PERSONAL COLUMN
Communism's dark backwoods
B. G. KRATOVIL
In April 1968 the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist party under Dubcek's leadership appointed a commission to make final inquiries into the political trials of the early 'fifties. It was also intended to examine why all previous attempts to rehabilitate the victims of these rigged trials bad been sidetracked—and what responsi- bility lay with individuals and party organs. ?The Report was the work of a team of historians, lawyers, political scientists and economists (all of them communists) under the direction of Jan Piller, but because of the Soviet invasion it was never adopted by the Central Committee and was suppressed inside the country. It was not until last year that the report was smuggled out into the West, and only a few months ago that it was published in the original in Italy. Last week the English edition became available from M acdonalds.
Dubcek wished to have the report sub- mitted to the Central Committee at the end of 1968 but, on a variety of pretexts, the mat- ter was continually postponed. As chairman, Piller informed the party leadership in sum- mer 1968 that the report contained alarming facts that might undermine the authority of the party and some of its top men. Publica- tion, anyway, was made impossible by the August invasion, the documents were marked top secret, the truth again locked up in the safes and the way for renewed persecutions opened. But as it turned out, the truth was not to be silenced: in addition to the report, personal documents from Lon- don, Lithl, Slanska, Slingova and others have been widely circulated in the free world. -
Unbiased readers in the West may be stun- ned and disturbed by the brutality that exists in the Soviet bloc and by the tragedy of
thousands of honest men who were forced to confess in the Hungarian, Polish, Bulgarian and Czechoslovak prisons. All confessions and all the trials bore the signature of Soviet ' intelligence interrogators who applied the methods of the Moscow trials of the 'thirties. After 1948 the leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist party `decided to yield to Soviet pressure' (Liibl) and accepted the Soviet offer to 'detect' Yugoslav and Anglo-American agents in its rank and tile. It allowed the creation of a special Soviet Security group which took control of the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior. Party leadership became dependent on these 'ad- visers' and in this way the country fell under Soviet rule. In essence the trials were a con- demnation of the policy of an independent road for socialism. The party leadership betrayed their own political programme, then betrayed the independence of the coun- try and finally threw overboard those who had carried out their orders. In truth Czechoslovakia was on trial!
Despite its crimes and repressive activities the Soviet Union remains a respected world power. The UN continues to follow its rule number one : never interfere with a fait ac- compli. The seeds of splitting and destruc- tion are being sown by parish-pump politi- cians of the West who have either forgotten or who never knew that compassion, charity, selfless detachment, a sense of security and of system are the basis of the European spiritual heritage of which the Czechs were guardians and transmitters. All the in- tellectuals of Europe and of the whole Western World should realise that if Europe forsakes Czechoslovakia the idea of Euro- pean civilisation will become a lifeless con- cept and the decline of the West will follow.
If there are still politicians (are there any statesmen?) in the West who are expecting some favourable developments within the Soviet Union they should realise that the people who did not experience great Euro- pean spiritual movements like the Renais- sance and the Reformation are not Euro- peans. Kipling knew that when the Russians (charming as orientals) insist upon being treated as the most easterly of western peo- ple, they become difficult to understand and dangerous as nobody can know which side of their nature is going to turn up next.
Why speculate, then, on whether or not Brezhnev is a neo-Stalinist? He is clearly a born conservative striving to protect and uphold a status quo inside the realm of the Soviet Union.
Perusing Piller's report and considering how the situation in Czechoslovakia has developed over the last two years, we find that Dubcek's world of decency has become a ghost! At the April 1969 Central Com- mittee Plenum--neatly eight months after the invasion—the conservative forces decisively gained the upper hand in the party's Presidium. In September 1969 con- servatives were named to replace twenty-nine liberals on the Central Committee. Similar purges swept the regional and lower levels of the party, government and public organisa- tions during 1969 and early 1970. Manage- ment of the law-enforcement agencies is once again in the hands of the 1968 Stalinists. The 'emergency' decree for 'strengthening and defending public order', adopted by the Federal Assembly im- mediately after the August 1969 clashes, permitted arrest of suspects without a court warrant and investigative detention for up to three weeks.
Another sign of the return to arbitrary ad- ministration of justice was the-8 July 1970 amendment to the 1968 law on rehabilita- tion. The 1968 law was designed to facilitate rehabilitation of persons wrongfully con- victed during the 'fifties. The new amend- ment is a clear rejection of the invalidation of many such convictions during the 'Prague Spring'. A notable feature of the political scene after August 1968 has been 'the rise to eminence of men who were involved with the trials or with blocking attempts to review them'. Among these 'pillars of the occupa- tion regime' Mr Miloslav Ruzek, Ambas- sador to London, holds a prominent place.
Most useful to any student of this period of the Czechoslavak political past are the biographical notes incorporated in the index. Some of them should have been more precise. Not many people would remember the notorious 'Jewish doctors' case' in the Soviet Union in the 'fifties. They were ac- cused of preparing the assassination of Stalin. In Prague Professor Haskovec and Dr L. Haas (now resident in England) were both imprisoned and charged with conspiring against the life of Gottwald. The Haskovec- Haas case was a feeble-minded emulation of Moscow and is a good example of how all the other trials were rigged.
It should also be stressed that the report covers only a very small number of Czech and Slovak people imprisoned on false charges. All these people were kept in prison for many years without charge and many of them were then either executed or driven to suicide. In fact in 1949-50 approximately 30,000 were in prison of whom 233 were sentenced to death and 178 actually ex- ecuted. Most of them were either liberal- minded democrats, or members of social democratic, christian or Czech national socialist parties. Many were apolitical peo- ple, victims of provocation by the state security organs under the auspices of Soviet 'advisers'. The sole purpose then was to keep the nation in a constant state of terror; nor .do today's accounts of •political trials in Czechoslovakia suggest that fear, or the memory of the 'fifties, has been banished.
B. G. Kratovil was Czechoslovak am- bassador in London and India between 1947- 51. He is now a British citizen and lives in London.
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