This article is based on a project of life-story interviews I carried out in the Czech Republic in 1994-5. The sample was deliberately biased towards social networks that were directly involved in the revolutionary circulation of elites. It included 18 men who, on the eve of November 1989, held posts listed in the central-committee nomenklatura.[Note 1] Six of them were actual insiders of the federal government - either as its ministerial level members or as senior members of the federal government chairman's staff. The focus of this article is on their view of the communist regime's demise. In regard to the usual historical dilemma in assessing revolutions - whether to stress the old regime's decadence or its opposition's vigour - it gives weight to the former option. The article also points out the seamless ease of transition in the Czech context from communist party allegiance to nationalism.
Dvorak[Note 2] was a true man of the Czech communist era. He was a twenty- year-old skilled worker when he joined the party during the general election campaign in 1946. After military service in the border guards he was encouraged by the party to become a university student. As an undergraduate he raised his hand in a special assembly to demand death for Slansky and others at the great Stalinist show trial, an act he recalls with remorse. After graduation he made good progress in his career. In 1970, when the normalisation purge created vacancies in executive ranks throughout the system, he got his first ministerial-level post in the government.[Note 3] His government career ended when the communist regime fell twenty years later; but he was overdue for retirement by then anyway. At the time of his interview, he was busy supplementing his pension by freelancing as a management consultant. He was still a communist party member.
The other respondents were of a younger generation that came of age in the 1960s. Fabera had not long been in his graduate professional employment when he was brought into the central committee bureaucracy in 1970. Later he moved to the government to take up a ministry, a change which he welcomed for affording him greater policy-making independence than he had had in his central committee jobs. The revolution not only ended his government membership but also caused him further troubles by an accusatory media campaign. He was living in obscurity at the time of the interview, as an employee of a small business firm.
Elias was the third respondent who had a ministerial-level government membership in the old regime. He had it since the mid-1980s, after a long career in the lower reaches of party and government administrations. He reported with pride his role in improving relations with western powers. Since the revolution, he was in a modestly paid professional employment which, however, he claimed to find intrinsically satisfying.
The remaining three insiders had a relatively short but busy time in high politics, working for the federal government chairman. Ales was brought into the Strakovka (the government presidium building) by the penultimate chairman, Strougal, in the 1980s. He joined the party as an undergraduate. In 1970 he got expelled from the party but not from his professional employment which he had commenced as a fresh graduate just before the Prague Spring. Strougal arranged a swift procedure by which Ales became a party member again. He was known for supporting his bid for a Gorbachevian perestroika mantle by promoting into influential positions handpicked people who had been expelled from the party by the normalisation campaign. After the revolution, Aleš left government employment to negotiate a privatisation project which made him the chief executive and a major shareholder of a large and important firm.
Andulka was a student during the Prague Spring who, like many others, hated the Warsaw Pact invasion and experienced the subsequent normalisation as a `thick blanket thrown over everything to smother it'. He recalled that, had there been a call to the barricades, he would have probably fought against the invasion. In 1977, however, he joined the Communist Party as a calculated career move. `I was pushing thirty, had children, something had to be tried.' He had a good career after that, culminating in the Strakovka. After the revolution, Andulka managed to arrange for himself a new start in the emerging capitalist business sector. He was a director of a large firm at the time of the interview.
Fiala joined the party as an undergraduate during the early normalisation period. He had a good professional career from the late 1970s on, despite being by his own admission unpopular among his colleagues because he `always lived an intense party life'. He was a sophisticated Marxist and a fundamentally convinced socialist who watched with foreboding the party losing its ideological soul to the purely careerist motivations of its post- normalisation membership. He also considered Gorbachev's perestroika to be a disastrous muddle. When he was recruited to the Strakovka, he firmly expected that his involvement in the centre of power would turn out to be about helping to manage a bloodless end to the communist regime. After the revolution, he lost his government job and an accusatory media campaign prevented his return to his previous profession. His distaste for the new capitalism was so acute that he was one of the mere ten percent of the Czech population that did not take up their rights of participation in the coupon privatisation. He had a modest professional employment at the time of the interview, in which he felt neither fulfilled nor secure.
