSS). Like the HSLS during the Second World War, KSČ forbade all political opposition in the country. Like the wartime regime, even the Communist regime could be divided into two periods, this time connected to Soviet instead of German military occupation. Until 1968, Czechoslovakia was not occupied by Soviet troops. The situation changed dramatically after the invasion against the so-called Prague Spring in August 1968. Then, the massive presence of the Soviet army on the Czechoslovak territory continued until the end of the Cold War. No reasons why the entire period 1939-1989 is treated as a single monolithic block are specified in Slovak law. Despite the fact that the lawmakers in the title use the term ‘national memory’, the law contains no definition of what it understands as ‘memory’ and ‘nation’. However, the law distinguishes between the Slovak nation and the members of 104 Tomas Sniegon ‘nationalities living in Slovakia’. Here, too, it is unclear if these nationalities are understood as part of the Slovak nation or not. This aspect is especially important with regards to the relationship between the ‘Slovak nation’ and the Slovak Jewish population during the Second World War. Even though Slovakia was not occupied by Germany before 1944, the Slovak regime deported almost 60,000 Jews to the extermination camps. More than 10,000 Jewish Slovaks were deported during the German occupation 1944-1945. While referring to the term nation, the law praises a ‘tradition of the Slovak nation’s fight against the occupants, fascism and communism’. At the same time, the Slovak nation as such is not made responsible for the ‘period of oppression’. Here, the ‘state that violated human rights and its own laws’ is seen as guilty. Thus, the terms ‘nation’ and ‘state’ are seen as antagonist with regard to non-democratic regimes. The state, which is not specified in ethnic terms, is seen as an oppressor of the Slovak nation. As the law concludes, ‘no activity of the state against its citizens that is contrary to law can be classified as state secret or forgotten’. The goals given to the new institute by the law are very extensive. It is, however, possible to sum them up and divide them into the three already mentioned categories: First, moral aspects focus on a need not to forget and ‘bring satisfaction to those whose lives were harmed by the state that violated human rights and broke its own laws’. Second, scientific aspects stress the need to learn more about the past. The institute should ‘completely and objectively evaluate the period of oppression’. It should analyse ways and reasons for loss of freedom, it should study ‘fascist and communist regimes and their ideologies’ and the ways in which both the Slovaks and foreigners were involved in developing these regimes. Third, ideological goals stressed the need to condemn oppressions of the state from the periods of dictatorship and to ‘promote ideas of freedom and democracy against the regimes similar to Nazism and Communism’. While Nazism and Communism are treated as equal here, there is no specification of what regimes are considered as ‘similar’ to them. Czech Law The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague, that was also supposed to be called the Institute of National Memory according to IMPLEMENTING POST-COMMUNIST NATIONAL MEMORY 105 the original plans,3 was established by the law 181/2007 in The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and the Security Services Archive, and on Amendments of some Acts. The Czech Parliament adopted the law on 8 June 2007, almost exactly five years later after the adoption of the Slovak institute in Bratislava.4 The new institute started its work in February 2008. Unlike the Slovak case, the period that is supposed to be covered by the Czech institute’s activity is divided into two periods that do not exactly follow each other: the period of oppression from 30 September 1938 to 4 May 1945, and period of Communist totalitarian power between 25 February 1948 and 29 December 1989. The first date, 30 September 1938, refers to the so-called Munich Agreement between Germany, Italy, Great Britain and France, which put Czechoslovakia under full German control. Because of the agreement, Czechoslovakia immediately lost its borderline regions where the majority of the population was German. Some months after the Munich Treaty, the rest of the Czechoslovak republic was destroyed and a Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia was established in its Czech part. The ‘period of oppression’ ends one day before the start of an uprising in Prague, i.e. four days before the end of the Second World War. The second period starts three years after the war with a communist coup d’état in 1948 and ends on the day when the Czechoslovak parliament removed a paragraph about the dominating role of the Communist Party in Czechoslovak society from the Czechoslovak constitution in 1989. Despite an indication of differences between the two periods in question, both are equalised in the Institute’s name as ‘totalitarian regimes’ (see note 84). The term ‘national memory’ is not explicitly mentioned in the Czech law (the reason why it was avoided will be explained later). The form of the law, however, is very similar to the Slovak ‘Nation’s Memory Act’. Even here, ambitions are much higher than merely making the institute 3 Návrh zákona o Ústavu paměti národa a změně některých dalších zákonů, presented to the Upper house of the Czech Parliament, Senát, in 2006. http://www.senat.cz/ xqw/xervlet/ pssenat/historie?T=62&O=6 4 Act of 8 June 2007 on the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and the Security Services Archive, and on Amendments of some Acts. http://www.ustrcr.cz/ data/pdf/normy/act181-2007.pdf 106 Tomas Sniegon an ordinary archive for handling documents of the secret services that were previously classified as top secret. The text of the law mentions ‘huge amount of victims, losses and damages on the Czech nation and other nations that suffered in the territory of the Czech Republic during the periods of totalitarian dictatorships’ and ‘patriotic tradition of resistance of the society