National Memory Institute (Slovakia)
The National Memory Institute (Slovak: Ústav pamäti národa) is a Slovak public institution that holds the police records of the fascist Slovak State and communist Czechoslovak Socialist Republic regimes that ruled Slovakia during the twentieth century.[2] The institute also promotes research into these periods of Slovak history and educates the general public of this history.[3] It publishes a journal, Pamäť národa, which is currently edited by Róbert Letz.[4] The founder of the institute was Ján Langoš, who served as director until his death in a car crash in 2006.[2]
| Ústav pamäti národa | |
 | |
 The institute's offices at Miletičova 19 in Ružinov, Bratislava | |
| Agency overview | |
|---|---|
| Formed | 2003[1] |
| Headquarters | Bratislava, Slovakia |
| Website | www |
One of the institution's staff historians, Martin Lacko, was fired in 2016 for promoting the Slovak State.[5]
James Mace Ward commented that the National Memory Institute "has done a brisk trade in publications on the Slovak state, much of this scholarship being of high quality. Yet the focus on the state seems disproportionate, as the institute’s archive has few relevant holdings".[6]
Political scientist Jelena Subotić states that after Langoš' death, "The institute’s main goal became the delegitimization of Slovakia’s communist regime, achieved by grouping it together with fascism while making a case that communist dictatorship was, in fact, worse."[7]
References
- "O Ústave pamäti národa". Ústav pamäti národa (in Slovak).
- "Nation's Memory Institute evicted". The Slovak Spectator. Retrieved 14 November 2018.
- "Mission". Retrieved 14 November 2018.
- "Časopis Pamäť národa". Ústav pamäti národa (in Slovak). Retrieved 23 February 2020.
- Paulovičová, Nina (2018). "Holocaust Memory and Antisemitism in Slovakia: The Postwar Era to the Present". Antisemitism Studies. Indiana University Press. 2 (1): 12. doi:10.2979/antistud.2.1.02.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
- Nedelsky 2016, p. 986.
- Subotić, Jelena (2019). Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance After Communism. Cornell University Press. p. 210. ISBN 978-1-5017-4240-8.
Further reading
- Nedelsky, Nadya (2016). ""The Struggle for the Memory of the Nation": Post-Communist Slovakia and its World War II Past". Human Rights Quarterly. 38 (4): 969–992. doi:10.1353/hrq.2016.0053.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)