The old regime insiders' attitudes to Premier Klaus's government, which was generally still riding high at the time of the interviews, were strongly correlated with their current fortunes. Ales and Andulka were very satisfied with it, Dvorak and Elias were good-humoured and mildly critical towards it, while Fabera and Fiala condemned it on many grounds. The insiders' accounts of the old regime were by contrast very consistent with one another.
The insider respondents' accounts of their days in old regime office certainly confirmed that the party rather than government was where central power lay. The line they drew between the party and the government had an alibistic element in it. In the government, they did the kind of work that every state had to do to manage its affairs. They were experts rather than politicians. The politicians and the processes that were characteristic of the regime were in the party.
Fabera welcomed his appointment as a minister because it gave him more policy-making independence, but then found his time in office punctuated by occasions where individual politburo members (Kapek, Kempny) called him in to discuss the personnel changes he was making in his state department to prepare it for a policy change. The sacked or threatened executives knew how to use the channels of appeal, denunciation and patron-client relations to seek redress. The channels included the state security organs, notably the fifth directorate of the interior ministry (according to Fiala); to which all government staff had informant obligations (oznamovaci povinnost), and which reported directly to the first secretary of the party, who might then pass the reports on to other politburo members. They were an excellent means for disgruntled executives to feed `signals' about their minister's policies to the supreme organ. In addition to the visits to Kempny and Kapek, Fabera recalled a phone-call from Adamec (a politburo member as well as the eventual government chairman) warning him of reports from `certain components of the executive' (jiste spravni slozky) that he was causing demoralisation in his department's executive ranks. Fabera's efforts to reform government policy turned into all- consuming battles about appointments and posts, and they ended in a politburo meeting which subjected him to four hours of personal humiliation before rejecting his policy, although it had won the government presidium's approval.
Although without the bitterness, Dvorak likewise recalled that learning to behave politically was the first thing he had to learn on taking his first ministerial-level office in the government. Although he had been a party member for many years, his government work itself had had mainly a technical problem solving character up to that point. As a minister, however, he became exposed to the full rigours of party discipline that being a government member required. He had to make regular appearances before the politburo to report on progress; and learned that an acceptability of a policy proposal might turn on such a detail as whether its key terms had easily identifiable equivalents in the Russian language. Letting the party first secretary' chief of staff to `insert political flags' into his policy- announcement speeches was just another aspect of the job routine. It was valuable to cultivate reputation among politburo members as an expert in his field rather than a politician. The principal key to success, however, was to present his policies to the politburo so that they were not taken by either faction as a potential threat. Dvorak claimed that he was lucky in this particular respect, in that saying what he actually thought turned out to please Bilak and Strougal on alternate occasions, with both the factional rivals thinking that he was on their side; exactly what the first secretary Husak needed to keep internal balance within the politburo intact.
Although himself a beneficiary of the normalisation campaign, Fabera was in no doubt that what might be regarded as normal aspects of politics - personal struggles about posts and pre-occupations with keeping factions in balance - became so extreme in the normalisation regime that it disabled the vital function of reaching agreement on new policies where these were needed.
What really wasn't good for this society was the fact that normalisation gave rise to a new political grouping whose unity was based on its origins in the normalisation and nothing else...and when it was time to step forward, the unity was gone....They would have supported sensible changes...but the personal ambitions of the two or three groups within the leadership kept each other in check....It lasted twenty years, for god's sake. I thought it unsustainable in 1978, and it lasted another fourteen (sic)....Everyone [in the politburo] was inclined to go along with marketisation, that wasn't an issue. The issue was, who should present it, if Bil'ak's wing or Štrougal's wing or something in between. They were all for it, Štepán was for it, they all were. But the problem was, who should be at the head of the process, with whom, or without. They knew how to stalemate each other.
