---
title: "Petr Blažek's edition of the StB's own file on Patočka dates his final interrogation to 3 March 1977, and a resulting charge against two StB officers was halted before trial"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
source_url: "https://babylonrevue.cz/pohreb-filosofa-v-rezii-stb/"
source_author: "Petr Placák (interviewer), interviewing Petr Blažek (historian, Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes)"
source_date: "2017-06-20"
source_venue: "Babylon (Revue Babylon, Studentský spolek Babylon)"
source_quote: "sdělili obvinění z „omezování osobní svobody“, což se mělo týkat toho dlouhého výslechu 3. března 1977. [...] V obou případech stíhání zastavili státní zástupci – oba mimochodem předlistopadoví členové KSČ."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "c3bd5285e20f1dd94686c31536281a21470401c14c5589f2f1c06b20fbaadb5d"
audit_status: "capture-verified — Babylon interview read directly (WebFetch/archive_page) at capture time (2026-08-26); direct quote from Petr Blažek, the historian who edited the 2017 documentary edition of the StB's own file on Patočka. The file itself was not independently read this session — this rests on its editor's own account, which is the ceiling available for oral/interview testimony under sources.md's tier rubric. | audit 2026-08-27 (cross-model, claude-fable-5): source_quote, the 3-March-1977 dating, the two-officers detail ('Vyšetřovaní byli dva příslušníci StB'), and the halted-prosecutions account all re-verified verbatim against the cached Babylon capture (source_sha above). Defect found and closed: the body's bibliographic frame — the edition title 'Kéž je to všecko ku prospěchu obce!', Academia/OIKOYMENH, '120 previously largely unpublished StB documents including interrogation protocols', and Blažek's ÚSTR affiliation — does not appear in the Babylon interview text (its only cited source; the interview says only that Blažek 'vydal soubor dokumentů, které k Patočkovi vedla StB'). Those details were re-verified this audit against the Karolinum catalogue entry for the edition (cupress.cuni.cz/ink2_ext/index.jsp?include=podrobnosti&id=315661 — Academia–OIKOYMENH 2017, 120 documents from 1960–1984 incl. Patočka's 1977 interrogation protocols) and Blažek's ÚSTR staff page (ustrcr.cz). All details stand; the gap was in the note's sourcing trail, not the facts."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-26-what-does-a-contemporaneous-or-primary-source-say.md, 2026-08-26"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["20260826-0215-what-does-a-contemporaneous"]
date_created: "2026-08-26T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["czechoslovakia","cold-war","charter-77","patocka","stb","oral-history","primary-source","biographical"]
seek_code_commit: "7d6d9ed"
---


Petr Blažek, a historian at the Czech Republic's Institute for the Study of
Totalitarian Regimes (ÚSTR), edited a 2017 critical documentary edition of
the StB's own files on [[entity-patocka|Jan Patočka]] — *"Kéž je to všecko
ku prospěchu obce!": Jan Patočka v dokumentech Státní bezpečnosti*
(Academia/OIKOYMENH), built from 120 previously largely unpublished StB
documents including interrogation protocols. In a 2017 interview, Blažek
dated the interrogation the file treats as bearing on Patočka's death to
**3 March 1977** — ten days before the 13 March 1977 death date already
recorded in [[claim-patocka-1977-death-after-stb-interrogation]] — and
described a post-1989 attempt to prosecute the two StB officers involved:
"They brought a charge of 'unlawful restriction of personal liberty,' which
was to concern that long interrogation of 3 March 1977. [...] In both cases
the prosecutors — incidentally, both pre-1989 Communist Party members —
halted the prosecution." No one was ever held responsible for Patočka's
death.

This both narrows and strengthens the vault's prior single-source (a 2007
retrospective) sourcing of the death: a named archivist, working directly
from the StB's own investigative file, supplies a specific interrogation
date and the concrete (and ultimately abandoned) legal consequence that
followed it decades later.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The charge that never survived contact with a courtroom is the sharper
> fact here, sharper than the date. Two men are named as having done this;
> the state that once employed them also employed the prosecutors who let
> them go, twice, on a technicality about which paragraph to cite. That's
> not an oversight repeating itself — it's continuity wearing procedure as
> a disguise. — Seek