Rethinking and Reforming the “Institute with a Totalitarian Regime”: ÚSTR and the Epistemic Capture of the Communist Past

26. 1. 2026 / Muriel Blaive

 

Introduction

Czech anticommunism, as institutionalized at ÚSTR, has degenerated into a system of calculated moral display. It is dominated not by citizens interested in understanding the past, let alone by historians driven by the thirst for knowledge, but by individuals aiming to gain social, political, and academic capital with little effort and at minimal cost. Anticommunism functions as a convenient badge of righteousness, allowing those who wear it to occupy the moral high ground without the inconvenience of reflecting too hard on how dictatorship actually worked, or how comfortably many people—including themselves, with rare exceptions—once lived within it.

Within this framework, historical work is carefully arranged so that it cannot become troublesome. Methodology is rejected because it introduces doubt and reflection; social history is avoided because it introduces individuals as social actors who made at times uncomfortable choices to survive; everyday life is ridiculed because it introduces a great taboo, collaboration with the communist regime, as well as social acceptance of the communist dictatorship as a redefined form of normality. Society is flattened into a mass of abstract victims who suffered endlessly but never acted, chose, adapted, negotiated, or benefited, thereby relieving us today of any obligation to examine responsibility. Archives are raided for suitably grim illustrations of predefined narratives, instead of being studied to promote our understanding of the past, and publications are produced not to examine complexity but to reassure. Everything is predictable, and nothing is allowed to be genuinely explanatory. Does this remind us of anything? Yes, this is by and large how the communist regime itself functioned.

This proposal contends that this is no accident. What is on display is a form of historical bad faith in which ignorance is cultivated because knowledge would be inconvenient, and certainty is prized because it brings applause. An institute created to study totalitarianism has thus perfected a more agreeable occupation: misleading the public on history while congratulating itself on its moral seriousness. George Orwell once observed that certain political creeds attract people who enjoy giving orders, denouncing heresy, and feeling superior without having to justify themselves; I suggest that Czech anticommunism, in its current institutional form, has become precisely such a refuge—one in which vanity is rewarded, calculation is encouraged, and the very idea of honest inquiry is treated as faintly improper.

An institute with a totalitarian regime

Pavel Karous’s 2022 ironic slogan “Ústav s totalitním režimem” (“Institute with a Totalitarian Regime”, rather than “Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes”) captures a widespread perception in the Czech public sphere that an institution formally dedicated to the study of totalitarianism has come to reproduce totalizing practices of epistemic capture, replacing the effort to understand the past with the authority to declare what may and may not be said about it.

This directorial project proposal takes that perception seriously – not as polemic, but as a heuristic starting point. It seeks to provide a clear diagnosis of ÚSTR’s dysfunctions by reconstructing the legal, institutional, and historiographical mechanisms that have undermined its academic credibility. My primary aim, as opposed to the outgoing director, would indeed be to restore the institute’s intellectual credit and accountability. This means ensuring that the considerable public resources devoted to the study of the communist past through this institute serve genuine historical inquiry rather than being absorbed in a pre-adjudicated moral narrative that substitutes moral verdicts and institutional authority for historical explanation.

This proposal is primarily analytical; it does not offer a concrete managerial reform plan but an intellectual diagnosis and a set of academic criteria against which any institution claiming to study dictatorship can be evaluated. In a context where the selection of institutional leadership has repeatedly demonstrated its insulation from scholarly critique and methodological debate, the presentation of detailed operational proposals would indeed be largely performative. For concrete organizational proposals, my 2014 directorial program for ÚSTR has lost nothing of its relevance. The purpose here is not to simulate governability within this unreceptive framework, but to make explicit in wider terms the epistemic conditions under which serious historical inquiry is possible — and to document, with analytical clarity, why those conditions are not being met.

1. What happened to ÚSTR? A case study in institutional self-destruction

The trajectory of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes over the past eighteen years is a typical cautionary tale in post-communist Europe of what happens when history is replaced by the ideology of weaponized anticommunism. We are all anticommunists, in the sense that no one today would want the return of the communist regime; but there are more and less politicized ways to express this sentiment. The current leaders and patrons of ÚSTR instrumentalize anticommunism to gain political, institutional, and personal capital; I, on the contrary, think of anticommunism as an incentive to try and understand what went wrong in the past and to learn the historical lesson for the future. The aim is not to excuse the communist regime but to analyze where Czech society failed in order to strengthen democracy today and tomorrow.

To grasp why this instrumentalized anticommunism became the institute’s dominant mode of operation, it is necessary to look past personalities and controversies and to return to the institutional logic on which ÚSTR was founded. The institute’s path is best understood not as a sequence of unfortunate conflicts, but as a structural failure that was present from the beginning and has since unfolded with grim consistency. ÚSTR was created as a research institute only in form; in substance, it was conceived as a political and normative tool whose task was not to investigate the communist past, but to imprint a specific interpretation of it onto Czech society.