against occupation and various forms of totalitarianism’ (see note 82). As in Slovakia, the Czech law specifies moral, scholarly and ideological ambitions. The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes ‘studies and independently evaluates the period of oppression and the period of Communist totalitarian dictatorship, it studies anti-democratic and criminal activity of various state institutions, especially security forces, and it also studies criminal activity of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia as well as other organisations based on communist ideology’ (Act of 8 June 2007, 3). Moreover, the institute is supposed to ‘analyse reasons and ways of destruction of a democratic regime during the Communist totalitarian power, documents involvement of Czech and foreign persons in the Czechoslovak communist regime and in the resistance against it’ (Act of 8 June 2007, 4). One of several important differences between the Czech and the Slovak institute is the extent of the institute’s involvement in prosecution and punishment of the crimes from the periods of oppression. While the ÚPN in Bratislava is according to law obliged to participate in this process by cooperating with the office of the Attorney General of the Slovak republic (Generální prokuraturou Slovenské republiky) and even to initiate new prosecutions (which makes the ÚPN very similar to the IPN in Warsaw), the Czech ÚSTR has no such obligation according to the Czech law.5 Who Controls the Institutionalised National Memory? An important question that helps to explain the intentions of those who initiated and founded the institutes is the question of power control. In both cases, the institutes are led by institute boards – the Czech board has seven, and the Slovak board nine members. The head of the Czech board is a director while the Slovak board is headed by a chairman. 5 This point was included in the original proposal. However, there was no mention about it in the final text. IMPLEMENTING POST-COMMUNIST NATIONAL MEMORY 107 Members of the board are elected for six years in Slovakia and five years in the Czech case. In Slovakia, the right to nominate members of the board is divided between President, parliament and government. The parliament, Národná rada Slovenskej republiky, elects five members of the board including the chairman, two members are chosen by the government and two by the President. In the Czech case, concentration of power is even higher; all decisions about new members are in the hands of the Senát, the upper house of the Parliament. While proposals can be made by more organisations and institutions that are specified by the law, the final decision can only be made by 81 members of the Senate. Thus, those political parties that control the Senate control nominations of members of the board. The Senate became a part of the Czech political system in 1993; since then, the conservative Civic Democratic Party (Občanská demokratická strana, ODS) held a majority until 2010. Demands on those who can be elected as board members are seemingly identical in both Slovak and Czech law: the candidates must be ‘irreproachable’ in the Slovak case and ‘irreproachable’ and ‘reliable’ in the Czech case. Both of these terms are specified in detail. To match the request for ‘irreproachability’ according to the Slovak law, a candidate must not be a former member of the Communist Party or other parties that were fully controlled by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia/Slovakia between 1948-1989. Moreover, a candidate must not be a former employee of the security services or registered as a collaborator of these services. This condition covers the entire ‘period of oppression’ 1939-1989. This means that while the request of irreproachability in terms of membership in the security services covers both the Second World War and the Communist period, the same request in terms of membership in a political party that was responsible for a dictatorship covers only the Communist period. Thus, former members of Hlinka’s Party (HSLS) from the years 1939-1945 can become leaders of ÚPN in Bratislava if they were ‘only’ involved in the party’s activities and not in activities of security and secret services of the Slovak wartime state. The fact that the HSLS dominated the Slovak political system during this time in a similar way that the Communist Party did later in the whole of Czechoslovakia is completely ignored. In this point, the Slovak law contradicts its basic aim to treat equally both the wartime political regime and post-war regime as one single ‘period of oppression’. Hlinka’s party, which was the only Slovak political party allowed in 108 Tomas Sniegon Tiso’s Slovakia, is not given responsibility for oppressions made by the Slovak state. The Czech definition of ‘irreproachability’ and ‘reliability’ focuses exclusively on the Communist period and does not include the wartime period at all. An ‘irreproachable’ and ‘reliable’ person must not be a former member or candidate of membership of the Communist Party. He or she must not be a former collaborator of the security service or intelligence service of Communist Czechoslovakia or other state that used to belong to the Soviet Bloc and its military organisation, the Warsaw Pact. With regards to the period 1938-1945, which in Bohemia and Moravia was dominated by Nazi rule, there are no restrictions for the candidates. Thus, in fact, a person that collaborated with the Protectorate’s or even Third Reich’s oppressive forces in the past can become member of the ÚSTR’s council. This, of course, only on the condition that such a person never became a member of the Communist Party or collaborator of communist oppressive forces after the War. Prevailing or even exclusive focus of both these definitions of impeccability during the Communist period indicates that impeccability from the time of the Communist dictatorship is more important for the control of ‘national memory’ and ‘studies of totalitarian regimes’ than the same attitude from the Second World War. Can such a lower request regarding the wartime period depend simply on the time factor? The lawmakers