Beáta Katrebová Blehová: From samizdat publisher to intelligence agent – the case of Miloslav Tačovský

Miloslav Tačovský's life story is an example of the transformation of an anti-communist fighter into an agent of State Security. Anti-communist attitudes in the post-war period led him to the idea of publishing samizdats and leaflets, for which he was sentenced to long imprisonment. His story contributes to the knowledge about the phenomenon of Slovak samizdat during the initial phase of communism in Czechoslovakia. His transformation into a State Security agent proves that the regime's ideological boundaries for recruiting secret collaborators were broad and not hindered even by evidential Hlinka Party supporting past. In the second half of the 1960s, he was deployed into the Slovak exile environment in West Germany, and his infiltration was successful. He was withdrawn from Germany in the early 1970s, and his return was propagandistically used by the normalisation regime to discredit the exile.