Cibulka's lists

Cibulkas lists , well known in the Czech Republic as Cibulkovy seznamy , are alleged, incomplete and in part incorrect lists of secret ("unofficial") employees of the Czechoslovak communist secret police StB from the time before the Velvet Revolution of 1989. They were first published in 1992 by former dissident Petr Cibulka and have since been the subject of controversial discussions and several court hearings.

Problems with the lists

Dealing with the communist past in Czechoslovakia has long been hampered by the fact that many compromised archives were kept under lock and key. In 1992 Petr Cibulka published these directories on the Internet with the announcement that the agents and collaborators of the communist regime had thus been exposed. An extensive electronic search function was added later. According to Cibulka, these lists contain around 200,000 people. These are official lists that he had received from David Eleder , who had worked in the Ministry of the Interior after 1989 and who later died under unexplained circumstances.

The list soon became a controversial event; The then President Václav Havel was one of the opponents of the publication . It turned out that the list has serious errors:

• It contained the names of people with any connection with the secret police; H. also the spied on themselves, as later became apparent in some court hearings (one of the prominent alleged collaborators was the publicist Zdena Salivarová , who has lived in exile in Canada since 1969 )
• The list was by no means complete, there were no very active employees to be found; however, the claim that the list is complete is not supposed to come from the original, but from P. Cibulka himself
• Gradually, many more examples were compiled, according to which the list was not only incorrect, but even actively manipulated.

In particular, the discussions about manipulation soon approached conspiracy theories. Cibulka is said to have removed his mother's name from the list. Some manipulations were caused by circles in exile in the USA. They paid server fees for the lists and worked with Bolshevik subversives.

The reliability of the registers also became the subject of a novel by the writer Zdena Salivarová, who described the fate of about a hundred people who, according to Cibulka's list, were alleged collaborators.

The official list of employees of the StB, which was released and published by the Ministry of the Interior in March 2003 (and is also not considered reliable), described Cibulka as a fraud; the official records from 2003 were the work of the "coup of the Russian KGB" and the "allied Czechoslovak criminals" and manipulated by the "post-communist secret services of exile".

Individual evidence

1. ^ STB On-Line , online at www.cibulka.com , both in Czech, accessed July 11, 2010
2. ↑ ^{a b} O seznamy StB je enormní zájem , report of the Hospodářské noviny (business newspaper) of March 21, 2003, online at: hn.ihned.cz/c1-12519760 , Czech, accessed on July 12, 2010
3. ↑ ^{a b} Jiri Vanek, Venovano desatemu vyroci tragicke smrti Davida Eledera, online at: Venovano desatemu vyroci tragicke smrti Davida Eledera Jiri Vanek ( Memento from April 1, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), Czech, accessed on July 11, 2010
4. ↑ Václav Havel, Samozvaní samosoudci - every z největších úspěchů StB (self-appointed self-judge - one of the greatest successes of the StB), speech of the president before the regional court in Prague on December 14, 1993 on the occasion of the trial with P. Cibulka u. a., online at: blisty.cz ( memento of the original from March 31, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Czech, accessed July 16, 2010 
5. ↑ s. a report by the ČTK news agency on the outcome of the court hearing, dated January 7, 1994, cited above. from www.svazky.cz , Czech, accessed on July 13, 2010
6. ^ Announcement of the news portal iDNES.cz of July 4th, 2009 on: brno.idnes.cz , Czech, accessed on July 14th, 2010
7. ↑ ^{a b} Petr Cibulka in an interview from April 15, 2003, online at: stb.misto.cz/.../cibulka/stanovisko ( memento of the original from July 18, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Czech, accessed July 12, 2010 
8. ↑ Zdena Salivarová-Škvorecká (ed.), Osočení. Pravdivé příběhy lidí z 'Cibulkova seznamu' (Defamation. True stories of the people from 'Cibulka's List'), Brno 2000 (1st edition 1993)