could believe that they did not have to be equally careful because of the fact that the wartime generations were too old and therefore no longer eligible for the leadership of the ÚPN or ÚSTR. At least two arguments oppose such an idea. In the Slovak case, the time or age factor can be excluded totally. If those generations that became adults during the Second World War were generally considered too old for the job, the law about the ÚPN would ignore them completely, i.e. without even mentioning a necessary impeccability of the candidates in their relationship to the oppressive forces of Tiso’s Slovak republic. The fact that only the request of impeccability towards the Hlinka’s party is missing while the wartime period is not ignored in general clearly proves a selective attitude of the Slovak lawmakers who did not wish to put the Hlinka’s party on the same level as the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia or Slovakia, even though they unified both historical periods as the time of non-freedom. IMPLEMENTING POST-COMMUNIST NATIONAL MEMORY 109 The second argument against any ‘accidental ignorance’ comes from the Czech model. It is true that the ignorance to moral aspects connected to the Second World War is more applicable there which might make the idea about low suitability of the wartime generations for leading positions within ÚSTR more convincing. However, the Czech model shows that these generations were by no means intentionally excluded automatically. The first, and until then only, chairman of the ÚSTR council, Naděžda Kavalírová, head of the Confederation of Political Prisoners of the Czech Republic, was born in 1923. Thus, Kavalírová belongs to the generation that reached an adult age at the beginning of the Second World War and could therefore carry full responsibility for all its acts during the Second World War. She was found suitable for becoming a chairman of the ÚSTR council in 2007. According to the Czech law, it was not necessary to check her political past before the Communist period.6 Why the candidates who want to influence the work of the institute for studies of two totalitarian regimes should prove their moral qualities only in their relationship to only one of these regimes remains unclear. The Czech law offers no response to this question. However, in a broader context, it is evident that the institute was originally intended to focus only on research of the Communist regime. As I will show, the reference to the years of the Second World War was added much later and without careful consideration. This also makes the ÚSTR in Prague different from ÚPN in Bratislava. This difference is much more evident if we study the act of establishing of the ÚSTR not as a structure but as a process. The Czech Way to Institutionalised Memory The Communist regime in Czechoslovakia ended in 1989, and the Czechoslovak federation split into the Czech and Slovak republic on 1 January 1993. Thus, the Institute of National Memory in Bratislava was 6 It must be added here that Kavalírová was never questioned because of her wartime past. Despite that, she became a controversial person because of her leadership in the Confederation of Political Prisoners. She was indeed persecuted by the Communist régime in the 1950s but after the Soviet led invasion in Czechoslovakia in 1968, she worked in one of the ministries. She became accused of being a member of some pro-Communist organisations after the invasion but despite this criticism, she remained at the head of the Confederation of Political Prisoners of the Czech Republic. 110 Tomas Sniegon established thirteen years, and the Institute for Studies of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague seventeen years after the fall of Communism. With regard to the fact that the Gauck Institute in Germany was already founded in 1990, why did the same step take such a long time in the case of Slovakia and more particularly in the Czech republic? The Czech political need ‘to come to terms with the past’, especially with the Communist past, by creating a new institution of Czech collective memory as late as 2007 might seem more surprising than the similar Slovak need in 2002. Already by the early 1990s, the Czech Republic was considered as a country with the most consistent attitude towards the Communist regime among all post-Communist states. Unlike new political elites in Poland or Hungary, the Czech post-communist political elites did not need to compromise in ‘round table negotiations’ with representatives of the dying communist party in their country (Rupnik 2002, 9-26). Thus, all political power and the archives appeared almost immediately under the control of the new regime. This made Czechoslovakia before the split of the common state more similar to Germany than to Poland or Hungary. Coming to terms with the communist past, indeed, started in Prague soon after November 1989. The ÚSTR was not the very first institution directed to fight with the legacy of the communist system. The entire process, however, was problematic and controversial from the very beginning. According to the statistics, some 250,000 individuals were sentenced to prison for political reasons during the Communist period in Czechoslovakia, and about 240 individuals were sentenced to death. Another 2,500-3,000 persons died at the hands of the Communist police, while imprisoned or interned in the so-called ‘camps of forced labour’. The legislative process that was supposed to come to terms with the legacy of the communist period started immediately after 1989. Already by April 1990, the then Czechoslovak parliament approved a law about rehabilitation of the victims of communism. Another law about restitutions of private possessions confiscated by the communist regime, and about screenings that were supposed to stop people collaborating with the oppressive forces of the communist dictatorship to gain new positions in the post-communist leading state organisations, was adopted soon thereafter. As the French sociologist and historian Françoise Mayer pointed out, already these two laws covering both purges in state admin- IMPLEMENTING POST-COMMUNIST NATIONAL MEMORY 111 istration and rehabilitations of former victims were part of the political attitude to the past, because they were intended as general norms for definitions of what was and was not legitimate. ‘In both these cases, an absence of legal proceedings meant creation of two categories, those who were guilty and those who were victims. The offenders were allowed to be “disqualified” while the victims were allowed to get satisfaction. Single circumstances that could show how individuals could make their commitments to the regime were not examined.’ (Mayer 2009, 66). The legal process continued after the break-up of Czechoslovakia, first by an approval of a radical ‘Act on Lawlessness of the Communist Regime and on Resistance Against It’ in July 1993 and a year later by creating the Office for the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism (ÚDV). The Act on Lawlessness of the Communist Regime and on Resistance Against It was not actually a penal law but rather a moral declaration. Compared to previous steps, however, it radically turned attention to the question of responsibility for the Communist system. While the victims were in main focus earlier, this act grimly defined the perpetrators and stated that the leading officials of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia carried the main responsibility for the Communist system and its negative impacts. This law constituted a legal framework that was used as a base for a new Czechoslovak institute, Úřad pro dokumentaci a vyšetřování zločinů komunismu (ÚDV, The Office of the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism). As an institution with the right both to document and to investigate, the ÚDV became actively involved in investigations and trials against the prominent figures of the Czechoslovak communist regime. It was The Office of the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism that paved the way to an institutionalied Czech (and to a certain extent even Slovak) collective memory of the communist regime. The Office was established in 1992, i.e. already before the division of Czechoslovakia, and included even the so-called Coordination Centre for investigation of violence against the Czech nation 19451989. As the centre’s name suggests, the perpetrator of such violence was separated from the Czech nation. Since the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and the oppressive forces of the Communist regime were understood as the perpetrators, it was clear that they were treated as non-compatible with the victimised Czech nation. Such a tendency to 112 Tomas Sniegon externalise perpetrators from a victimised nation was still very apparent fifteen years later when The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes started to work. The Office of the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism was directly inspired by the Gauck Institute in Germany but, unlike the German institute, it was subordinated not to the Parliament but to the Czech ministry of interior. The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (ÚSTR) resembled, in 2007 its predecessor, ÚDV, in a number of aspects. For example, the first director of the ÚSTR, Pavel Žáček, worked first in the ÚDV in the 1990s. During the years 1998-1999 he was a deputy director of the ÚDV. Among other institutions created by the post-Communist Czech politicians and dealing with ‘coming to terms’ with the Communist or ‘totalitarian’ past already during the 1990s was a ‘governmental commission of historians’ that was studying and analysing the Soviet-led invasion of the Warsaw Pact in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the following defeat of the Prague Spring reform movement until 1970 (Komise vlády ČSFR pro analýzu událostí, 1967-1970). Besides, a number of academic institutions, such as The Institute for Contemporary History in Prague and several Czech universities, were focusing on modern Czechoslovak history. Those scholars who were closely connected with the policy of the former Communist regime in Czechoslovakia from the previous decades disappeared almost completely from all these places. Moreover, the Czech penalty law was modernised in 2001 and public denial, questioning or approval of the ‘Nazi and Communist genocides or other Nazi or Communist crimes against humanity’ became – according to a paragraph 261 – illegal. Due to these facts, a need for yet another institution that would be by law obliged ‘to study, independently evaluate the periods of non-freedom and the Communist totalitarian power, to analyse anti-democratic and criminal activity of the organs of state, especially its security forces, and criminal activity of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia as well as other organisations based on Communist ideology’ did not seem very convincing in 2007. Already in the early stages, the idea of a new institute of national memory was strongly questioned, not only by those who could seem to be directly affected by such an activity, such as, for exam- IMPLEMENTING POST-COMMUNIST NATIONAL MEMORY 113 ple, supporters of the old Communist regime.7 Together with scientific aspects of the institution that was by law obliged to make sense of the Czech ‘national’ history, even the moral incentives of the authors of the proposal became a subject of this criticism. Therefore, the new round of the ‘fight against Communism’, represented by the creation of the ÚSTR, should be explained rather by the political situation in the Czech republic in the beginning of the twentyfirst century, than by a fact that an institute of national memory was going to rapidly enrich the Czech scientific research of the Communist system or bring a new, previously missing moral quality into the Czech process of coming to terms with the Communist past. (The Nazi past is not intentionally mentioned here because, as it will be shown, it had not been discussed at all until the very late stages of the development). Post-Communist Fear of the Post-Communist Communists Until the late 1990s, right-wing political parties dominated the Czech political arena. An important aspect of this dominance was the