The irony is that the institute was endowed with extraordinary symbolic authority, financial resources, and public visibility, yet was deprived of the one thing that makes historical research viable: methodological openness. History was not treated as a discipline governed by questions, sources, and debate, but as a tribunal charged with issuing verdicts that were already known in advance.

What followed was not a distortion of this otherwise necessary institution, but the logical consequence of its founding logic. From the outset, ÚSTR privileged a top-down, state-centered, terror-focused historical narrative of the communist past that reduced society to a passive object of repression. This model allowed for an apparent moral clarity, but at the cost of historical inaccuracy. By conflating dictatorship with omnipresent terror, it rendered everyday life analytically irrelevant, individual behavior morally suspect, and social agency either invisible or scandalous. In this framework, there was no place for studying compromise, adaptation, negotiation, or micro-resistance—not because these phenomena did not exist, but because acknowledging them would have required abandoning the fiction of collective innocence.

II. Conceptual clarification of what is at stake: revisionism, social agency, everyday life history

It is in this context that the term “revisionism” must be understood correctly. The kind of history that has been attacked under this label is in fact not denialist, apologetic, or relativizing.

1. Revisionism as method to understand, not as apology for the communist rule

This project is revisionist in the strict disciplinary sense: it revises questions, scales of analysis, and categories inherited from Cold War and dissident narratives. It shifts the focus from institutions to society, from ideology to practice, from proclamations to lived experience. It treats people under dictatorship as social actors navigating constraint, not as inert recipients of terror.

The agency of social actors, in this sense, does not imply freedom, consent, or moral exoneration. It refers to the capacity of individuals and groups to perceive constraints, evaluate risks, and make choices within limited and asymmetrical power relations — including choices of compliance, avoidance, compromise, and occasional resistance. This approach, which has long been standard in the historiography of Nazism, Stalinism, and other authoritarian regimes, is grounded in social history, Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life, understood here as history of the communist dictatorship as it was experienced in the banality of its everyday implementation), and critical archival analysis. That such an approach could be framed in the Czech context as morally offensive says less about the approach itself than about the fragility of a memory regime that cannot tolerate complexity without perceiving it as a threat.

Between 2014 and 2018, there was a brief and fragile attempt to realign ÚSTR with these basic academic standards. I was proud to take part in it as advisor to the director for research and methodology. As opposed to what its opponents claimed, the institute researchers did not seek in this period to overturn moral judgments about the communist regime or to diminish repression or suffering. Their ambition was methodological rather than ideological: it was to turn ÚSTR into a research institute capable of producing knowledge, understanding, and reckoning with the past rather than reproducing empty political slogans. The emphasis on everyday life, domination practices, collaboration, and social agency was not an attempt to normalize dictatorship but to understand how it functioned—a prerequisite for any serious engagement with historical accountability. That this attempt provoked immediate and aggressive resistance reveals the extent to which the institute had become invested not in research, but in the preservation of a normative monopoly.

The subsequent restoration of hardline anticommunism dismantled the fragile building of this professional credibility. Under the banner of defending victims and safeguarding democracy, ÚSTR underwent yet another process of systematic de-professionalization. As of 2022, experienced researchers were dismissed or driven out, research projects were abandoned or botched, and positions of responsibility were entrusted to individuals who lacked the qualifications required for academic work. In many cases, personnel appointed to research or editorial roles had no relevant academic training, no peer-reviewed publications, no familiarity with international historiography, and no competence in the methodology necessary to study dictatorship as a social system. Loyalty and ideological alignment replaced academic expertise as the primary criteria for advancement—in a manner disturbingly reminiscent of communist practices, if I may repeat myself.

2. Moral purity and the politics of memory

What gives this battle around ÚSTR its particularly corrosive character is that the actors who have most aggressively claimed the right to morally “cleanse” others since 2008 were themselves, with a few exceptions, neither dissidents nor social outcasts under communism. The core figures of Czech anticommunist memory politics, including those who founded and later reasserted control over ÚSTR, typically followed trajectories that were unremarkable within late socialist society: studies in officially acceptable fields, professional integration into state structures, access to travel or education abroad, or family embeddedness in regime and party institutions. This is not an ad hominem observation, nor a retrospective accusation: it is a structural fact with analytical consequences. The insistence on radical moral purity after 1989 has functioned less as a reckoning with repression than as a symbolic operation of purification, allowing socially integrated actors to retroactively convert ordinary socialist biographies into platforms of moral authority, while disqualifying precisely those forms of historical inquiry that would expose the social banality of life under dictatorship. In this sense, anticommunism has operated not as a critique of power but as a technology of self-absolution, projecting guilt outward while rendering one’s own past analytically untouchable.

