ZDENĚK NEJEDLY

In even the most libertarian society, there is no such thing as absolute freedom: laws are needed, against crimes like murder; and taxes are needed, to pay for basics like fire and ambulance services, policing, and a system of justice. But to a large extent, people enjoy the fundamental freedoms: freedom of expression, assembly, and worship; and freedom from fear. Quite explicitly, the state exists to serve the citizen, not vice versa; and there is truth in the adage that “Everything is permissible which is not expressly forbidden”.

Conversely, in a police-state, such as Czechoslovakia was under the Communist dictatorship, “Everything is forbidden which is not expressly permitted”. The citizen exists, implicitly, to serve the state, not vice versa; and there is a comprehensive denial of the fundamental freedoms. Especially is this true where freedom from fear is concerned: a reign of terror is imposed, and people are afraid to stand up for their rights, because they know what harsh penalties will be inflicted, if they do so.

For forty-one years, from 1948 to 1989, with a brief interlude of freedom in 1968, Czechs and Slovaks suffered under an atrocious tyranny. Individual citizens, if they were unwise enough to criticize the regime, were fired from their professions, were harassed, beaten up on the street, publicly vilified in the press, arrested on trumped-up charges, sentenced to forced labour that broke their health, and in some cases executed. In such an atmosphere, it is not surprising that most people kept their thoughts to themselves, and numbly accepted that they were living in a gigantic prison from which there was no escape.

In hindsight, especially for an outsider, it is easy to pass adverse judgment. But the fact is, not everyone can be a saint or a hero. Most of us, in such a situation, would go along with the system, feeling helpless. There were, of course, some who actively participated in the system: the thugs who enjoyed wielding power, and the careerists who used the system to their own advantage. But in the ranks of those who served the regime, the saddest cases were those citizens who, at heart, were decent people, but who were co-erced into co-operation. The chief weapon used by the regime, to secure such co-operation, was blackmail: parents were threatened that failure to co-operate would be visited upon their children; and since everyone knew of families whose children actually had been persecuted, the blackmail was monstrously effective.

Thus it came about that hundreds of unwilling collaborators were forced into service as informants for the secret police. Their task was peculiarly obnoxious, for they did not simply report on the seditious activities or subversive remarks of actual dissidents, which would have been bad enough: what was worse, they were obliged to fabricate similar reports against innocent people whom the authorities looked on with disfavour.

After the Velvet Revolution, much of this tale-bearing came to light. In the vilest cases, punishment of a sort was meted out: it might take the form of dismissal from a job; more often, it consisted solely of public disclosure of the facts, which was quite injurious to the offender’s reputation. There were instances, though, of guilt-ridden offenders who went and confessed to their victims, in floods of tears, and begged for forgiveness. It is heartening to record that in most such oases the forgiveness was not withheld.

A country like Czechoslovakia, after decades of internal despotism, cannot go on to a healthy future unless it comes to terms with its past. How necessary that is, that reconciliation, has been amply demonstrated, by default, in neighbouring Russia: there, a polite veil has been drawn over past atrocities, as though they did not exist, as though they had not caused any lasting after-effects; the result is a society lacking any moral direction. Czechoslovakia, by contrast, immediately set about dealing with the black record of things done and things left undone. First task on the list was to rehabilitate the victimized, to restore their reputations, to give them back their jobs and their property, to make a formal apology, and to pay them at least some token compensation — this, of course, if they were still alive: sadly, many had not survived. Next, office-holders were eased out, who had been appointed because they were Communist Party favourites, not because they were qualified or needed: they did not need to be replaced, since they had always been superfluous; so the economy benefited, from the elimination of feather-bedding. Finally, the worst cases of abuse, involving grievous bodily harm, were prosecuted, wherever solid evidence existed; but there was no campaign of vengeance.

These steps of reparation and re-organization and, when really necessary, of punishment were widely accepted by the public as a healthy policy. They were carried out at the official level, with proper regard for due process. But at the grass-roots level, there was a general need for people to be open with each other about their mutual past, and to address its hurts without recrimination. On the whole, that need was met, often quite gracefully, for vast numbers of adults were burdened, to some degree, with guilt: many professionals, for example, felt a bit guilty for having, in a sense, supported the fallen regime by taking out membership in the Communist Party; it was mostly recognized, though, that they had done so, not out of support for the Party’s doctrines or behaviour, but merely because membership was a formal prerequisite for working in the professions. Their situation, thus, was a rather ambiguous one: they had not, in fact, done any direct harm to another person, requiring an apology; if they felt guilt, that was just a matter for their own consciences, and the only penance required was that they be candid about their record.

Ambiguity ran through society from top to bottom. Factory workers did not need to join the Communist Party in order to keep their state-subsidized jobs: but it was expected of them that they turn out en masse to join in rallies cheering the regime on as it went about its bloody business; for this, many of them, both at the time and afterwards, felt painful twinges of conscience. A very frequent kind of ambiguity, too, occurred in intellectual circles: composers wrote film-scores for state-subsidized movies that were acceptable to the censors; painters accepted commissions to do portraits of Party bigwigs; writers, if they wanted to be published, avoided saying anything offensive to the regime; and so on. Much of this work was technically excellent, but it was morally tainted.

One individual can serve, here, as an illustration of intellectual ambiguity. Zdeněk Nejedly was an accomplished musicologist, who specialized in the sacred music of the early Hussites. He transcribed the surviving manuscripts, and published the transcriptions with a full apparatus of learned, scholarly commentary. His work is a valuable and lasting contribution to historical knowledge. As such, of course, it was of immediate interest to the Communist Party, for its ideologues had latched onto the Hussite period as a useful, if perverted, way of bolstering their own propaganda: they saluted the fifteenth-century “Warriors of God” as paragons of resistance to enemies, inspiring their descendants to resist the current foes in the decadent, imperial West; and they lauded the Hussite communes as early exemplars of Communist principles — in both cases, they either ignored or played down the religious fervour which lay at the core of the Hussite ethos; the fact of that was inconvenient to their cause, which sought to substitute for religion a wholly secular faith; in this, they were substituting sophistry for truth, but nobody was in a position to argue.

In the musicological world, Nejedly was respected for his work, and rightly so. But when its publication brought him favourably to the notice of the authorities, he did not resist their blandishments: they offered him a secure government post, as Minister of Education, and he accepted — there was not actually any remaining work to be done in his special field, since he had successfully edited all the surviving manuscripts of Hussite sacred music. So he switched careers, from academia to politics. The trouble was, his new job was not one for which he had any previous vocation: instead, he was content to serve as a mere functionary, carrying out directives handed down from above by the hierarchy. In that capacity, beyond question, he did damage to the lives of innocent people, and he became deservedly unpopular. When he eventually retired, he faded into obscurity, and there is no record available of whether or not he made any act of contrition in his final years. Judgment on him must therefore be left open — and who are we to judge, anyway? The human effects of his government career were pernicious, and should not be forgotten; but the wounds he inflicted do get scarred over, as his victims fade away into history. On the other hand, the legacy of his scholarly career is a rich one: it tells a valuable truth about the early Hussites, whose music he admired, but whose culture his later masters willfully skewed to their own wicked ends.