fact that these parties did not place themselves into any specific ‘Czech right-wing political tradition’ that was rooted in the period before the Second World War. These parties considered themselves as completely new parties without history. This naturally does not mean that the politicians did not use history at all; however, no historical narrative that could be described as a post-Communist right-wing interpretation of history was formulated during that time (Sniegon 2010, 191). On the contrary, the two most important oppositional left-wing political parties, the ‘renewed’ Social Democrats and ‘old’ Communists, did seek their social democratic, reform communist or hard-line-communist ‘historical roots’, which made them – especially in discussions about the guilt for communism - automatically much more vulnerable than the right. The Social Democratic Party, for example, presented itself as ‘the oldest Czech political party’ despite the fact that it did not exist between 1948 and 1989. This historical connection led immediately to discussions about social democratic guilt for the Communist coup d’état in 1948, when collaboration between Czech communists and Social Democrats led to the political fusion of these parties into the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The fact that the institutionalised Czech ‘national mem7 http://www.rozhlas.cz/cro6/stop/_zprava/495699 114 Tomas Sniegon ory’ was, according to original intentions, meant to be based only on studies of Communist terror was from the point of view of the new right-wing political parties very favourable, since nobody could make right-wing politics responsible for the communist oppression (the parties of the political right were forbidden during the Communist rule and their activities were due to various reasons limited already during the first post-war years, i.e. before February 1948). On the other hand, if the period of Nazism and German occupation was included from the very beginning, it could eventually even open discussions about the Czech political right’s attitudes to the Munich treaty, the period immediately before the occupation and raise questions of collaboration with the Third Reich. All these debates were potentially much more problematic than the debates that exclusively focused on Communism. The proposal to create yet another new institute dealing with crimes of the Communist regime was presented for the first time officially in late November 2005 by nineteen deputies of the Senate, the upper house of the Czech parliament. No less than seventeen of these deputies were members of the conservative Civic Democratic Party (ODS).8 While presenting the proposal in the Senate, the Senators pointed out a necessity to centralise control of documents about oppressions of the Communist regime and to secure better public access to these documents as main reasons for their activity. Such needs suggested that the new institution was supposed to have the character of an archive; there was no mention of a new ‘national memory’. The institute, however, was not supposed to replace the already existing Office of the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism, ÚDV. The proposal of a new institution that would ‘independently evaluate the crimes of the Communist system’ was not based on detailed analyses of the work of the already existing institutions controlled by the government. It did not specify why the already existing institutions were insufficient and why it was impossible to simply improve the already existing institutions and legal norms. 8 Parlament Ceské republiky Senát, 5. funkcní období 2005. Návrh senátoru Jirího Lišky, Josefa Pavlaty, Aleny Paleckové, Václava Jehlicky, Martina Mejstríka, Pavla Sušického, Tomáše Julínka, Jirího Šnebergera, Františka Príhody, Jana Nádvorníka, Vlastimila Sehnala, Aleny Venhodové, Karla Tejnory, Milana Bureše, Zdenka Janalíka, Vítezslava Vavrouška, Františka Kopeckého, Jirího Nedomy a Miloslava Pelce (http://www.ustrcr.cz/data/pdf/chronologie/051129-185.pdf). IMPLEMENTING POST-COMMUNIST NATIONAL MEMORY 115 While the new institute was not supposed to help punish crimes from the communist era through the legal system, as was the case with the already existing Office of the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism, it was supposed to ‘reveal communist officials as well as organizers and instigators on political and ideological levels’ who were ‘co-responsible for crimes and other matters’ during the communist era. There was no specification of what ‘other matters’ meant or how exactly these people were to be responsible for such things. While explaining the ideological need for a new institute, the initiators even related this need to a topical global situation after 11 September 2001 in the USA: ‘Ideologies that despise human lives and use malicious terrorism in their fight against civilized societies are partly connected with ideology of Communism’ (Parliamentary Draft 2005, 1). Therefore, according to the Senate members who initiated the proposal, it was necessary ‘to see improvement of our knowledge about practices of oppressive forces of the totalitarian regime as an important contribution to the actual fight against international terrorism’. Here, the proposed institute clearly exceeded the competences of an archive. While presenting the proposal in the upper house of the Czech parliament half a year later, in June 2006, the deputy-chairman of the Senate, Jan Liška, stressed the need of a ‘united national memory’ at the same time he assured that the law about the new institute ‘cannot dictate how history is supposed to be understood’. He added that ‘the past can be unpleasant for some’ and that ‘non-memory can be much more pleasant than memory’ for these political forces. The shift between ideas of an anti-communist archive and the institute of national memory came at the time when the Czech political arena experienced an important change. As a result of parliamentary elections, the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) became the biggest political force in the newly elected Czech parliament in early June 2006. Both the right and