Twists of Fate: Secret Agents, Communist Collaborators and Secret Files in German, Polish and Czech Films

Abstract

The communist secret services, which combined political police and intelligence, were the most hated and dreaded element of the apparatus of power in the Soviet bloc. These negative emotions were directed towards their employees, agents and secret collaborators, and to files containing shameful secrets and fabricated evidence, able to destroy reputations of the most respected citizens. One of the consequences of the collapse of communism was thus the opportunity to dismantle these services and access their archives. The first opportunity was used almost immediately: the communist secret police was replaced in the early 1990s by new institutions practically across the entire communist bloc, although whether they were new in spirit, as well as in letter, remains a subject of debate (see, for example, Williams and Deletant 2001; Stan 2009b). The fate of the secret files proved more contentious. In each country the arguments of those in favour of disclosing them to the public at large clashed with those who proposed to limit the right to access them to special categories of people, such as historians or well-respected dissidents, or even discard them entirely. Adherents of the idea of placing the files in the public domain argued that this would quench the curiosity about how the secret services operated, who was corrupted by them and who resisted their pressure, and what was the relation between the secret police and other centres of official and unofficial power, such as the Churches. Another reason to open them was the conviction that the harm inflicted by the secret police should not go unpunished and forgotten: their functionaries and collaborators should be punished and/ or forbidden from holding any positions of power in the new democratic countries, which would not happen without screening the secret files.