Office for Foreign Relations and Information 

Historians and academics have welcomed the release of the once-classified files, now available to everybody in digital form at the Interior Ministry´s offices in Prague 4, as a step toward greater government transparency.

"Our office has been analyzing these documents for a long time," said Bohumil Srajer, spokesman for the Czech Foreign Intelligence Office (ÚZSI), which is responsible for the new archive. "We came to the conclusion that a part of these documents has no intelligence value [any longer] and there is no reason why they should be kept secret," Srajer added.

Inside the Interior Ministry, the archive is in a sterile office with white walls and gray chairs. With its hushed ambience - the only sound is the faint hiss of an air-conditioning system - it resembles a small reading room in a public library, except that there are no books, only three modern computer terminals.

Many of the documents in those computers relate to key moments in Czech history such as the Prague Spring of 1968 and the 1989 revolution that toppled communism.

"We think that it is important that people, our citizens, see these documents," Srajer said.

One report dated January 1966, for example, apparently had been translated from Russian before Soviet security services handed it to their Czech counterparts. It warns that Western powers now "understand that military intervention into internal affairs of socialist countries can cause a global nuclear war and this would endanger the existence of the capitalist order as a whole." Instead, the document continues, the West has adopted a softer and more sophisticated approach: encouraging student exchanges and tourism in order to spread capitalist propaganda.

Western embassies were also allegedly trying to win over citizens of communist countries by offering them presentations, lectures and even "extensive French and English language courses."

The ultimate goal, the document warns, of such "psychological war" remained "the liquidation of the political system in socialist countries."

Files that the StB, the former Czechoslovak secret police, kept on its collaborators have been available to the public for several years at the Interior Ministry´s offices in Pardubice, east Bohemia. The new archive, open since Oct. 4 and located in offices by the capital´s Prazského povstání metro stop, is different because it makes public documents mostly about the work of the communist foreign intelligence service.

Another report dated Jan. 25, 1969, analyzes Czech students´ opinions and activities in the days following the death and funeral of Jan Palach. Palach, an 18-year-old Charles University student, set himself ablaze Jan. 16, 1969, to protest public apathy in the wake of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.

A senior Interior Ministry official signed the document, which says radicalized students are voicing contempt for communist functionaries regarded as being close to the Soviet Union.

The students are trying to prove that "the leaders of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia are collaborators with the USSR and that it is only the progressive power of the youth that will establish real democracy, without ties to the USSR," the document reads.

The report mentions a widespread rumor that the Soviet Army is digging out dead bodies around Prague and transferring them to the USSR; the bodies, the report continues, are supposed to be those of Soviet soldiers who disagreed with the occupation of Czechoslovakia and were executed by their own army.

Members of the public interested in viewing the archive must fill out several forms before receiving a password that allows access to a database containing some 1,000 pages - digital scans of original paper documents. ÚZSI spokesman Srajer declined to reveal the cost of the project. He said the number of documents available will continue to increase.

In half a year, a Web version of the archive is planned that will allow people to access a selection of documents from their own computers at home. However, some materials will be kept from the public, for instance, information on military installations of former Cold War foes who have since 1989 become allies .

"Sensitive information, for example, on the weak points of Britain, must be kept classified," Srajer said. "These countries are our allies now and we want to protect them."

Jan Srb, a spokesman for the Office for Documentation and Investigation of Communist Crimes, said that his organization, unlike the general public, has enjoyed extensive access to the material contained in the archive for years. "The materials stored by ÚZSI have great value," he said. "The opening of ÚZSI documents to the public and individual researchers is a good step."

Oldrich Tůma, director of the Institute of Contemporary History at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, also welcomed the launch of the computerized archive.

He said the files are "probably not something that would make us rewrite books on the history of the Cold War," but added, "This will help us to be better informed and better understand the history of the communist regime."