The Bilak-Strougal rivalry was widely known among Czechoslovak politics watchers; the popular wisdom had it that the former was the arch- conservative and the latter the aspiring reformer. Fábera's point is somewhat different. Throughout his account, he reiterated that there was a wide consensus in the political establishment that reforms in both political and economic spheres were badly needed. He told of his own distaste for the mass conformity rituals like May Day parades, which he thought brought the worst out of the Czech nation;[Note 4] of the one-party system's `subjectivism' that dealt with problems only on an ad hoc and personal basis; of the acute sense of crisis when, in the mid-1980s, an IMF loan had to be arranged. The need for reforms was not in question. But, it could not be met because personnel stability within the political establishment was the latter's supreme priority in practice. A policy initiative threatened to upset an apple-cart of delicately balanced hierarchies of personal patronage and protection. The usual array of means would be activated to bring the rank-breaker back into rank. A new policy could be challenged, for example, on the grounds that it involved a key term without an established Russian equivalent. Not necessarily because the Soviets were closely watchful over the preservation of orthodoxy, but because the Soviet loyalty markers were in the normalisation regime's repertoire of relevant concerns, available to its members as a handy resource for keeping each other's initiatives in check. Its use gave it the strength of precedent that short- circuited more rational procedures for reaching agreement on the substantive merits of a policy proposal.[Note 5] Bilak and Strougal were wedded not to conservative or reformist policy preference, but to a fear of each other.[Note 6]
It is in this sense, that the political system was incapable of endorsing needed policy innovations and making them stick, that our insiders used the words nezivotaschopny (life-incapable) or nezivotny (lacking in vitality] in their references to the old regime. The issue of how people whom the normalisation regime had purged from its ranks should be treated was a case in point in their accounts. The ex-ministers told with pride of the protection they gave to capable staff who were not party members. Dvorak had to have arguments with his government department's party organiser about the fact that his personal secretary as well as two out of five section chiefs were not party members, because the party organiser was convinced that people in nomenklatura posts should be. Fabera likewise had to face denunciations that the staff changes he was making were insufficiently discriminatory in party members' favour.
The issue of whether normalisation expellees from the party deserved a second chance was even hotter than the arguments about allowing promotion to nomenklatura posts to people who had never been in the party. It got its first airing in the central committee right at the inception of the normalisation purge in 1969. Dvorak claims to have argued against repeating the errors of the 1950s, and general secretary Husak concluded the proceedings with the formula that `although one naturally could no longer meet party expellees in party meetings, it was OK to have the occasional beer with them'. Dvorak had an occasion to cite the formula back to Husak several years later, when the latter asked him if it was true that he had been in personal contact with Cernik, a purged member of Dubcek's Prague Spring politburo. Dvorak replied that he had only had one telephone conversation with Cernik, but added that had he met him by chance in the street, he would have had a chat with him, because he entirely agreed with the spirit of the `OK to have a beer' ruling. In Fabera's account, the issue was debated formally at the central committee again in the mid-1970s, with the conclusion that the party expellees should be henceforth treated on individual merit. The implementation of that policy, however, was stalled by resistance from `126 Napoleons', the district party secretaries.
Regions and districts killed it. They killed it below, because the same people who pushed the expellees out of their jobs might now have to make way to let them back in again. Basically it always was a fight for posts. If a building site manager or a factory deputy director was pushed out because of his political opinions once upon a time, how could he be given a chance again? He might want his old job back, for god's sake, and that's taken by someone who helped to push him out of it in the first place! The district secretaries saw it that way, they felt the threat....So, the [central] leadership took the right decision, but they killed it down below. And the leadership made a historical error in not standing up for its decision and not insisting on its implementation.
The exaggerated `it's all about posts' tendency was reflected in the terms in which the insiders sought to put their own time in high office into a positive light. They `protected' competent professionals so that they could do their work; they `felt the weight' of responsibility for their protégées' careers when making their own political calculations; and they `helped many individuals'. And, when describing the troubles that the revolution visited upon them, they described them not as a cost of their earlier career decisions that had identified them so closely with a `life-incapable' political regime, but in terms of personal betrayal. These narratives of betrayal were a typical phenomenon not only in the accounts of the government insiders under focus here, but in those of the broader, managerial nomenklatura sample as well.[Note 7] In them, the people who had the most reasons for being grateful to the protagonist turned out to be the least friendly during or after the revolution. The narratives of betrayal fit in with the broader Czech culture of viewing the public sphere of life in terms of personal connections rather than institutions.
