EASTERN EUROPE: Eastern Europe is stil grappling with its communist era legacy, reports Daniel McLaughlin.
More than a decade after they escaped communist rule, the European Union's new eastern members are still grappling with the ghost of the dreaded KGB.
Poles are now scrambling to a website that shows the names of some 240,000 alleged collaborators with the Soviet-era secret police, drawn from a list that was secretly copied at the national archives and put on-line by a journalist, Mr Bronislaw Wildstein.
Polish prosecutors announced yesterday that they are to launch a criminal investigation into the leak of the list, which identifies both security service agents and the people they spied on, but does not spell out who did what.
The result is not only a huge spike in Polish Internet traffic, but also an unprecedented surge of people wanting to see their own secret police files and those of friends and relatives named on the list, to find out whether they were collaborators or targets.
Top Polish politicians and even members of the anti-communist Solidarity movement have been named as police agents, as calls for a final reckoning with the past have swept through Central Europe, from the Baltic to the Balkans.
Mr Leon Kieres, president of the National Remembrance Institute (IPN) that keeps Poland's secret police files, said he has received "an avalanche of requests" for records kept by shadowy security services that did the bidding of the Soviet KGB.
The appearance of the "Wildstein List" on the web was only the culmination of months of feverish interest in the contents of those records, however.
Public fascination with their contents was piqued by the resignation last month of parliamentary speaker Mr Jozef Oleksy, for lying about his role as an agent for the Soviet-era secret police.
Then came the even bigger bombshell that Ms Malgorzata Niezabitowska, a prominent Solidarity activist and spokeswoman for Poland's first post-communist government, had informed on her pro-democracy colleagues to the security services.
While experts at the IPN say her file - which reportedly includes her photograph, signature and codename, "Nowak" - appears to be entirely genuine, Ms Niezabitowska claims that the communists fabricated her file to discredit her."I was not a collaborator - not for one second," she insisted. "What is there in these files, is that I am a traitor to my country . . . But for me, it would be better to be accused of killing someone."
Candidates for public office have been screened since 1997 for a security service background, and can be fired - as Mr Oleksy was - for lying about his past; also, anyone who suspects that he was the subject of a secret police file can demand to see that dossier at the IPN.
But right-wing opposition politicians now want the names of all collaborators to be published, despite warnings that many of the files may contain false information and could permanently stain the reputations of people falsely accused.
The old Eastern Bloc has been divided on how to deal with its murky past. The Czech Republic threw open its files without investigating their veracity, with the result that perhaps thousands of people lost their jobs simply because their names cropped up somewhere in the archive.
The files of East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, were also opened to victims, historians and journalists, and a number of politicians and public figures were ruined.
In Hungary, all public officials are screened for a security service past and parliament will study a proposal this month on granting wider public access to the files. Romania's new government, meanwhile, wants judges and senior magistrates to be checked for collaboration with the feared Securitate secret police of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Lithuania - which impeached its president last year for alleged links to the Russian security services - is now rapt by an inquiry into how the foreign minister, intelligence chief and deputy speaker of parliament all became KGB reservists. "We have stepped on a mine," said Mr Eligijus Masiulis, an opposition politician who supports the investigation.
"After 15 years of freedom we haven't cleared the minefield. We need to define more clearly who did what back then."