The Nation’s Memory Institute is a public organization that collects and processes all of the information related to regimes during the period from 1939 to 1989, and in its archives it declassifies documents from former state security agencies. The Nationʼs Memory Institute’s archive registers, accumulates, accesses, and administers documents from the German Third Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as well as Czechoslovak and Slovak governments that were created and collected from 18 April 1939 to 31 December 1989. State security files remained sealed until the creation of the Institute. Therefore, the establishment of the Nation’s Memory Institute in Slovakia in 2002, can be considered a “breaking of silence.” The Nation’s Memory Institute was officialy launched on 1 May 2003. The institute publishes the periodical Pamäť a národ [Memory and Nation], various documentary editions, memoirs, collections, and offers access to its e-library.
In an effort to deligitimize past communist regimes, during the 1990s many of the postcommunist societies established a special official institutional body, commonly labeled an “institute of memory .” According to Martin Kovanic, institutes of memory (not only in Slovakia) were set up as an institutional expression of anticommunist beliefs of right-wing political elites, as well as a legitimizing process of the postcommunist political elites that demonstrated the break with the communist past. One of the Institute’s main functions is the production of anticommunist collective memory.
The effort to make the files produced by state security services available to the victims and the public and to “catch up” with other postcommunist countries in Central Europe was primarily an initiative of Democratic Party representative Ján Langoš, later the founder and first Chairman of the Management Board of NMI. Langoš had been a dissident and samizdat publisher in the 1980s and became involved in politics after 1989. He was the Czechoslovak federal Minister of Internal Affairs between 1990 and 1992 and a member of the Slovak parliament from 1994 to 2002. He started preparing the enabling law in 1999 and initially planned to make it a part of the freedom of information act which, however, was passed in 2000 without it (in 1996 the Czech Republic archives of the secret police were opened up). Due to lack of political support for this initiative, the legislation concerning the archives of the security agencies was submitted in the parliament only in 2002. The time was strategically chosen because of the fact that it was only a few months before the next elections. The law establishing the Institute (the so-called law on national memory) was then supported by a wide range of political parties and factions in the parliament. The whole process of building the archive and gathering the relevant documents from the Slovak Information Service (SIS) lasted approximately until 2006.
After the tragic death of Ján Langoš in 2006, the parliament elected a new president of the Institute, historian Ivan Petranský, nominated by the Slovak National Party (Slovenská národná strana— SNS). SNS is a nationalist conservative party that was at the time a member of ruling coalition. Some of the previous candidates introduced by SNS, including the new president himself Ondrej Krajňák, were criticized for their nationalist views and their insufficiently critical evaluation of the period of the First Slovak State.