the left, however, earned one hundred places in the lower house parliament with two hundred seats. The situation was immediately described as a ‘stalemate’. Nevertheless, the 2006 elections ended an eightyear long period with the Social Democratic Party as the leader of the Czech government. The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia was no longer attacked as a party that aspired to a global revolution but as the main Social Democratic ally on the left. It was not radically reformed after 116 Tomas Sniegon 1989 and still saw itself as a direct successor to the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. It was evident that the Communist Party had established itself well in the post-communist Czech political system; the noncommunist left was not able to succeed in the political battle against the right-wing coalition without the communist votes, even though the Social Democrats refused to build government coalitions with the Communists. During what the Czech political scientist, Vladmimír Handl, described as a period of communist ‘consolidation and growth’, the Communist Party occasionally became the third biggest Czech political party in the Czech Republic (Handl 2008, 91-115). The Communists did not succeed to block the proposal by protesting at the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic. Despite that, the idea of a new Czech Institute of National Memory was further modified before its approval in the Czech Parliament’s lower house, Poslanecká sněmovna. The connection between communism and post-9/11 terrorism, for example, was deleted as such a discussion was never found relevant for the Czech society with no eventual connection between Communism and Islamic terrorism. There was no other such discussion in Parliament either. The main change between June 2006 and the final approval by both houses of the Czech Parliament in 2007 was the fact that the proposed Institute of National Memory quickly became The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, and that the focus of the institute was equally quickly broadened from only Communism to two totalitarian regimes, i.e. the event of the period of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia during the Second World War. After long debates the lower house of the Parliament, Poslanecká sněmovna, adopted the law on 2 May 2007, as a ‘Law about the Institute of National Memory’ still focusing only on the period of Communism.9 Only a few weeks later, however, the Senate received the same document in another form that spoke about The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes.10 Thus, the focus on the Second World War as well as 9 Parlament C9eské republiky POSLANECKÁ SNE9MOVNA 2007?5. volební období, 308 USNESENÍ Poslanecké sne9movny ze 14. schu °ze 2. kve9tna 2007 k senátnímu návrhu zákona o Ústavu pame9ti národa a o zme9ne9 ne9kterých zákonu /sne9movnítisk15/-tr9etíc9tení. http://www.ustrcr.cz/data/pdf/chronologie/070502-308.pdf. 10 68. Usnesení výboru pro zahraniční věci, obranu a bezpečnost ze 14 schůze, konané dne 6. června 2007 k návrhu zákona o Ústavu pro studium totalitních režimů a o Archivu bezpečnostních složek a změně některých zákonů. http://www.ustrcr.cz/ IMPLEMENTING POST-COMMUNIST NATIONAL MEMORY 117 the new name was added into the original document on the way from one parliamentary house to the other within a single month. Compared to the discussions about how to approach and institutionalise the period of the Communist regime, discussions about how to deal with the Nazi occupation were neglected. The final form of the law, approved by the two chambers of the Czech Parliament under two different names, is possible to read as a backtracking caused by a criticism of the originally very primitively defined ‘national memory’ and as a compromise between the left and the right in their view of the place of Communism in Czech(oslovak) history. The new institute could not be seen as a new initiator of ‘Czech national memory’ but avoided the label as exclusively ‘anti-communist’. At the same time, it still focused primarily on crimes of the Communist regime and the activities of its supporters. The Slovak Way The process leading to the The Nation’s Memory Institute in Slovakia was simpler than in the Czech republic. While the Czech process did not get support from those who actively fought against the communist regime before 1989, including the first post-communist Czechoslovak and Czech president Václav Havel, creation of the Nation’s Memory Institute in Slovakia became possible thanks to an initiative of two people, Ján Čarnogurský and Ján Langoš, who during the 1980s belonged to the most active dissident groups in the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia. Ján Čarnogurský was a lawyer and a Christian Democratic Slovak politician who in 1991, one year before the division of Czechoslovak federation, became Prime Minister of Slovakia. His father had been a deputy of the Slovak parliament during the Second World War and member of Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party. In 1998, Ján Čarnogurský became Minister of Justice in Slovakia and remained there until 2002. It was during this time the Nation’s Memory Institute was established as a part of the Slovak Ministry of Justice. Ján Langoš became a deputy of the Czechoslovak federal parliament shortly after the fall of Communism and the Czechoslovak minister of interior. He remained minister until the summer of 1992. Thus, already before the break-up of Czechoslovakia, Langoš was one of the key peodata/pdf/chronologie/070606-68.pdf 118 Tomas Sniegon ple who—then still on a federal Czechoslovak level-actively initiated the first post-communist attempts to come to terms with the communist past from both a moral and a legal point of view. The foundation of the institute in Bratislava after the division of Czechoslovakia can be seen very much as a continuity of Ján Langoš’s activity within new conditions. This continuity, however, was interrupted by a political situation in the new Slovak Republic during the period 1993-1997 when the government headed by the controversial Slovak Prime Minister, Vladimír