Finally, the former ministers' accounts of their time in office are remarkable by their matter-of-fact acceptance of police surveillance. When Dvorak told the tale of how a single telephone conversation with Cernik led to questions from Husak, his point was to show himself as someone with a courage to make a stand on the issue of party expellees, not to express outrage at having been phone-tapped. Similarly, Fabera's point in telling of how he learned from Adamec about police reports to the politburo on him was to show the embattled state his reform-minded hiring and firing got him into, not to voice indignation at the existence of such reports. All three former ministers made a positive comment on the new era to the effect that `it was now easier to breathe'; but their discussion of the Stb and its role was in the vein of every state needing such an institution and the repression of dissidents being, albeit wrong, a very small part of what it did. This argument was common throughout the former nomenklatura sample. In some cases, however, including those of the former government chairman's staff, there was a good personal reason for making it, in that the respondents themselves featured in the unofficially published list of Stb collaborators.
Ales, Andulka and Fiala were even more damning than Fabera of the Communist Party establishment bequeathed by the normalisation purge. The former two thought that although there were plenty of pragmatically thinking and intelligent people in the system, some making it even into the central committee, the core consisted of a good-for-nothing normalisation echelon. Fiala thought the careerist pragmatism of the younger members only sped up the rotting process. They all agreed that up to 1968 the party was a genuine political force with home-grown social roots. Normalisation left it an empty shell held together by jealous guardianship of ill-gained posts and ritual displays of loyalty to the Soviet Union.
Government chairman and politburo member Adamec enjoyed something of an exemption from this contempt in his former assistants' accounts. Fiala thought him a straight character who, whatever his mistakes, tried to do some good for his country. Andulka thought that he was a `typical working- class cadre' who acted on intuition rather than intellect, often given to quick temper, but who had a sound common sense and saw that Jakeš's politburo was disastrously inadequate to developments. They devoted a busy year to helping him in his (failed) bid to replace Jakes as the party's first secretary, and eventually in the role that befell him as the old regime's negotiator with the revolution.
It appears from his assistants' testimonies, however, that Adamec's strategies were less than mould-breaking. He kept honouring the leading role of the party by seeking politburo approval for his actions even when the revolution showed up the politburo's terminal paralysis. Throughout the last year of the communist regime, it was the top party post he was after, rather than a shift of power from party politburo to government presidium. He wanted to emulate Gorbachev in taking the party leadership and announcing a perestroika. But he had no perestroika programme of his own, while the example that Gorbachev had set was getting, by 1989, rather confusing to the Czech communist officials whose backing Adamec sought. Aleš, Andulka and Fiala thought that their boss was nevertheless worth backing because he might pave the way for someone of the younger generation to become the leader of actual reform. Their hopes were fuelled in this respect in that he seemed to like younger people, but that was all; he never gave any indication that he wanted to groom a protégé for the top post.
Beyond seeking politburo allies through behind-the-scene chats in the party corridors, Adamec tried to get broader backing by a busy tour of speaking engagements. He particularly liked to speak to the same gatherings of party members that the first secretary Jakeš had spoken to a week before, so that they could see for themselves that he, Adamec, was the more intelligent of the two. Jakeš was alert to the tactic and got his people to block it where they could. Adamec tried to put him under further pressure by two written offers to resign his posts, which Jakes simply ignored.
Trying to get a direct backing from Moscow was another strategy. An envoy went on a conspiratorial journey to Moscow to explain Adamec's intentions to central committee contacts there. He was heard out, but nothing happened. He went again the day after the revolution broke out, when Adamec had his first meeting with Havel, but again to no tangible effect. And finally, Adamec tried to arrange a private meeting with Gorbachev at a Warsaw Pact gathering in the following week, but again to no avail. As a Moscow contact of his explained to Fiala, Gorbachev had by then decided to cede that part of Europe. Adamec was not surprised by the snub either, because he had been warned by his Polish and Hungarian counterparts that Gorbachev, if he could be induced to make a promise, did not keep it anyway.
Another part of Adamec's strategy was to use his position as government chairman to push through several changes in the top posts of the armed forces. As Fiala explained, the new minister of defence and other appointments were not necessarily very different from their predecessors in their political opinions, but the fact that they were new in their posts made it less likely that they might be tempted to bring the armed forces into play to resolve a political crisis.
