56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL Telephone: 071-405 1706; Telex:
27124; Fax: 071-242 0603
FORGETTING THINGS PAST
It was by the narrowest of margins, but when the committee investigating the links between Czechoslovak MPs and the secret police of the communist old regime split six to five in favour of expelling one of the Federal Assembly's best known members, they set off shock waves, and not just inside Havel's kingdom. The decision to denounce the Civic Forum MP, Jan Kavan, as an informer caused distress to many dissident-support committees in the West. Jan Kavan was well-known in London as the tireless organiser of campaigns against the post-Dibcek rulers in Prague. He helped set up the East European Reporter, the chief journal for publishing and dis- seminating the ideas of Eastern European samizdat to Westerners and in English translation to other parts of communist Europe. In almost every effort to promote contact with the underground in Prague or elsewhere, Jan Kavan's help might be sought or would even be the inspiration behind it.
Having welcomed Dubcek's Prague Spring, he then defended its memory from exile. Rumours did circulate of Kavan's connections with the Husak regime and about his visits to Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, but they were generally dismissed as attempts by the Czech security service to slander an inveterate enemy.
The Kavan case has aroused a great deal of concern in Britain. Some of his friends have rushed to his defence, fearing a witch-hunt. (It remains to be seen whether the vocal support of Michael Randle, who helped to spring George Blake from Wormwood Scrubs, will strengthen his cause.) Unfortunately, Kavan is by no means alone. Not only in Czechoslovakia, but throughout ex-communist Europe, charge and counter-allegation of informing or serving the secret police have been sounding. Anyone involved with the old dissidents will know cases at first hand of people who seemed so central to the smooth working of book-smuggling opera- tions now being charged with working for the regime. Did their compliance with official demands for information really hinder dissident activities? Or was it that the secret police were not really very concerned about the amateur subversives
from Western universities holding semi- nars on abstruse philosophers? It could be argued that, but for this sort of intellectual succour, the dissidents would have taken to the streets rather sooner.
Nowadays, there is a minor genre of self-congratulatory accounts of how West- ern, often Oxford, academics did their bit towards Stalin's downfall. Some of the dons, however, were better known for their contacts with the nomenklatura and their lectures on the official circuit than for time spent with ex-academics now working in the boiler-rooms of Eastern Europe. Today it seems that the secret police were smiling indulgently all the time. For the people living under communism it was a different matter. They still have to live with its legacy of deceit and surveillance.
In east Berlin, 80 kilometres of Stasi files have yet to be digested by investigators. The situation in Prague cannot be any different. In Poland, the Mazowiecki gov- ernment tended to let bygones be bygones and keep secret files out of the public domain, perhaps even to destroy them. At first sight this is an attractive policy: who wants endless denunciations and un- pleasantness, especially when so many were involved? However, denying access to files gives rumour-mongers a field day.
It is in human nature to want to know the truth about colleagues and close rela- tives as well as prominent public figures. On the other hand, putting too much faith in the accuracy of the police bureaucrats would be a mistake. The problem is to balance the widespread demand to know what one's fellow citizens were up to in the past under a very different regime with the desire to avoid endless prosecutions and tragic downfalls. A possible solution would be to prepare the almost endless shelves of documents for public access, but at the same time to grant an amnesty to anyone implicated by them and perhaps to enact laws to forbid public discrimination against people who may well have fallen into the clutches of the secret police through black- mail or other pressures.
Private bitterness about irreconcilable breaches of trust will survive: there will be divorces and friends will never speak to each other again. In post-Nazi Western Europe, collaborators were lynched or had their heads shaven by enraged fellow citizens who had often done still worse things than go to bed with Germans. Indignation can easily be a sign of guilt. So far the people of Eastern Europe have been very tolerant of those who served the old regime, but the desire to know the truth can be dangerous if it is frustrated for much longer. A combination of openness and immunity from persecution offers the best chance of letting the new democracies deal with their social and economic prob- lems without being worn down by suspi- cion, guilt and fear of retribution. Then men like Jan Kavan can put their case to the voters, who should be the real judges of the records of their prospective rulers.
Previous page