The consequences of this process are neither abstract nor merely reputational, but concrete and measurable: massive waste of public funds through repeated restructuring and litigation; the destruction of institutional memory; the collapse of international cooperation with bona fide partners; and the transformation of ÚSTR into an inward-looking, defensive organization whose primary output is moral reassurance rather than historical insight. Appeals to respect for victims have functioned less as ethical commitments than as rhetorical shields, deflecting criticism and insulating academic weakness from scrutiny. Moral language has been instrumentalized to mask struggles over power, access to resources, and symbolic authority.

3. Historical kitsch and the loss of explanation

What ÚSTR has thus become is not a guardian of democratic memory but a producer of historical kitsch: emotionally saturated, morally unambiguous, intellectually thin. By equating suffering with heroism and repression with terror, it has erased both the compromises that sustained the regime and the forms of dignity that existed within it. Micro-resistance disappears, not because it was insignificant, but because it does not fit a narrative in which social agency itself is taboo. Numbers lose their analytical function and become symbolic tokens, enabling false equivalences that flatten historical specificity and, in the long run, risk relativizing precisely what they claim to defend.

This failure matters profoundly, because it coincides with the disappearance of living memory, 37 years after the fall of communism. As eyewitnesses slowly vanish, ÚSTR helps replace experience with caricature. New generations are being taught a version of the past in which society had no agency, guilt was externalized, and history is closed because judgment has already been rendered. Such a vision does not strengthen democracy but weakens it. A society that cannot understand how people adapt to power, how domination is normalized, and how moral choices are made under constraint is a society ill-equipped to recognize these mechanisms when they reappear in new circumstances.

The history of ÚSTR is therefore not a cautionary tale about political interference alone; it is a case study in how dogmatism, when institutionalized, leads to intellectual ruin, financial waste, and civic irresponsibility. The tragedy is not that consensus was lost, but that inquiry was never fully allowed to begin.

III. A methodological manifesto for studying the communist past

Any serious engagement with the communist past must begin by abandoning the illusion that history’s task is to reassure fragile egos. Historical research is not a moral service industry, nor a branch of transitional justice charged with distributing symbolic innocence and guilt. Its function is explanatory and pedagogic. Where moral narratives seek closure, history must reopen questions; where memory demands unanimity, history must insist on plurality; where verdicts promise comfort, history must accept discomfort as a sign of analytical seriousness.

1. History is not a tribunal

The most damaging confusion in post-1989 Czech memory politics has been the deliberate appropriation of historical authority by actors who present themselves as historians while behaving as prosecutors. In this model, the past is not investigated but indicted. Certain interpretations are treated as self-evident truths, while the historian’s task is reduced to assembling confirmatory material in support of charges that are morally and politically predetermined. Historical methodology is not abandoned accidentally but sidelined because it interferes with accusation. Disagreement is therefore not refuted but disqualified, and contextualization is reinterpreted as evasion or apology. What is at stake here is not a confusion of roles but a conscious instrumentalization of professional capital for the purpose of political prosecution. In this configuration, the authority of the historian no longer rests on explanation, source criticism, or debate, but on the power to accuse while claiming immunity from scrutiny.

The central problem is therefore not that history has somehow drifted into moral judgment, but that a small group of actors claiming the professional authority of historians has become a gatekeeper of the field. By controlling access to the legitimacy both of this public narrative on the past and of what functions as an institute of national memory, they have been able to present a highly selective interpretation of the communist past as if it were the product of broad scholarly consensus. This would-be “consensus” is not the outcome of sustained historiographical debate but of restrictive gatekeeping: certain questions are ruled illegitimate in advance, certain methodologies are discredited as morally suspect, and certain conclusions are treated as self-evident. Under these conditions, epistemic critique does not appear as disagreement but as deviance, and methodological pluralism is re-coded as irresponsibility or apology. What is thus produced is not academic consensus but its simulacrum: an appearance of unanimity generated by exclusion, which then serves as a justification for further exclusion.

This mechanism allows those who control ÚSTR to act simultaneously as arbiters of truth and moral prosecutors while shielding their own assumptions and trajectories from scrutiny. Yet a research institute that adopts this logic cannot produce knowledge; it can only reproduce moralized certainty. The first methodological requirement for studying communism is therefore to prevent historical research from being subordinated to moral and political gatekeeping, as well as to reassert inquiry, explanation, and debate as the primary sources of scholarly authority. Without this distinction, archives become evidence exhibits, not sources; historians become prosecutors or defense attorneys; and the complexity of social life disappears behind binary categories that explain nothing.

2. Revisionism as a methodological necessity

Revisionism, properly understood, is not a provocation but the normal operation of historical scholarship. It does not revise crimes, but questions; it does not revise suffering, but interpretive frameworks. The revisionist history of communism revises a top-down, state-centered, terror-only model by introducing society as an object of analysis. It asks not only what power did, but how domination was enacted, mediated, normalized, and sometimes contested in everyday life.

