Te late 2000s in the Czech Republic saw a trend of increased interest in the archival document as a means of historical authentication. Tis chapter examines two parallel developments of this preoccupation on the discursive level and analyses their occasional intersections: in public debate and in cultural representations. With the establishment of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů; ÚSTR) in 2007, an institution dedicated to examining the archives of the Security Services during the Nazi occupation and the period of Communist Party rule, 1 the topic of the archive reanimated public debate. As was the case in the 1990s, when various memory activists took it upon themselves to publically disclose names of alleged former secret police collaborators, thus tarnishing the reputation of a number of people, 2 information emerging from the institute sparked discussions on the supposed collaboration of several prominent public fgures with the communist secret services. At the same time, popular representations of the past adopted the archive as a theme and motif. As I show in this chapter, the presumed credibility of archival documents allowed cultural producers to introduce moral categories in fctional narratives. Te fgure of the compiler of the archival document – the secret police ofcer – became the ultimate villain. Focusing on examples from literary and flm production, my contention is that this trend of ‘authenticating the past’ arose in a defnite context: it bolstered a politicized memory of the socialist period at a time when the latter seemed to be increasingly receding into the past. Tis trend was mirrored by a heightened preoccupation on the part of distinct state and NGO actors with manufacturing a national memory of anti-communist heroic resistance. Institutional interventions Te opening of ÚSTR in 2007, afer heated discussions in Parliament 3 and accompanying controversies in the public sphere, has been the most visible marker in a changing memory landscape in the Czech Republic. Troughout the 1990s and the 12 Authenticating the Past: Archives, Secret Police and Heroism in Contemporary Czech Representations of Socialism Veronika Pehe 9781350051713_txt_rev.indd 207 23-06-2018 15:27:03