And finally, Adamec allowed his staff to establish a channel for direct talks between the government and the dissident underground. It is not clear exactly what part this was meant to play in his bid to become the party's first secretary, which appeared by then to have failed. Whatever the original intention, the channel was activated immediately after a street confrontation between students and police commenced the revolution, and Adamec became the communist regime's chief negotiator with the revolution's spokesmen.
Originally he hoped to negotiate a power sharing between reform-minded communists and socialist-minded dissidents.[Note 8] His main motivation, however, was a fear that the revolution really could turn into a bloodbath. `Wait until they start abducting your children' was a recurrent reproach to his staff whenever they appeared to be regarding events with insufficient gravity. His staff claimed in their accounts a crucial historical role for him, and for themselves, in `leading the opposition by the hand to the round table' and in making sure that the state's sword-wielding organs stayed their hand. Once the revolution seemed safely set on a non-violent course, however, Adamec took his exit from the historical stage. He resigned in anger brought on, rather fittingly for the end of a communist regime, by a police surveillance report. It told of bugged conversations between Havel and his friends, from which it was clear that, as far as they were concerned, Adamec would play only a temporary role in a revolution that would go much further than a pink-hued compromise.
Ales and Andulka thought Adamec did well to go when he did. Calfa became federal premier instead, who put his knowledge of existing legislation and government machinery fully at Havel's disposal, thus affecting a swift transition to unambiguously pro-western capitalist democracy. That, the two insiders claimed, was what the majority wanted, including many in communist executive ranks. Fiala was rather more regretful.
But there was no disagreement about the depths of exhaustion and decadence to which the communist regime had sunk. Training courses for party cadres about discipline in crisis proved entirely useless. Before one of the Havel-Adamec meetings, the revolution's leader invited students to mark the occasion by erecting a barricade of empty cartons outside the government building. That was enough for the hundreds of people working there - from secretaries to ministers - to use the back exit to make themselves scarce. When Havel's team arrived, there was only Adamec and no more than 15 others left in the whole building. At the first politburo meeting since the outbreak of the revolution, which took place two days after the first Havel-Adamec meeting, the discussion included talk about who needed to stay in their posts for a while longer, while their new house or chata (dacha) were still under construction.
There were no more than very fragmented, occasional and faint traces of Marxist theory in our communist government insiders' talk. Only Fiala sounded like someone who might have welcomed a good heart-to-heart with a Marxist intellectual. The insiders had certainly known how to put a virtuoso grasp of Marxist science on display when it suited them in their earlier careers, but now felt no hardship in a matter-of-fact acceptance that the science was yesterday's dogma. Its influence made itself evident only, for example, in Fabera's passing comment that assumed a value-loaded distinction between productive and speculative investment; in Ales's recollection of his early reading of the revolution as leading to `a system where the acquisition of private property would be a necessary condition for achieving an autonomous position for oneself'; or in Andulka's praise for Premier Klaus's insistence on placing a swift economic transition at the top of the agenda, because `Marx was surely right in this, that the economic base is the most important'. Fiala's only explicit comment on Marxist theory was that `it had got human nature wrong'.
All the insiders, however, voiced some misgivings about the rapid and radical way in which the revolution detached the country from the East and opened it up to the West. They thought there was a danger that `German capital will swallow us'. They were critical of the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968 and damning of the normalisation regime that followed, with its reduction of political acumen to ritual displays of loyalty to the Soviet Union. In their narratives and arguments, however, they freely expressed elements of geopolitical reasoning and emotional Slavophilism which equated Czechoslovak patriotism with the solution to `the German question' that the alliance with the Russian neighbour had offered. This was also the case in a high proportion of the respondents who had been in the managerial nomenklatura. The respondents' past allegiance to the communist regime was now evident not in their attitudes to capitalist privatisation, in which most of them participated with great alacrity, nor in a distinctively Marxist theorising. It was narratively refashioned into an expression of Czech nationalist self-identification.
