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Czechoslovakia 1990–2

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Security Intelligence Services in New Democracies

Part of the book series: Studies in Russia and East Europe ((SREE))

Abstract

The challenge of the first years of the revolution in security intelligence was summed up by a parliamentarian in two words: purification and prestige.1 As the former implied, the institutions had to be purged of all accomplices in the old regime’s crimes, and in the process society as a whole had to reflect on the conditions in which abuse of those institutions had been, and might again, be possible. At the same time, as the latter term indicated, a new bureau of domestic intelligence had to earn and receive respect, in order to attract talented staff who could supply decision-makers with valuable information and to reassure citizens unsettled by the crime wave accompanying the transition.

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Notes

  1. Vladimír Hanzel, Zrychlený tep dějin: Reálné drama o deseti jednáních (Prague: OK Centrum, 1991), pp. 302, 312, 393–4 (remarks by Petr Pithart and Václav Havel).

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  56. Letters from people describing their experience after being wrongly listed were collected and published in Zdena Salivarová Škvorecká, Osočení: Dopisy lidí ze seznamu ( Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1993 ).

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  57. For more detail, see Vladimír Mlynáč, ‘Lustrační zákon schválen’, Respekt, no. 40, 7 October 1991

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Authors
  1. Kieran Williams
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© 2001 Kieran Williams and Dennis Deletant

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Williams, K. (2001). Czechoslovakia 1990–2. In: Security Intelligence Services in New Democracies. Studies in Russia and East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403905369_3

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