This shift is not optional. Without it, dictatorship remains unintelligible. A system that functioned for decades cannot be explained solely by repression, just as obedience cannot be reduced to fear alone. Revisionism insists that to understand how dictatorship worked, one must study how people lived in it—how they adapted, negotiated, compromised, avoided, complied, and occasionally resisted. To reject this approach, as self-proclaimed anticommunists do, is not to defend victims: it is to abandon explanation.

3. Social agency under constraint

A precise and non-naïve understanding of social agency is central to this revisionist approach. The agency of social actors as a concept does not imply freedom, consent, or moral innocence. It refers instead to their capacity to perceive constraints, evaluate risks, and make choices within asymmetrical power relations. Agency exists precisely because domination is never socially automatic. Dictatorships rely on routinization, participation, and normalization; they function through millions of small decisions, adjustments, and accommodations that cannot be captured by a model of permanent terror.

Recognizing social agency does not absolve the regime from responsibility. On the contrary, it is the precondition for analyzing responsibility meaningfully. A society without agency is a society without history. Treating people exclusively as passive victims does not only falsify their lived experience, it also eliminates the very space in which moral dilemmas, compromises, and acts of dignity can be understood.

4. Everyday life as the primary site of power

If the dictatorship is to be understood as a social system rather than as an abstract evil, everyday life must be treated as its central analytical category. Long-term power does not operate only, or even primarily, through spectacular violence or exceptional events. It is embedded in routines, institutions, workplaces, schools, families, and informal norms. Everyday life is where constraints are internalized, negotiated, or circumvented; where obedience is produced; and where limited forms of autonomy persist.

The study of everyday life does not trivialize repression, it contextualizes it. By reconstructing how people organized their lives, made sense of rules, and navigated expectations, historians can identify both the mechanisms that stabilized the regime and the cracks through which it was occasionally resisted. Without this perspective, history collapses into abstraction and society disappears from view. 

5. Collaboration, compromise, and micro-resistance

A serious history of communism must abandon the moral comfort of binary categories. Collaboration and resistance are not mutually exclusive, nor are they stable identities. Most people under dictatorship inhabited a grey zone of compromise, adjustment, and situational decision-making; they might have collaborated and resisted in turn, and sometimes simultaneously. To study this grey zone is not to relativize repression, but to confront the social reality that made repression effective.

Micro-resistance—the refusal of promotion, avoidance of participation, informal protection of others, selective compliance—cannot be dismissed as insignificant simply because it was not “heroic.” Such practices mattered precisely because they operated within constraint. At the same time, collaboration must be analyzed as a social practice rather than reduced to individual betrayal. Only by studying both together can historians avoid moral caricature and recover the texture of lived experience.

6. Archives, sources, and methodological discipline

The study of communism requires rigorous source criticism, particularly when dealing with regime-produced archives. Surveillance reports, opinion monitoring, and institutional records are neither transparent reflections of society nor meaningless fabrications. They must be read critically, comparatively, and contextually, with constant attention to the categories, intentions, and blind spots of those who produced them.

Methodological discipline also requires resisting the temptation to replace evidence with affect. Numbers, scale, and proportionality matter. Without them, historical comparison collapses into the relativization of “other” victims or, worse than anything, martyrology competition; analytical categories then lose all meaning. Insisting on scale is not a moral ranking of suffering; it is a safeguard against conceptual confusion and political instrumentalization. To remind that there were 50 to 100 times more deaths of the Second World War than of communism in Czechoslovakia is not a political project—it is the reality around which we have to work.

7. Against moral saturation and historical kitsch

One of the most corrosive effects of politicized memory is moral saturation: the flooding of the past with emotional meaning to the point where inquiry becomes redundant or illegitimate. In such conditions, history is transformed into kitsch—emotionally powerful, morally unambiguous, and intellectually hollow. Kitsch offers reassurance at the price of understanding. It produces consensus, but not knowledge.

A historical research and national memory institute such as ÚSTR has the responsibility to resist this temptation. Its task is not to have history compete with memorial culture or even worse, to replace history with memory, but to provide analytical distance from them both. Where memory simplifies, history must complicate, and vice versa. Where narratives close, research must reopen.

8. The ultimate aim: historical intelligibility, not innocence

The ultimate aim of studying the communist past is not reconciliation through forgetting, nor unity through moral purification: it is historical intelligibility. Only a society that understands how dictatorship functioned, socially, institutionally, and normatively, can reflect meaningfully on responsibility, continuity, and change.

This requires abandoning the comfort of innocence and accepting the difficulty of complexity. It requires treating citizens not as fragile recipients of moral instruction, but as capable of confronting an uncomfortable past without collapsing into apology or condemnation. In this sense, methodological rigor is not only a scholarly requirement: it is a democratic one.

