Peter Kulan

"At that time, news slowly began to leak out that Mečiar was not well, that there was something very wrong. That's where his TV discussions started, where he used information from files against people. Their codenames and so on. So, at that time, when it went beyond a certain level, the Minister of the Interior decided, and all the registers of the files were taken away from Tiso's villa. It was taken away by URNA [Rapid Response Unit – trans.] amidst a huge fuss in Slovakia, and Mečiar almost had a stroke at the time when he found out that his toy had been taken away. But we didn't know then that he himself was an agent of the State Security under the codename Doctor. That only came out in the registers. And that meant there was information on the table about a lot of people who were politically involved at the time. So, there was a need to create a lustration law in Slovakia, which was also created, and the hysteria around the creation of the Czechoslovak lustration law was incredible."

"It wasn't that possible. Consider that one in ten citizens was involved in the Communist Party. That's roughly a million people. It's a bit like trying to abolish poverty by law. Just because you declare poverty illegal doesn't mean it will disappear. And it was the same with the communists, it simply has to die on its own. If you wanted to start a process similar to the denazification in Germany, you could have solved it by banning the Communist Party, but the problem was that it collided into disapproval even from non-partisans and non-communists. I, for one, was in favour of abolishing it by law, but I think that would have unleashed a lot of internal conflict. We, for example, did not believe until the mid-1990s that we would not be arrested and, at worst, shot. Today, it is very difficult for people who were not alive at the time to get to know the power of the State Security and how strongly intertwined these forces were in the former Czechoslovakia. And what very strong personal ties there were between those leaders. And friendship and ideological ties."