Mečiar, was in power. When the political power changed, Ján Langoš became the leading person behind the legislation about the Nation’s Memory Institute. No institute similar to The Nation’s Memory Institute existed in Slovakia before 2002, not even a counterpart of the Office of the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism. Only in 2000, seven years after Czechoslovakia was divided, The Unit for Documentation of Crimes of Communism was set up under the auspices of the Ministry of Justice headed by Čarnogurský. This unit was, in fact, the only predecessor of the ÚPN that was established ten years after declaration of Slovak independence. From this point of view, the difference between the ÚPN’s function in the Slovak society and ÚSTR’s function in the Czech society is very important. The Czechoslovak law about lustrace (screening law) was approved for Slovakia but the Slovak part of the dying federation stopped paying attention in 1992. The Slovak elites showed less will to dissociate with the communist regime, until the end of the Mečiar era in 1998, than their Czech counterparts (Šimečka 2007, 399-403). On the one hand, a number of Slovak politicians were members of the Communist Party before 1989, even though they did not occupy the most important positions. On the other hand, the power of the new Slovak elites, unlike the Czech case, was never challenged by a non-reformed Communist Party; the old Slovak communist party was dissolved and its members split into several other, new parties, at the same time when no new communist Party was created in the independent Slovakia (Kopeček 2003). With the absence of both strong conservative and strong extreme left political tendencies, there was no interest to push ahead an idea about an institution which would be similar to the Gauck Institute in Germany or even to the Czech Office of the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism. IMPLEMENTING POST-COMMUNIST NATIONAL MEMORY 119 The situation became different after the parliamentary elections in 1998 when, for the first time in independent Slovak politics, a new government coalition came to power that started to distance itself from the non-democratic Slovak past during the Second World War and the time that followed. Important catalysts to change were firstly the start of negotiations between Slovakia and the European Union about Slovakia’s membership there, and secondly similar negotiations between Slovakia and NATO. During the Mečiar era, the EU and NATO boycotted such tendencies. However, during the first two post-Mečiar election periods, Slovakia reached full membership of both the EU and NATO. Ján Langoš, then an adviser to the Minister of Justice, became the head of the ÚPN at the beginning of the organisation in 2003. In the editorial of the quarterly Pamäť národa that was first published by the ÚPN in 2004, he especially stressed the European dimension of the memory process. ‘The truth about European past is our common heritage and it should be accessible to us as well as to people from the West. Therefore, together with our counterpart institutes from Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, we have sent a letter to the chairman of the European Commission, Mr. Romano Prodi, and asked him to transfer our activity to the level of the European Union’.11 Especially the steps condemning oppressions of the wartime Slovak state and the attitude of Tiso’s Slovakia against its Jewish citizens during the Holocaust can be understood as a contribution of the new Slovak political elites after 1998 to the process of the EU enlargement and an attempt to convince the Union that the new Slovak democracy is qualified for full EU membership and dedicated to building a new ‘European memory’ (Lášticová and Findor 2008). The fight for democracy fits into a new Slovak national-European historical narrative that was supposed to give legitimacy to the Slovak entrance to the EU (Sniegon 2008, 213-256). Thus, the role of the foundation of the ÚPN in the process of Slovakia’s Europeanisation is another important difference between the Czech and Slovak debates about the ‘national memory’. The Czech institute, unlike the Slovak one, was founded first after the Czech entrance into the EU. The Slovak parliament approved the law about The Nation’s Memory Institute in summer 2002. The government coalition could not at that time be characterised as clearly right-wing oriented. Its main unifying 11 Pamäť národa, October 2004, p.2. http://www.upn.gov.sk/data/pamat-naroda-002004/pamat-naroda-00-2004.pdf 120 Tomas Sniegon aspect was first of all resistance against the former Mečiar course of Slovakia’s development before 1998. Even some members of the opposition voted in favour of the new law. Left and right perspective in this case was not as evident as in the Czech case. A dividing line was rather the attitude towards extreme Slovak nationalism that experienced a constant boom between 1990 and 1998. The Slovak president Rudolf Schuster, who until 1989 was a member of the Communist Party, disliked the new law. After the president’s veto, however, the parliament was strong enough to enforce the law regardless. Making clear his ideological standpoint, Ján Langoš described the law as ‘the most important anti-Communist law in Slovakia’. Langoš remained at the head of the ÚPN until 2006 when he tragically died in a car accident. ÚPN and ÚSTR as Regulators of Scholarly History By establishing The Nation’s Memory Institute in Bratislava and The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague as institutional promoters of a ‘correct memory’ of the key non-democratic periods in the development of modern Czechoslovakia based on a legal basis, the lawmakers strictly limited the field of possible activities for those historians who found their work in both institutes. From the point of view of scholarly history, such limitations became highly problematic. The evidence that clearly dominates the work of the institutes is based on observations and documents of the former oppressed security forces of two non-democratic regimes. Those historians who work in the institutes are by law