IV. Why this matters: history, democracy, and the loss of intelligibility

The stakes of how the communist past is studied are not confined to historiography; they are eminently civic. As living memory recedes, societies increasingly depend on mediated forms of knowledge—institutions, museums, school curricula, public discourse—to make sense of the past dictatorships. When these mediations substitute moral certainty for explanation, they do not strengthen democratic culture but impoverish it. A past that is rendered morally unambiguous but socially unintelligible cannot serve as a resource for critical reflection in the present.

The dominant narrative promoted by ÚSTR has produced precisely this outcome. By reducing dictatorship to terror alone and society to passive victimhood, it offers a simplified and emotionally saturated account that forecloses understanding. This model leaves no room for analyzing how domination is normalized, how participation is elicited, how conformity is produced, or how moral compromises are rationalized in everyday life. Yet these are exactly the mechanisms through which authoritarian systems endure—and through which they can re-emerge under different guises.

The problem is not the exaggeration of repression, but its analytical evacuation. A society taught that dictatorship functions only through fear learns nothing about its own role in sustaining power. Responsibility is externalized, agency denied, and the past is transformed into a closed moral tale rather than an open field of inquiry. Such narratives may offer reassurance, but they deprive citizens of the conceptual tools needed to recognize forms of domination that do not announce themselves as terror. They also foster a dangerous complacency: if dictatorship is imagined as something radically other, then its gradual normalization becomes invisible.

This dynamic is particularly consequential in our present context, which is marked by rising populism, moral polarization, and the erosion of trust in institutions. When historical authority is monopolized through gatekeeping and manufactured consensus, disagreement is framed as threat rather than as a condition of democratic life. Citizens are trained to defer to moral certainties instead of evaluating arguments, evidence, and scale. The result is not democratic resilience, but epistemic fragility.

As mentioned above, there is an additional risk. The abandonment of proportionality, specificity, and scale in the study of communism has contributed to symbolic equivalences with the history of Nazism that flatten historical difference and invite relativization rather than preventing it—antisemitism is ever nearer to rearing its ugly head in the Czech Republic again. When numbers lose their analytical function and suffering is treated as interchangeable, memory politics ceases to protect victims and begins to instrumentalize them. This does not honor the past: it trivializes it.

A democratic relationship to history requires confidence in citizens’ capacity to confront complexity without collapsing into apology or denial. It requires institutions that privilege explanation over accusation, inquiry over certification, and method over moral exhibitionism. Studying the communist past as a social system—one sustained by fear, adaptation, participation, and negotiation—is not a concession to relativism. It is a condition for democratic maturity.

The alternative is a politics of memory that produces a closed inquiry instead of understanding, a fake consensus instead of debate, and moral comfort instead of knowledge. Such a politics does not protect democracy. It weakens it, by ensuring that the past teaches nothing about how power actually works.

V. A program for ÚSTR: restoring function through institutional differentiation

The repeated management crises of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes are not only the result of unfortunate personalities and political interference. They are also the predictable consequence of a structural error that has never been corrected: the conflation, within a single institution, of functions that obey fundamentally different logics. Historical research, archival stewardship, and commemorative or educational activity have been merged into one organizational body, thereby subjecting scholarly inquiry to moral, political, and symbolic pressures it cannot withstand without being distorted. Any serious attempt to restore ÚSTR as a credible institution must begin by disentangling these functions and assigning each of them a clear mandate, clear criteria of legitimacy, and clear limits.

1. Research is not a moralized tale of the past

At the core of the institute must stand a research function that operates according to the ordinary standards of historical scholarship. Research cannot be governed by a moral mission without ceasing to be research. Its legitimacy derives from methodology, evidence, peer debate, and the capacity to revise its own assumptions in light of new questions and sources. For ÚSTR to function as a research institute, historians must be free to define their research questions without prior ideological framing, to pursue lines of inquiry that may complicate established narratives, and to engage in disagreement without fear of moral disqualification. Recruitment and evaluation must therefore be based on scholarly competence—doctoral training in relevant fields, peer-reviewed publications, and engagement with international historiography—rather than on political reliability or symbolic positioning. Research programs should be evaluated through external peer review, preferably international, precisely in order to insulate them from domestic memory politics and internal gatekeeping.

Such a research unit would not relativize communist repression or deny responsibility. On the contrary, it would make responsibility historically intelligible by situating it within social practices, institutions, and everyday life. Its task would be to study dictatorship as a social system: how it functioned, how it endured, how it was normalized, and how it was occasionally contested. Only by granting research full autonomy can ÚSTR produce knowledge rather than reproduce moral reassurance.

2. Archives are not a political tool (or they shouldn’t be)

The archival function must be distinct from research, though institutionally connected to it. Archives are not narrative engines and should never be treated as such. Their role is to preserve, catalogue, and make accessible sources under conditions of transparency and equal access. When archives are subordinated to a specific interpretive agenda, they cease to be infrastructure and become instruments of pre-judgment.

