 Years
after the Velvet Revolution, worry about return to totalitarianism is
obsessive.
BY ONDREJ HEJMA, PRAGUE
A bust of Lenin with a bashed-in skull adorns the newly opened Museum
of Communism, where visitors can imagine being interrogated by police
beneath a single bulb in a bare-walled chamber.
The museum in downtown-Prague reflects a new trend: Twelve years after
the Velvet Revolution brought down communism, many Czechs seem obsessed
with re-examining the darker aspects of their totalitarian past. More
to the point, they are debating whether the old demons might return
to haunt their future.
Although the Czech Republic is part of NATO and is well on the road
to membership in the European Union, recent opinion polls suggest that
one in two Czechs thinks life was better under the Communists.
Such nostalgia can be downright dangerous, other Czechs warn.
"We should avoid making the old regime prettier than it was. It
was a miserable regime" said Pavel Tigrid, a former chancellor
to President Vaclav Have1. It's a legacy that Czechs can't seem to escape.
In November, a Roman Catholic priest', Rev. Vlastimil Protivinsky, faced
charges of disseminating hateful ideologies for calling the Czech Communist
Party "evil" during the 1998 election campaign.
When the news hit the media, Mr. Ravel swifty intervented to grand amnesty
to the priest, and the justice Minister fired the investigator handling
the case - a former member of the STB, the Communist regime's dreaded
secret police.
Activists and politicians launched a "Stop Communism" campaign
warning that democracy was in danger.
"The investigation was stopped, but . . . the iceberg of Communist
thinking remains hidden beneath the surface," the group's petition
said. "Our democracy can be shipwrecked by that." Ten per
cent of Czechs were dues-paying members of the Communist Party. Thousands
worked for the secret police. Others were members of the Communist youth
union, trade unions or militia.
"Mast of our citizens . . . in a way collaborated with the regime
or at least tolerated it," said Mr. Ravel, the playwright-turned-President
who led the crusade against communism and remains the country's respected
moral authority. When the Communist government was peacefully toppled
in the fall of 1989, Czechs started building a new system.
Pragmatically, they focused on economic reform rather than past crimes
and punishment. But although the business world remained open to everyone,
highlevel functionaries and police under the Communists were banned
from holding posts in the state administration. Promoting communism
was declared illegal, but the party itself was not banned. Today, Communists
are the third-biggest bloc in the 200-seat Parliament, where they hold
24 seats, and party membership is 120,000, though it has been slowly
declining. And although the Czech Republic became a member of NATO in
1999, thousands of former comrades who left the party after the revolution
survive in the lower ranks of the army, police and judiciary.
The govertment, eager to make an example of those it accuses of Communist-era
crimes, brought charges late last year against former interior minister
Jaromir Obzina, ex-prime minister Lubomir Strougal and former Communist
Party chief Milos Jakes. They face up to 15 years in prison if convicted
on charges of abuse of power or treason. Not everyone is worried about
a Communist resurgence.
"Whenever something serious happens that has to do with our ugly
past, the public reaction is immediate and absolutely healthy ,"
said Martin Fendrych, a commentator for the weekly magazine Tyden, referring
to the case of the priest. Still, many Czechs are nagged by the question
of whether communism could reassert itself. Mr. Ravel often points to
a persistent "Communist mentality" that he says is reflected
in xenophobia and corruption caused by decades of isolation under the
totalitarian regime.
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