Prague, Feb 8 (CTK) – President Milos Zeman refused to appoint a nominated professor due to alleged cooperation with the Czechoslovak communist secret police StB, but he decorated actress Jitka Frantova Pelikanova whom the StB listed among their active informants, daily Lidove noviny (LN) wrote on Monday.
Last year, Zeman refused to name three professors. In case of one of them, mathematician Ivan Ostadal, he argued that Ostadal allegedly cooperated with the StB.
Only five months later, the actress Pelikanova, officially registered as an agent in the StB files, was one of the persons whom Zeman awarded on the national holiday on October 28, 2015.
Pelikanova, who has been living in Italy since 1968, is an old friend of Zeman and she supported him in the campaign before the direct presidential election, the paper writes.
Information that Pelikanova had contacts with StB officers appeared before her decoration and she sharply dismissed the “unfounded rumours.”
“I did not sign any cooperation with the StB and I did not harm anybody,” she told daily Pravo last October.
According to the file on Pelikanova, which is still available in the Archive of Security Forces, she was an agent from March 25, 1961.
The StB was interested in the then 29-year-old actress from Prague’s Rokoko theatre because she was a friend of Jana Werichova, daughter of famous actor Jan Werich, and among her colleagues were theatre director Jan Rohac, husband of singer Hana Hegerova, LN writes.
The StB also wanted to have general knowledge about what was going on in Prague theatres such as Na Zabradli, Laterna Magica and ABC. Pelikanova (then named Frantova, which is her maiden name) provided this information to StB official Zbynek Martinek during several meetings.
Like almost all actors who visited the West, Pelikanova had to submit a report about contacts with foreigners to the Czechoslovak Interior Ministry after the Rokoko theatre performed in Berlin in 1960. Pelikanova surprised the ministry with her readiness to provide information, the paper writes, referring to Martinek’s reports.
In February 1961, she brought a list of people about whom she can report to Martinek. As agent, Pelikanova was registered under code names Helena and Barbora.
StB officers praised Pelikanova for her good cooperation. They wrote that she asked on her own initiative what she should do and where she should go and that she was “fully devoted to the Interior Ministry,” LN writes.
The StB documents on Pelikanova do not include a written statement in which she would officially confirm her cooperation with the secret police.
Mirek Vodrazka, from the Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (USTR), said such a written statement was not necessary for StB cooperation to start.
Later in the 1960s, the StB had to stop cooperating with Pelikanova despite her qualities because she started living with a member of the Czechoslovak parliament, Jiri Pelikan, and the StB rules did not allow for such cooperation.
Her file was put into the archives and part of it, including crucial documents written by Pelikanova herself, was destroyed.
After the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet troops in 1968, she and Pelikan left for Italy where they later applied for a political asylum. The StB then began to monitor them, the paper writes.
Zeman’s spokesman Jiri Ovcacek said Zeman heard Pelikanova’s account of her alleged StB cooperation, which explained the case.
Ovcacek said Pelikanova and her husband opposed the communist regime in the 1970s. “Those who discredit the Pelikans are on the same level as the StB officers who pursued the husband and wife in their exile,” he told LN.