For this reason, the archival stewardship must be institutionally insulated from both research agendas and commemorative imperatives. Archivists should be evaluated on professional criteria—preservation quality, cataloguing accuracy, accessibility, and user support—not on their contribution to a preferred narrative. The archive must remain a space of potentiality, not of moral classification, enabling multiple forms of inquiry rather than foreclosing them in advance.

3, Commemoration is a political function that is distinct from historical research

A third function, equally legitimate but epistemically distinct, concerns commemoration, public education, and memory work. These activities are unavoidably normative: they address values, identity, and civic responsibility. The problem arises only when they claim the authority of historical research while pursuing moral or political aims. The solution is not to suppress memory work, but to give it its own institutional space and to require transparency about its purpose. Exhibitions, educational programs, and commemorative initiatives should openly acknowledge that they are engaged in public memory rather than academic explanation. Freed from the pretense of research authority, they can then legitimately pursue civic and ethical goals without distorting historical inquiry. Separation, in this sense, protects both memory and history by allowing each to operate according to its own logic.

The differentiation of these three functions—research, archives, and memory work—must be accompanied by governance mechanisms designed to prevent capture and gatekeeping. Decision-making procedures, hiring practices, and funding allocations must be transparent and subject to external scrutiny. A genuinely independent scientific advisory board, composed largely of international scholars, should oversee research standards without intervening in substantive conclusions. Leadership positions should be subjected to fixed terms and evaluated on institutional performance rather than ideological conformity. Disagreement must be recognized as a normal and productive feature of scholarly life, not as a threat to institutional identity.

Such a structure does not weaken ÚSTR; it makes it viable. By disentangling functions that have been fatally confused, the institute could finally escape the cycle of politicization, purges, and symbolic warfare that has defined its existence. Research could regain credibility, archives regain trust, and memory work its legitimacy precisely because none of them will be forced to masquerade as something they are not.

Ultimately, this program does not aim to depoliticize the past—an impossible and undesirable goal—but to depoliticize historical research by institutional design. It rests on a simple premise: a democratic society does not need historians to tell it what to think about the past, but to help it understand. ÚSTR can fulfill thiz role only if it abandons the illusion of moral monopoly and embraces differentiation, plurality, and method as the foundations of its public responsibility.

VI. The legal framework: why law 181/2007 must be rethought and rewritten

Any serious attempt to reform the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes must confront a fact that has too often been treated as untouchable: the institute’s recurrent crises are not only institutional or personnel-based, but legally embedded. Law No. 181/2007 Sb., which established ÚSTR, does not merely provide an administrative framework: it actively shapes the institute’s epistemic orientation, its internal power relations, and its vulnerability to politicization. As long as this law remains unchanged, attempts at reform will remain partial and reversible.

The fundamental problem of the law lies in its normative overdetermination. Rather than defining ÚSTR primarily as a research institution governed by scholarly standards, the law assigns it a moral and political mission. By explicitly framing its purpose around the documentation and evaluation of “crimes” and “resistance”, the law embeds a prosecutorial logic into the institute’s mandate. This does not merely encourage a particular focus; it pre-structures interpretation, privileges certain questions over others, and renders entire areas of legitimate historical inquiry—such as everyday life, social negotiation, compromise, or participation—methodologically suspect before research even begins.

In practice, this has had predictable consequences: the law has facilitated the transformation of historians into quasi-judicial actors, encouraged the conflation of research with moral certification, and legitimized gatekeeping practices whereby methodological dissent is re-coded as ethical failure. It has also blurred the boundary between historical inquiry and memory politics, making it structurally difficult for ÚSTR to function as a normal research institute comparable to its international counterparts. The repeated institutional crises of ÚSTR should therefore be understood not as deviations from the law’s intent, but as expressions of its internal contradictions.

A second major problem, as already stated above, is that Law 181/2007 institutionalizes confusion between functions. Research, archival stewardship, and commemorative or educational activity are treated as parts of a single mission, without clear differentiation of purpose, standards, or authority. This legal conflation has exposed research to moral and political pressures it cannot absorb without distortion, while simultaneously granting commemorative activities an unwarranted aura of academic authority. The result has been permanent tension, internal conflict, and the erosion of public trust.

If ÚSTR is to be made viable, law 181/2007 must therefore be substantially amended, not just cosmetically adjusted. As already stated above, the aim of such amendment should not be to depoliticize the past—a misguided and impossible goal—but to depoliticize historical research by legal design. This requires a redefinition of the institute’s core mission in terms of inquiry rather than judgment, and a clear separation of epistemic functions:

• First, the law must explicitly define ÚSTR as a research institution, whose primary task is to study authoritarian regimes as historical and social systems, using the full range of academic methodologies recognized in international contemporary historiography. Moral evaluation, legal judgment, and symbolic condemnation cannot be the institute’s guiding principles without undermining its credibility and effectiveness.

