REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

POSSIBILITIES TO RESEARCH
COMMUNISM IN SEVERAL
EX-COMMUNIST COUNTRIES
Péter BLAZOVICH 1
Now, 23 years after the transition, it is still an actual question, how the governments of
the ex-communist countries should handle the secret documents of the communism.
There are several approaches to the above issue: according to several opinions the past
should be revealed without any limitations, so the violators/agents could be impeached;
others think that the complete reveal would be not fair, as many documents – mainly the
ones related to the top-servants of the communist system – have disappeared or have been
exterminated, so the “fat cats” cannot be found or impeached now. And it is worth to
mention, that many of the former agents and the concerned people are still alive – so a
law regulating the reveal of documents has to respect the personal rights.
There are still heavy disputes about the above issue. In the majority of the countries of
the former Eastern bloc it is still a daily political and/or social issue, what to do with the
remaining files. The remaining part of the documents is not complete in any of the
countries: many documents have been exterminated or disappeared in the communist
period, or later, during the transition. Furthermore, there are still many files kept in secret
by the existing State Security organs. The personal data (containing the files related to the
sexual life or the health condition of the concerned people) limit the possibilities of the
researches and even more their publication.
It is worth to examine, how the several ex-communist countries approach to the
researching possibilities of their communist past.
Germany
The Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives (Bundesbeauftragte für die
Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen
Republik – BstU) was founded parallel with the German Reunification, on the 3 rd of
October 1990 by the parliament. Nowadays there work about 1700 employees and there
are about 111000 linear meters of files stored.
Furthermore, there are about 16 thousand sacks of torn paper-documents that were to be
exterminated at the time of the transition, but thanks to the occupation of the Stasi centre
that couldn’t be executed.
The experts of the BStU work on the reconstruction of the above mentioned, halfdestroyed
original documents, which has drawn the interest of other countries, too.
1 Emlekpont Museum, Hódmezıvásárhely, Hungary.