A man, who refused to be identified by name, reads a communist era secret police file July 29 at the headquarters of the National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives in Bucharest, Romania. Twenty years ago this autumn, communism collapsed across Eastern Europe. But its dark legacy endures, and it has spawned a conundrum: Does opening declassified dossiers to the public so people can see how they were snooped on really help a nation heal, or just rip open old wounds?

Bucharest, Romania ? Even his best friend betrayed him.

Stelian Tanase found out when he asked to see the thick file that Romania’s communist-era secret police had kept on him. The revelation nearly knocked the wind out of him: His closest pal was an informer who regularly told agents what Tanase was up to.

“In a way, I haven’t even recovered today,” said Tanase, a novelist who was placed under surveillance and had his home bugged during the late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime.

“He was the one person on Earth I had the most faith in,” he said. “And I never, ever suspected him.”

Twenty years ago this autumn, communism collapsed across Eastern Europe. But its dark legacy endures in the unanswered question of the files — whether letting the victims read them cleanses old wounds or rips open new ones.

Most former East Bloc countries have enacted legislation that opens up at least some of their millions of pages of secret police archives to the public, revealing how armies of informers were bribed or coerced into snooping on friends, colleagues and neighbors.

While Germany has launched an ambitious effort to piece together millions of documents shredded as the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, the Czech Republic and Poland are bitterly divided over how much access to grant. And at least two others — Hungary and Romania — are holding back hundreds of thousands of files implicating key figures, including some still powerful in business, media and politics.

In Hungary, which still has no legislation that would fully open the files, the intelligence services have kept 27 percent of the dossiers closed because they are still considered top-secret, said Janos Kenedi, an investigator who recently oversaw an official evaluation.

“There is no other former Soviet satellite where there is such a lack of regulation about the files as in Hungary,” he said.

That hasn’t stopped the names of alleged former snoops from trickling out every few weeks or months, implicating personalities ranging from actors and athletes to priests and intellectuals.

In Romania, where 700,000 informants kept tabs for the “Securitate” on a population of 22 million, the more than 2 million files remain tightly controlled, yet dirty secrets keep slipping out to damage careers, friendships and family ties.

This summer, a newspaper outed soccer star Gheorghe “Gica” Popescu, the former captain of Romania’s national football team. At first he angrily denied it, then acknowledged he wrote notes informing on teammates and others in the 1980s.

Yet a cloak of secrecy still shields Securitate generals who ran the surveillance and now hold key posts in politics and business.

Some are said to have destroyed their files, and the National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives acknowledges it has not been given 70,000 dossiers that remain off-limits on grounds of national security.

“You don’t see the files of the generals because they don’t have any. They’re the ones who made files,” said Virgiliu-Leon Tarau, the council’s vice president.

Romanian-born writer Herta Mueller, who fled the regime for Germany and won this year’s Nobel literature prize, has accused the government of making a show of opening the files while keeping the most important papers under wraps.

That, say other critics, makes a mockery of efforts to achieve national reconciliation.

“They’ll never open the files of the big players,” said Cornel Nistorescu, a prominent Romanian political analyst.

“It can’t be done because the state is still run by these people. They’re in political parties, in NGOs, in media, in business — everywhere,” he said. “Romanian society is contaminated. In the last 10 governments, I couldn’t find three people who weren’t dirty.”