• Second, the law must clearly differentiate between research, archives, and memory or educational activities, assigning each its own mandate, internal logic, and criteria of legitimacy. Research must be protected from normative predefinition; archival research must be governed by principles of neutrality, accessibility, and professional stewardship; and commemorative activities must be transparent about their normative character without claiming scholarly authority over interpretation.

• Third, the law must remove implicit incentives for gatekeeping and monopoly of interpretation. It should explicitly affirm methodological pluralism, protect scholarly disagreement, and prohibit the use of moral or ideological criteria as substitutes for academic evaluation. Without such safeguards, any leadership committed to reform will remain structurally vulnerable to reversal.

• Finally, any amendment to the law 181/2007 must recognize that democratic societies do not require institutions that deliver moral unanimity about the past. They require institutions capable of sustaining informed disagreement under shared methodological rules. A legal framework that equates legitimacy with moral alignment undermines precisely the democratic values it claims to defend.

Reforming ÚSTR without revising its legal foundation would therefore amount to managing symptoms while leaving the cause of the disease intact. A serious program for the institute must include the courage to acknowledge that law 181/2007, in its current form, has decisively contributed to the institute’s failure—and that only a substantial rethinking of its mandate can allow ÚSTR to fulfill a genuinely scholarly and civic function in the future.

VII. From moral declaration to institutionalized prosecution: the legal genealogy of ÚSTR

1. Negative influence on the legal order

Any serious assessment of ÚSTR must in fact begin with the legal framework shaping Czech memory politics and the fundamental problem that has too often been evaded: the nature and consequences of law 198/1993 Sb., on the Illegality of the Communist Regime and on Resistance To It. This law is not problematic primarily because of its moral condemnation of the previous regime, but because it represents a profound distortion of the meaning of law itself.

The 1993 act is a declaratory law; it does not regulate behavior, establish legal responsibility, or create enforceable norms. Instead, it proclaims a judgment about the past. In doing so, it claims that the communist regime was “illegal.” This claim is legally untenable. Whatever its moral or political character, the communist regime governed through a functioning legal order that was internally coherent and formally valid at the time. To retroactively declare that regime “illegal” is not an act of legal reasoning, but a symbolic gesture that empties the concept of illegality (or legality) of its meaning.

The problem is compounded by the fact that this declaratory fiction was explicitly endorsed by the Constitutional Court in 1993. By accepting a statement that is manifestly false in legal terms, the Court effectively sanctioned the idea that law may solemnly declare untruths without consequence. In doing so, it undermined the very principle it was meant to protect: the rule of law in the newly democratic Czech state. A legal order that tolerates such declarations renders legality itself contingent, rhetorical, and politically malleable.

Paradoxically, the power of the 1993 law lay precisely in its legal emptiness. Although it produced no legal effects, it exerted enormous symbolic and epistemic authority. By transforming a historically and legally complex past into a matter of legal proclamation, it established a model in which historical interpretation could be settled by declarative fiat rather than by academic inquiry. This had lasting consequences for the writing of communist history, legitimizing a mode of engagement in which verdict precedes analysis and historical critique appears as defiance of the law rather than as a normal feature of historical debate.

In this sense, the 1993 law prepared the ground for later institutional developments. It normalized the idea that the past could be legally fixed rather than historically examined, and that moral certainty could substitute for historical research. The subsequent creation of institutions such as the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, and the embedding of prosecutorial logics into their mandates, cannot be understood without reference to this earlier moment in which declaratory law was allowed to pass for legal truth.

2. Negative influence on the writing of history

The influence of law 198/1993 on the writing of communist history did not operate through legal coercion, but through the constraining power of a state-endorsed narrative. As a purely declaratory law, it produced no enforceable legal consequences, yet by proclaiming the communist regime “illegal”, it fixed a historically and legally false claim at the level of official state discourse. This declaration did not settle a legal issue; it settled a story. Once endorsed by the Constitutional Court, this story acquired a quasi-constitutional status, rendering it immune to ordinary contestation in the public sphere.

The effect on historiography was profound. Indeed, the law reversed the burden of proof in historical debate. The criminality and illegality of the regime ceased to be a hypothesis to be examined and became instead an axiom to be illustrated. Historical research was implicitly expected to confirm a verdict already delivered by law, rather than to investigate how the regime actually functioned as a social, legal, and institutional system. Questions that complicated the declaratory narrative—be it about legality, normalization, participation, everyday life, or social negotiation—were no longer treated as legitimate lines of inquiry, but as suspicious deviations from an officially sanctioned truth.

In this way, a law that was legally empty acquired immense epistemic force. It constrained not what historians could legally write, but what could be publicly said, funded, taught, and institutionally supported. It transformed history from an open field of inquiry into a practice of confirmation, and it normalized the idea that disagreement with the dominant narrative was not academic critique but moral or political defiance. This is how a declaratory law that claimed authority without legal substance profoundly shaped the public narrative of the communist past and has narrowed the horizons of historical understanding for decades.

