Institutes of Memory in Slovakia and the Czech Republic: What Kind of Memory?

Result code in IS VaVaI

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Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Institutes of Memory in Slovakia and the Czech Republic: What Kind of Memory?

Original language description

The interpretation of historical events affects the ways in which people remember these events and how individuals who were not alive at the time perceive them. Institutes of memory, which are one of the specific post-communist mechanisms of transitional justice, serve the role of detection and remembrance of crimes of the non-democratic regimes that existed in this area in the 20th century. An interesting situation developed in Czechoslovakia, which first adopted a rather strict transitional justice approach, but after the federation split, the two successor states went separate ways, despite the fact that they shared a common communist past. On the one hand, the Czech Republic continued to deal with the non-democratic past, while Slovakia adopted the politics of silence. The purpose of this article is to identify motivations and justifications for the establishment of such institutions in the Slovak Republic (Nation&apos;s Memory Institute) and the Czech Republic (The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes) and examine the ways in which these institutes interpret the crimes of communist regimes and in this sense influence collective memory. Both of these institutes play a different role in the framework of transitional justice in the two countries. In the Czech Republic, only one of the institutions dealt with the criminal past. In Slovakia, the establishment of the Nation&apos;s Institute of Memory can be seen as breaking the silence, as it was first organization to gain access to secret police files and uncover the criminal past. The main finding is the conclusion that the work and products of both institutions can be categorized as manifestations of anti-communism. Both institutions stirred debates regarding their functions and were met with resistance from some political elites.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

50601 - Political science

Project

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Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2017

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration in Communist Eastern Europe

ISBN

978-1-78308-723-5

Number of pages of the result

24

Pages from-to

81-104

Number of pages of the book

366

Publisher name

Anthem Press

Place of publication

Londýn

UT code for WoS chapter

000417809800005