July 5 (Bloomberg) -- For Czech Interior Minister Ivan Langer, putting communist-era secret police files on line is more than just a job. It's a matter of family honor.

The plan by Langer, whose grandfather was jailed during the communists' four decades in power, would go further than any east European country in allowing access to documents that once landed people in jail or condemned them to work in uranium mines.

``We have to know our past in order to cope with it,'' Langer said at his office in Prague. The project fulfills ``a debt to my grandparents and an obligation to my children.''

The former eastern bloc is still struggling to come to terms with who did what during communism. In Poland, opposition parties have slammed the government's move to publish names of informers, and in Hungary, files are open only to historians. The Czech plan to use the Internet has drawn criticism that unfounded rumors in the files will destroy lives.

The Social Democrats, who led the governing coalition from 1998 to 2006 and are now the largest opposition party, are against Langer's ``Open Past'' project because they say it violates privacy laws. The Communist Party, the third-largest party in parliament, is also opposed.

The authorities in what was Czechoslovakia used at least 10,000 agents and collaborators to gather information on people who were perceived as threats to the regime, with the targets including hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens.

``It's not wise to dig into the past,'' said Jan Vokraus, 54, a security guard at a Prague shopping mall. He has no plans to go on line to see whether there is a communist-era file on him. ``People don't give a damn about it.''

Miles of Files

Across Eastern Europe, people were tortured, shadowed by agents or prevented from getting into university if their families didn't toe the party line.

The Open Past project may take years to complete. It's currently uniting in one archive materials the secret services gathered on as many as 2 million people.

This autumn, the Interior Ministry will start uploading files now stacked side by side. The project will initially involve 850,000 cards that contain the name, birth date and other personal data of people who were registered by the secret service. Eventually, about 17 kilometers (11 miles) of paper files will be available on the Internet.

The archive will be part of the government-funded Institute of Totalitarian Regime Studies that is being set up this year.

Most secret service files are now classified and scattered in various archives, making it difficult and time-consuming for researchers to find individual records.

`Daring'

Langer's plan ``is so new that it is almost daring,'' said Ivo Samson, an analyst at the Slovak Foreign Policy Association in Bratislava, the Slovak capital since Czechoslovakia split into two states in 1993.

Slovakia set up its own Institute of National Memory in 2002, whose main job is to open up secret service files and study the country's history under the fascist and communist regimes. Members of the public can place requests to review documents at the facility.

Langer, 40, was a student protest leader during the 1989 Velvet Revolution that toppled communism. He appointed another student leader, Pavel Zacek, to head the new archive.

Financing for the project will come from the Interior Ministry's budget as well as from funds from the European Union, which the Czech Republic joined in 2004. Langer wouldn't give a figure for how much the project will cost.

Past Pain

In the past, many people objected to allowing partial access to the files because of concerns that someone who cooperated under duress would be tarred with the same brush as those who voluntarily spied on their own people.

As more files go on line, it should be easier to determine the role and character of the people named, Langer said. It will be possible to tell whether someone was an ``active, voluntary or paid'' informant or ``was forced to collaborate by blackmail, threats to himself or his family,'' he said.

Only about 5 percent of the material in the files will remain classified, because those documents include information still used by the present-day secret services, Langer said.

Communist Party Chairman Vojtech Filip said the project ``can only have a negative influence on the society.''

Filip has said that while his name turned up in the secret service files, he wasn't an informant. The government of Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek is stirring up past pain, he said.

``They are only after power,'' he said. ``This can't bring lessons about the past.''

The past is being raked up across former communist Europe. In Germany, the operations of the Stasi secret police were the subject of ``The Lives of Others,'' which won an Academy Award this year for Best Foreign Film.

``A great deal of information and data from the totalitarian regime remains classified to citizens of a democratic society,'' Langer said. ``This is absurd.''

To contact the reporters on this story: Andrea Dudikova in Prague at adudikova@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: July 4, 2007 18:10 EDT