Czechoslovakia’s transition to democracy became known as the Velvet revolution, due to the largely peaceful end of Communism in the country. Alexander Dubcek, hero of the Prague Spring uprising was elected speaker of the Czechoslovakian parliament on 28 December 1989 and a day later dissident writer Vaclav Havel became the country’s new president.

In 1968, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague to crush what was known as the Prague Spring – a pro-democracy movement that sprang up in response to a brief period of liberalisation.

On the 21st anniversary of that day, 21 August 1989, protestors again took to the streets of the Czech capital calling for democracy and freedom. Police used force to break up the demonstration, but events elsewhere in Eastern Europe made it impossible to crush the dissident movement and the days of the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia were numbered.

Then on 1 January 1993, Czechoslovakia ceased to exist entirely as it split peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Hunger for information
As is the case in other former Soviet states, there is today a hunger for information about Communist era abuses. The latest Internet hit in Prague is a database of leaked Communist-era secret police data - its popularity driven by frustration with the slow rate at which the authorities are making these files available to the public.

Listen to Restricted access - The Czech secret police files, a report by Rob Cameron

Veil of secrecy
The site was launched by former dissident and human rights campaigner Stanislav Penc, who claims he received the data from a researcher who was frustrated at the failure of the authorities to lift the veil of secrecy covering the records. It doesn’t give any details, but simply lists whether the secret police, the dreaded Statni Bezpecnost, kept a file on a particular individual or not. So many Czechs wanted to access the information that the demand caused the computer server to crash when the records first went online in July.

The Czech Republic does have an official programme in place to archive and provide access to the old secret police files. But the sheer volume of paperwork - Czech researchers estimate they have 280 million pages of records listing even the most mundane details of citizens' lives - means this is a slow and costly process. Although a digitalisation project now under way should allow full online access in the coming years, the popularity of Mr Penc's database shows that many think that this is too little, too late.