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Czechoslovakia INTERNAL SECURITY AND PUBLIC ORDER
The Ministry of Interior is responsible for public order and
internal security. The ministry controls the armed security
organizations in the country except for the regular armed forces
and some prison guards. It is also responsible, inter alia, for
fire prevention, government archives, and passport and visa
control. In theory the interior ministries that exist at the
Czech and Slovak Socialist republic levels have similar
responsibilities and functions, but the real power rests in the
federal ministry in Prague. The federal Ministry of Interior is
considered one of the key posts because of the power inherent in
the control of the country's security agencies. In mid-1987, the
minister of interior was Vratislav Vajnar, who had held the post
since 1983. Vajnar was concurrently a deputy in the Chamber of
the People in the Federal Assembly and a member of the KSC
Central Committee.
At the end of World War II, when President Benes established
the first postwar government at Kosice, control of the Ministry
of Interior was sought and obtained by the KSC. Party member
Vaclav Nosek was appointed minister and began the process of
converting the security forces into arms of the party.
Anticommunist police officers and officials were fired,
noncommunist personnel were encouraged to join the party or its
youth organization, and all were subjected to heavy doses of
communist propaganda. It was Nosek's packing of the police
hierarchy with communists that caused the protest resignation of
anticommunist government ministers in February 1948, leading to
the coup d'etat. When the coup took place, Nosek's
communist-dominated security forces ensured an easy takeover.
During the purges of the early 1950s, the security agencies
aided the Klement Gottwald faction against those communists
accused of antistate crimes. Police participation in the purges,
their arrogance and lack of scruples in dealing with ordinary
citizens, and their brutal methods of interrogation were typical
of the Stalinist model that they emulated. The term Secret
Police as an official appellation was dropped in 1953, but
the public, almost thirty years later, still used the title in
referring to State Security.
As was the case in the military, but to a lesser extent, some
members of the security forces were weeded out for having
supported the Dubcek reforms. Stability returned to the security
forces early in the
1970s--during normalization--and the forces have kept a tight
rein on Czechoslovaks ever since. The repressive measures have
led to discontent and dissidence, but never to a degree that was
beyond control. Many Western observers and most expatriates of
the era reported that the public became apathetic after the
Warsaw Pact invasion and the return to rigid communist orthodoxy.
The dissent movement known as Charter 77 that took form in 1977
was certainly a rebuke to the government and to the KSC, but it
was far from being a mass movement and was rather easily
contained by the security police
(see Police Repression
, this ch.;
Charter 77
, ch. 4). Ten years after its inception, the
Charter 77 group remained small; security forces had ensured that
it would not attract mass support.
Data as of August 1987
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