“Reality is always more complicated”

This is of course true to a point, and difficult to disagree with. And yet. As often, I would argue that things might not be so black and white. As the very motto of Britské listy puts it, “Reality is always more complicated.” I can think of not a few individuals who, as far as I can judge and beyond an obvious reconstruction bias (the reality of their past behavior is not easy to judge from today’s point of view), seem to have remained decent people no matter their profession and the timing in which they exercised it. For example in České Velenice’s train station, a particularly harsh, policed institution since it was the last stop before the Iron Curtain, the station master who was in charge before 1989, of course a party member, remained in place well into the 2010s, not because he was an apparatchik appointed by the regime, but because he was a genuinely nice person and a boss liked and respected by his employees. He was put in place by the regime, yes, but he was freely elected and reelected after 1989 by his employees. The way he handed me the keys to his office so I could stay in it alone and study the archives after hours was not exactly the behavior of someone who had something to be ashamed of. Did he know at the time of his nomination what the regime had done in the 1950s? He assured me he did not. Is this true? Of course I cannot say. What I can report is that in 1990, since there were no more May Day parades in Czechoslovakia he proudly went to the May Day parade in Vienna, which would seem to indicate that he held genuine left-wing ideals. As many Communists who had been engaged in the public sphere before 1989, he remained in the party and pursued his involvement in the town council after 1989. He stepped down only in 1992, somewhat discouraged by the new capitalist mentality frenzy.

But even the position of station master was not one of those compromized professions Jan Čulík mentions. No matter: I happen to have interviewed also a former policeman, Vladimír Dzuro. Why did he become an officer of the criminal police in the 1980s? Because he wanted to catch criminals. This is hardly a reprehensible aim – even under a dictatorship, a society might wish not to let murderers run loose in its midst. Let us repeat the cycle of questions: did he know at the time of his nomination what the regime had done in the 1950s? He assured me he did not. Is this true? Of course I cannot say. What I can say is that even though he was a compulsory party member, had been appointed by the regime, and belonged to the repressive apparatus (even if repression was not part of his own professional daily assignment), he made a spectacular and deserved career after 1989 as one of the most distinguished representatives of the Czech Republic in international police and judicial institutions: after serving at Interpol, he became the only Czech investigator at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, then pursued his career at the UN.

Obviously, a newly established democracy cannot conjure uninvolved policemen and judges out of thin air. The new, democratic police and justice forces after 1989 had to be made at first of communist regime policemen and judges. As a side note, Mr Dzuro was not called for duty to maintain order in the streets of Prague on the evening of 17 November 1989, nor before or in the days thereafter, even though his unit was on stand-by. But he could have. What would he have done? His career could have been very different after that. Does this make him a potentially bad person? This is the whole question. My tentative answer is that there probably were decent people even amongst the police force, just as there probably were unsavory characters even amongst the dissidents. Humanity does not always pick sides and chance can genuinely change human destinies in either direction. I believe it was Václav Havel who claimed one could become a dissident just by happenstance, as the sheer result of a given set of circumstances.

One rule which we might derive from these personal, concrete examples is that overall judgements on a group of people might be true in general, but they are not always true for individuals, so that the risk of injustice in this pre-ordained collective judgement is real. Examples are rife in the history of dealing with the communist past in post-1989 Czechia. The most obvious among them is the 1992 Cibulka list, an unofficial list of former secret police collaborators smuggled out of the Ministry of Interior’s archives. Yes, it is true that a large part, probably most, of the persons on the list were former collaborators of the StB. In many cases, the shame these people experienced when seeing their name on the now published list was the only retribution they ever encountered, and they arguably got what they deserved. But there are two caveats: not all people on the list were “guilty”; and not all people who were *not* on the list were innocent. And to finish answering to Jan Čulík, who amongst us can be absolutely certain they would never collaborate with any regime?

This is where hypocrisy enters the stage as the main character of the story. It is quite amusing to consider the personal path of the most prominent of our anticommunists and chief lesson-givers. Take for instance Eduard Stehlík, the head of the governing board of ÚSTR, who studied Russian and became an employee of the Military Historical Institute before the revolution. Take Naděžda Kavalírová, long a symbol of anticommunism, also former head of the ÚSTR board as representative of the Confederation of Political Prisoners, whose husband was a member of the communist party. Take the darling of the anticommunist media, Petr Blažek, who, despite his young age (he was 16 in 1989), was already a member of the socialist youth. Take the founder and first director of ÚSTR, Pavel Žáček, as well as current board member and beacon of the anticommunist movement, Monika MacDonagh-Pajerová, who were both journalism students before 1989. It is not difficult to imagine what career these personalities would have pursued had the Velvet Revolution not taken place. Pavel Žáček might well have ended as editor-in-chief of Rudé právo rather than ÚSTR director, who knows. What is relevant here is that the narrative of these personalities on their own moral integrity is based not on their personal courage, but on the fall of communism, for which they had done little or nothing – while those who had really done much, like Petr Uhl or Václav Havel, but also small hands who were not remembered by history but who challenged the regime by their everyday way of being before 1989, i.e. genuinely brave people, were the least boastful about it. What our anticommunists all have in common is their absolute certainty that their personal case is “special”, a level of self-stylization which can only call for a good measure of eye-rolling. Other people allegedly irremediably compromised themselves and can be freely pilloried, but with them it is unfailingly a “different story.”

