Europe's Communist Secret Police Files Made Public

Via Middle East Times -

WARSAW -- Nearly two decades after the fall of communism, Europe's former Moscow-dominated states are using the Internet to make public the files of the security services that helped keep their regimes in power.

In the latest step, the body in charge of Poland's communist-era secret police files began Tuesday posting documents related to top officials, including the President Lech Kaczynski and his identical twin Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

The material on the special site of National Remembrance Institute (IPN) - http://katalog.bip.ipn.gov.pl/ - was hardly shocking, and simply confirmed that both Kaczynskis were spied on and harassed by the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (SB) police because of their anti-communist activities in the 1970s and 1980s.

But the possibility of peeking into the SB archives - which cover people who were spies, victims, or both - was such a draw for Poles that users swamped the IPN's site.

The IPN started posting the files of the Kaczynskis and other officials such as the speakers of the lower and upper houses of parliament, top prosecutors, and the judges of the constitutional tribunal and supreme court, under new legislation that came into force earlier this year.

The Kaczynskis, who came to power in 2005, have made coming to terms with the communist past a major plank of their policy and pushed to vastly increase the number of people affected by come-clean rules from 30,000 to 700,000.