Two years after the Velvet Revolution, Czechoslovakia is still exorcising old demons. Lustrace, or purification, has dragged down scores of people, including 16 members of Parliament. Last month Deputy Prime Minister Vaclav Vales quit amid unproved speculation of StB ties. “I cannot go on like this,” he declared in a broken voice. President Havel denounced the “smear campaign” but failed to quell the popular cry against alleged collaborators. Last week Parliament passed a tough new lustrace law, banning agents and collaborators-as well as former senior Communist Party officials and militia members–from holding state posts for five years.
To defenders of lustrace, it is preventive surgery to purge a democratic government of officials who may be “StB positive.” A parliamentary lustrace commission headed by Jiri Ruml has zealously classified 16,000 Czechs and Slovaks as secret-police agents or collaborators. Its source: the StB registry of files, listing thousands of informants and prospective collaborators. “Everything that is in the register is very reliable,” Ruml insists. But the files-which contain everything from “residents” who supervised agents to “trustees” who may have served as unwitting sources-are hardly fair measures of guilt,
Take Bedrich Moldan’s case. Sacked early this year as Czech environment minister, Moldan admits he talked with StB agents. “I did not throw them out the door because I was convinced this was a normal part of life under a communist regime,” he says. But he claims he never became a collaborator, and StB records list him only as a “candidate” for recruitment. The Czech government admitted it had no evidence that he acted as an informer but said “misuse cannot be ruled out.” Some StB files may have been falsified by recruiters to pad their rosters. Jaromir Gebas, a former national-park official, was fingered by two border guards who later testified that they “recruited” him without his knowledge and forged his signature on a collaboration agreement.
Even “airtight” cases raise troublesome questions, During a student fellowship in Austria in 1961, Rudolf Zukal at first rebuffed requests from a Czechoslovak diplomat to report on his meetings with U.S. students. But when the diplomat, an StB agent, threatened to expose an affair he was having with a married Austrian woman, Zukal agreed to talk. He insists that he warned the U.S. students they were under surveillance, and that he told the diplomat nothing incriminating. It was the only time Zukal was listed as an StB collaborator; he became a well-known dissident and was classified as an “enemy.” After his election to Parliament in 1990, the lustrace commission, citing the 1961 meeting, demanded Zukal resign. He refused and was publicly branded as a collaborator. “We live in the country of Kafka, and this is Kafkaesque,” he says.
Lustrace has given new life to the very institution it was supposed to destroy-the StB, whose files can still undo reputations. That irony has not been lost on President Havel, who has yet to take a strong stand on lustrace. “It’s exactly what would interest me in a play,” he told the Czech weekly Mlady Svet. “The situation of someone who felt he’d made it through the [communist] system unscathed and suddenly is terrified that maybe he hasn’t after all.” Trouble is, lustrace is real life.