To sum up, although law 198/1993 had no binding legal effects, its declaratory endorsement by the Constitutional Court transformed a legally false claim into an authoritative state narrative, reversed the burden of proof in historical debate, normalized confirmation over inquiry, disciplined public and institutional discourse, and thereby constrained for decades what could be publicly written, taught, funded, and institutionally recognized as legitimate history of communism. Critiquing this law is therefore not an attempt to relativize repression or deny injustice: it is a defense of the rule of law against its instrumentalization. A democratic state weakens itself when it uses its legal apparatus to declare historical meaning instead of creating conditions for historical understanding. The considerable long-term damage lies not in what the law said, but in what it taught: that legality, truth, and history are interchangeable categories; in fact, they are not.

3. Further legal consequences: the 262/2011 law on anticommunist resistance

The logic inaugurated by Act No. 198/1993 Sb. was further consolidated by Act No. 262/2011 Sb., on the Participants in Anti-Communist Opposition and Resistance. Whereas the earlier law fixed a declaratory judgment about the regime as a whole, the 2011 law introduced a system of state-certified moral recognition, legally defining who qualifies as a participant in “resistance” and establishing (often politically biased) procedures to adjudicate that status. In doing so, it transformed a historically complex and analytically open category into an administratively closed one. The effect was not simply commemorative: by elevating explicit opposition into a legally privileged form of agency, the law narrowed the spectrum of historically intelligible action under dictatorship, relegating everyday strategies of survival, negotiation, compromise, and micro-resistance to moral and narrative marginality. Social agency ceased to be an object of historical inquiry and became instead a matter of retrospective accreditation.

Like the 1993 declaratory law, law 262/2011 did not constrain historians through legal prohibition, but through symbolic and institutional normalization. It reinforced a binary public narrative in which meaningful action under communism was equated with resistance, passivity with victimhood, and everything in between rendered analytically insignificant. In this way, the law further disciplined the public understanding of the communist past, discouraging precisely those forms of social and everyday life history that might illuminate how dictatorship actually functioned. Far from correcting the distortions introduced by earlier legislation, it completed the shift from history as inquiry to history as moral classification.

By legally certifying “anti-communist resistance”, law. 262/2011 thus completed the transformation of history into identity politics, narrowed historically intelligible agency to a single administratively privileged form, imposed retrospective moral sorting on society, marginalized the study of everyday life and social negotiation, and replaced historical explanation with state-sanctioned moral hierarchy under the guise of justice.

Conclusion: Against moral comfort, for historical responsibility

This project proceeds from a simple but demanding premise: a democratic society does not honor its past by simplifying it, nor protect itself by moralizing it. On the contrary, the more history is reduced to moral certainty, the less it teaches about how power actually works. The repeated crises of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes are therefore not incidental failures of governance or personality, but the predictable outcome of a deeper refusal to accept what historical inquiry requires: uncertainty, plurality, and the willingness to confront uncomfortable forms of social normality.

What has been diagnosed in the present project is not merely institutional dysfunction, but a broader epistemic failure. Through a combination of declaratory law, moral certification, and institutional gatekeeping, the communist past has been progressively transformed from an object of inquiry into a closed narrative, from a historical problem into a moral identity, and from a field of research into a terrain of symbolic purification. This transformation has not strengthened democracy but weakened it by replacing explanation with reassurance and by training citizens to defer to verdicts instead of arguments.

The insistence on revisionism, everyday life, and agency is not an attempt to soften judgment or rehabilitate the communist dictatorship. It is an insistence on taking dictatorship seriously enough to study how it functioned socially, legally, and morally over decades. A regime that endured for forty years cannot be understood solely through terror, nor can a society be absolved of responsibility by being cast exclusively as a victim. To deny agency is not to protect dignity; it is to erase it. To refuse complexity is not to honor suffering; it is to render it meaningless.

The legal framework that has shaped Czech memory politics since 1993 illustrates the danger of confusing law with truth. Declaratory judgments that are legally false but symbolically powerful have constrained public narrative without producing justice. Certifications of resistance have elevated moral recognition at the cost of historical intelligibility. Institutional mandates have encouraged prosecution rather than inquiry. Together, these developments have produced a landscape in which history is expected to confirm what has already been decided, and where asking different questions is treated as transgression rather than as academic inquiry.

This project argues that ÚSTR can fulfill its public responsibility only by breaking with this logic. Not by abandoning moral concern, but by refusing moral monopoly. Not by depoliticizing the past, but by depoliticizing historical research through institutional design. Not by producing consensus, but by sustaining disagreement under shared methodological rules. A research institute worthy of a democratic society does not promise comfort; it offers understanding.

The choice, therefore, is not between condemnation and relativization, nor between memory and forgetting. It is between history as a form of civic intelligence and history as moral theater. If ÚSTR is to have a future that justifies its existence, it must choose the former—even at the cost of controversy. Especially at the cost of controversy.