obliged to condemn these forces and their activities, this without paying attention to possible individual variations. Thus, those who are collectively condemned are, first of all, former employees of the oppressive forces and their collaborators and agents. It became possible to publish archival information about their names and activities and denounce them morally in public by the institutes’ historians themselves. While, to some extent, such a procedure could be quite understandable in a society that lived under dictatorships for such a long time, it also negatively affected innocent people who were registered as collaborators on false grounds or those who were forced to collaborate under special circumstances against their will. In the Czech Republic, the attention often turned to well-known public names – writers, actors or singers – making scandals of this kind very popular in the media. IMPLEMENTING POST-COMMUNIST NATIONAL MEMORY 121 History according to both these laws, however, left very little room for analyses of broader circumstances that led to the non-democratic regimes in Czechoslovakia and that on the contrary could raise provocative questions with the potential to challenge a united ‘national memory’ by calling for ‘national’ self-reflection instead. Similarly, the clearly practical tasks of the institutes’ work meant that important theoretical questions that have dramatically changed history as a scholarly discipline during the last decades were left aside. One of these examples is a complete absence of any scholarly research that studies relations between history, memory, historical consciousness and national, ethnic, religious or social identity. This became especially paradoxical in the Slovak case since the Slovak Nation’s Memory Institute carries the term ‘memory’ in its name. Instead of focusing on questions about the relation between the past, the present and the future, it has been focusing on its own nation, but even here, theoretical aspects of nation-building processes were not viewed as important. Similarly, despite the reference to ‘totalitarian regimes’ in the name of the Czech institute, there has been no theoretical research based on theories of ‘totalitarism’. Instead of a comparative study of the period of Nazism and Communism in Czechoslovakia, both dictatorships are almost automatically understood as equal. This proves that ideologically based thinking of the politicians who supported the institutes was given the highest priority at the expense of the scientific use of history, but it also indicates that historians who became employed by the institutes generally accepted such a prerequisite. The laws on the ÚPN and ÚSTR have been primarily based on a very traditional, positivistic perception of history and on a belief that a ‘right’ or ‘correct’ understanding of history is only possible if the people know enough about the past and condemn the perpetrators (Kopeček 2008, 76-90). To give a few examples of how absolutely essential questions can be missed in this context: How can the war crimes of the Slovak wartime regime from the time Slovakia was not occupied by Germany be explained without challenging an idea of the unity of the Slovak nation? Similarly, how to explain the fact that Czechoslovakia became a communist state while it was not occupied by the Soviet Union? Why did the Communist Party in 1948 have no less than 2,5 million members, which was about 25 per cent of the entire population? Why was the most rigid 122 Tomas Sniegon and stable form of communism in the entire region born ‘in the economically most advanced Central European society’ (Rupnik 2002, 9-26)? These – and many other – sensitive questions have been left aside. Conclusions: Old Ideological use of History Replaced by a New One The idea of establishing an institute of ‘national memory’ came to Slovakia and the Czech republic from outside and was found inspiring in both these cases. Slovakia took over the concept of the Polish IPN in Warsaw, the Czech republic copied both Polish and Slovak cases. However, in neither of these two cases was the inspiration followed by a profound discussion about how to adjust the concept to the local conditions and how to eventually make it work in order to develop the new post-Communist democratic process of coming to terms with the past. Even though moral and scientific aspects were mentioned among the main reasons to establish a new institute both in Slovakia and in the Czech Republic, both ÚPN and ÚSTR can be seen primarily as ideological projects. While the goals of the moral use of history are, according to Karlsson’s typology, rehabilitation and reconciliation, the goals in the Czech and Slovak cases were rather connected with confrontation and proof of collective guilt. By recognition and condemnation of this collective guilt of the clearly defined group of perpetrators the new ‘national memory’ was supposed to help the new leaders and ‘new’ post-Communist Czech and Slovak nations to be recognised as exclusively positive. As the scientific use of history often stresses and analyses specific aspects and parts of historic development and its interpretations, here it was supposed to be understood that the entire course of the Czech and Slovak history has lead to the desired results. The laws about the ÚPN in Bratislava and ÚSTR in Prague were both – though under different circumstances – adopted first of all in order to present a new and ‘compact’ interpretation of the most traumatic past that could be – in an institutionalised form and with the support of the state – presented as ‘national’ and understood as more or less official. In this context, they can be understood as centralised attempts to create a new national Czech and Slovak historical narrative. An ideological attitude seems to be more evident in the Czech case where the outcome of the ÚSTR’s research could in fact legitimise only the right-wing post-Communist politics. IMPLEMENTING POST-COMMUNIST NATIONAL MEMORY 123 This does not mean that the ÚPN and ÚSTR could not have any moral or scientific effects in their respective countries. 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