It is not a different story. It is exactly the story of Czech society.

Without knowing anything specific about Josef Baxa and Robert Fremr, we can generically argue that a bad person under communism remains a bad person under capitalism. Surely, we all have made the experience of meeting a personality of whom we just know they would have been the type to denounce us to the StB, even if they were small children or weren’t even born in 1989. There is simply such a personality type. I would argue that with the benefit of hindsight, rather than professing necessarily murky judgments on people for what they shortly did or did not do before 1989, unless of course interconvertible documentation is available and their actions are clearly reprehensible, we now have ample opportunity to judge what they have done in the 34 years since 1989, and this is much more relevant – cf. the path of Petr Pavel or of Vladimír Dzuro. To live in the past incurs the real danger of endangering the future – and of reproducing the vindictive communist mentality.

It is perfectly logical that Petr Pavel would turn to ÚSTR to provide expertise on the past involvement of upcoming Constitutional Court judges. This is what public institutes of memory should be for. But this is also where we see the gravity of ÚSTR’s development since February 2022. The insipid disputes amongst ÚSTR supporters in the columns of Echo24 or on Facebook might be laughable, but in this case those at its helm exert real influence and can significantly contribute to destroying Czech democracy, exactly as it is already happening in Poland and Hungary. The recent controversy about the schoolbook Contemporary History illustrates this worrying trend. When I read Michal Klíma’s denunciation (“History cannot be the playing field of manipulators who pick and choose what pleases them or what fits their ideological worldview”) and ÚSTR’s systemic critique of the textbook (“The textbook contains fundamental errors, about which there is no doubt, which may mislead the underage pupils and students for whom the textbook is intended”), I must confess I had a moment of doubt. If only a tenth of what they reported was true, the pedagogical value of the schoolbook was indeed questionable. I will leave aside the mass of misleading and irrelevant details ÚSTR invoked and concentrate only on Michal Klíma’s central point: the textbook allegedly gives the impression it endorses the communist regime as legitimate and good.

When I did open the schoolbook, I had to laugh. I should not be surprised, yet I can’t help being fascinated at the level of historical fabrication involved in ÚSTR’s and Michal Klíma’s critiques. It is one of the smartest textbooks I have ever seen, one which indeed absolutely deserves an international prize. How I would have loved to have it as a high school student! It is engaging, reflexive, entertaining, it mixes personal, political, and social sources, the micro- and the macro-level, it leads the readers to ask themselves questions rather than provide ready-made answers. It is not remotely supporting communism, only making an effort at understanding the motivation of social actors at the time, many of whom were sincere in their support of the regime – sincerely mistaken, we might add. Michal Klíma’s uncultured jibes show that we are yet again back at the long-standing misunderstanding within Czech society of what “revisionist history” is supposed to mean. The greatest ideological success of the self-stylized anticommunists after 1989 is to have made the Czech public believe that to ask questions instead of parroting ready-made answers amounted to denying the extent of Nazi or communist repression. Once again: it does not. To be revisionist means to ask questions, not to deny repression.

Another thing the schoolbook does *not* do is to give a list of dates and names and a political wisdom to be learned by rote. No wonder the anticommunists don’t like the book – it does the opposite of what the communists and their anticommunist intellectual twins like to do: it makes people think. To refuse to publish it and demand a ministerial expertise as if this book represented a public menace is a sinister charade and yet another intimidation maneuver. It would be a mistake to laugh it out, though: slowly but surely, ÚSTR is attempting to drag the country down the authoritarian slide towards a regime in which one is allowed to think only what is printed on official material.

The antidote, which brings me back to the question of the judges’ nomination to the Constitutional Court, is to start seriously debating about the limits of legitimate anticommunism. I cannot imagine that anyone would want to bring back the communist regime today in this country. In this sense, we are all anticommunists. But not everyone is instrumentalizing a legitimate preference for democracy and freedom in order to push an authoritarian agenda of a different sort. Anticommunism is an ideology, too, and one that is ultimately almost as dangerous for democracy as communism itself.

Vytisknout