Dvorak's life story is a case in point. Like other communists of his generation, including people who left the party and joined the dissident movement after 1968, he gave a very extensive account of his decision to join the party. And, like in the other cases, the account was largely about anti-German patriotism. Placed at the theme-setting beginning of the whole life story, a patriotic stance of the protagonist's family at the beginning of the war leads to his own adventures during the war and eventually to his enthusiasm for the Soviet Union and the Communist Party. This is admittedly an uncritical enthusiasm that soon leads to his regrettable error in raising his hand in support of unjust Stalinist show-trials and purges. But it is historically warranted by the situation of the whole Czech nation. The nation's existence, as Palacky had said, had been always defined by struggles with `the German question', which the war brought to a head and the post-war settlement resolved. For Dvorak and others, the post-war settlement is of the essence. It enabled the expulsion of the German minority, a controversial act of ethnic cleansing which they still endorse, and it provided an iron curtain which, whatever its unfortunate side-effects, guaranteed that the expelled Germans could not return. Czech patriotism as well as working-class identity accounts for the protagonist's communist allegiance.
During the First Republic, Marxist theory had been an ideological counterweight to the new republic's hegemonic, ethnically based nationalism. The Social Democrats in particular were distinguished by a membership base that combined German-speaking and Czech-speaking organisations. Dvorák's account of becoming a party member serves a reminder that, in the Czech context, Marxism lost its counter-nationalist mission in the post-war settlement. The post-war Communist Party celebrated a Marxist orthodoxy, but it also made its broad appeal by speaking for a Soviet-guaranteed Czechoslovak nation state. The invasion of 1968 inserted a wedge between nationalist and pro-Soviet sentiments in the wider strata of society, in addition to putting a rude end to the ideology of `socialism with a human face'. In the name of proletarian internationalism, the normalisation regime became an ideologically hollow shell. It duly suffered an ignominious collapse. The removal of the iron curtain, however, has put Palacky's `German question' back on the public agenda, in numerous guises ranging from historical debates about the expulsion of the German population in 1946 to legislative acts that restrict rights of foreign nationals to acquire property. In this context, past or present supporters of the Communist Party feel able to stake out a position for themselves in nationalist as well as socialist terms.
The communist government insiders were surprisingly critical of the normalisation regime. Their most stinging criticisms, however, were narrowly aimed at the party establishment created by the purges of 1969- 70. They in effect served the purpose of implicit self-defence against the dominant discourse of the revolution that condemned the old regime on numerous broad grounds. Our insiders presented their own role as being on the side of `reforms' that were needed to free a system that was oriented to guaranteeing `social security' (socialni jistoty) to the citizen of its `deformations', to make it more functional. They were stymied by a normalisation party establishment that was faction-riven but dedicated to its own stability. The establishment consequently suffered a disabling entropy. It was exhausted and, in the end, the most constructive consensus it was able to reach, with greater or lesser degrees of explicitness, was that it was perhaps best to let the `internal opposition' have a go at ruling the country. Its more responsible elements made sure that the transfer of power to `the internal opposition', i.e., a government featuring leaders of the dissident underground, would occur swiftly and without violence.
The insiders were critical of the narrow `normalisation echelon' while, throughout their accounts, they in effect argued against the `demonisation' of the communist regime, which they thought was typical of the current media. The old regime committed acts of terror, but that was in the 1950s. It had a big secret police, but that was doing mainly things that western states had to do too, to protect their security. It prosecuted dissidents, but imprisoned relatively few and, in the end, helped their leaders take power. It had kept its economy insufficiently market-oriented for too long, but that was to give its citizens their social security, and in the end decided not to stand in the way of market enterprise. And, the communist regime's belonging to the Soviet bloc was rooted in a post-war settlement that freed the Czech nation of its perennial `German question'.
The insiders' accounts give some weight to the thesis that the communist regime's end was due to its own exhaustion rather than to its opposition's vigour. They don't clinch the thesis, however, if such a thesis can be articulated with sufficient precision to be proven or showed false. Like all accounts, they are arguments on one's own behalf against some potential accusers. In this case, they are arguments against dissident leaders such as Havel, who had made a moral case against the communist regime, for which they eventually gained, at least for a crucial revolutionary moment, a popular backing.
End.