Daughters of the KGB (27 page)

The London Czechs formed a government-in-exile, recognised hypocritically by the British government in July 1940. During the Second World War, émigré Czechs fought the common enemy in Allied uniforms, but Tiso saw it his priestly duty to declare for the Axis powers. As a result of Hitler’s invasion of the USSR and Beneš’ compromises with Czech émigré Communists in Britain, Stalin also recognised the London government-in-exile and Beneš made an agreement with him on 8 May 1944, under which all Czechoslovak territory liberated by Soviet forces would be handed over to Czech authority. By that, Beneš meant the government-in-exile after its return to Prague. As usual, what Stalin intended was the confusion of all other parties. A year later, as combat officially ended in Eastern Europe one day later than in the West, the Czech and Slovak capitals, Prague and Bratislava, had been liberated by the Red Army with some assistance from indigenous armed resistance factions, although these numbered far less than in Poland. In apparent compliance with the deal made with Beneš, the Soviet troops withdrew before the end of the year, as did the US Third Army, which had liberated western Czechslovakia under General George Patton. He typically had wanted to continue the drive to Prague, a frustrating 45 miles to the east of his front line, but the White House decreed there must be no clash with Stalin’s troops – this in line with President Roosevelt’s expressed belief that Stalin was a gentleman, who would play by the rules of the Western democratic game.

At the 1945 Potsdam Conference Stalin held all the cards, with the two new players in the game of Big Three suffering a considerable disadvantage. President Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, had never been briefed on anything by Roosevelt, and Attlee was only elected halfway through the conference. Their body language in photographs taken at Potsdam says it all: the Soviet dictator sits rock solid and inscrutable while Truman and Attlee lean awkwardly towards, but try not to look at, the man who is getting everything his own way. Among the decisions taken there was the punitive expulsion of nearly 3 million German-speakers – some of whose families had lived in the Sudetenland for six centuries – in one of the massive deportations that changed the ethnic make-up of Central and Eastern Europe during and after the war. This emigration at gunpoint involved old men, women and children walking very long distances into what remained of the Reich, where there was no provision for them and little food even for those already there. It was achieved by a specially formed paramilitary police that was to be the nub of the pro-Communist irregulars who executed the coup of 1948. All these great events hide a multitude of individual tragedies. The parents and sister of successful U-boat commander Fregattenkapitän Reinhard Suhren, who was in an Allied jail, were so terrified after German forces withdrew westwards from the Sudetenland that the father killed his wife and daughter to prevent them falling into the hands of Czech irregulars, and then killed himself. There are no statistics to tell us how many others did the same.
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The first government of the so-called Third Republic, in which both Czechs and Slovaks were reunited, was a coalition consisting of left-wing and ‘democratic’ parties with some religious representation from Catholic Moravia. In hoping that his newborn country would be a bridge between East and West, Beneš the democrat was being optimistic, but most of his people rightly mistrusted the Western democracies after their betrayal of 1938. Free elections in May 1946 led to another coalition in which the Communist leader Klement Gottwald was named prime minister and Komunistická Strana Ceskoslovenska (KSC) – the Czechoslovakian Communist Party – gained control of the most important posts, including the interior ministry and defence ministry.

As early as 30 June 1945 a nationwide secret police force was set up: Státní Bezpecnost (StB) or, to give it the correct Slovak title, Štátna Bezpecnost. For convenience, both organisations will be referred to as ‘StB’. Under Václav Nosek, Minister of the Interior, its role was to be ‘the sword and the shield of the party’ – not of the country, or even the government. It was modelled closely on, and ‘advised by’, the NKVD, whose title changed to Ministerstvo Vnutrennykh Del (MVD) the following year. The professed brief of StB was to hunt down and punish German stay-behinds, Czechs who had collaborated with the German occupation authorities, as well as all dissidents and people guilty of sabotage and espionage. The StB considered these legitimate targets for the state security organisation of a country that had just emerged from a brutal occupation by German forces, but StB also intimidated or put out of circulation political opponents of KSC, using forged evidence and confessions obtained under torture and by the use of drugs, thus accelerating the Communists’ rise to total power. From its inception, StB used telephone intercepts, interception of much domestic and
all
international mail, widespread surveillance and a photo archive of several million secretly taken photographs. The StB’s První Sprava, on the model of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, set up in Prague a company manufacturing costume jewellery, which was a traditional Czech export. The company’s offices abroad became a cover for illegals.
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After getting new orders from Stalin in 1947, Gottwald upped the pressure from the superficially democratic approach, forcing the twelve non-Communist ministers to hand in their resignations in February 1948 – which they did in the hope of provoking a new election, but President Beneš refused to accept them and did not call an election. The KSC then mounted a coup d’état, presenting him with a new cabinet of its choosing. In very suspicious circumstances, the democratic Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk died in a Moscow-style ‘suicide by falling out of a window’ in the Foreign Ministry. A contemporary cartoon shows him by the window, hands tied behind his back, in the grip of two KGB thugs with a third asking him to kindly sign a declaration that he is jumping of his own free will.

His country found itself a ‘people’s democracy’, where all dissidence was to be brutally purged as in the other countries of Eastern Europe. The Catholic religion was ousted by the creed of Marxism–Leninism and Czechoslovakia was forbidden by Moscow to join the European Recovery Programme – the Marshall Plan – and obliged instead to become a founder member of Comecon. On the orders of Molotov, Pavel Sudoplatov gave to a former KGB
rezident
in Prague a receipt signed by Beneš’ secretary in 1938 for an unrepaid loan of $10,000, to enable the Czech statesman to escape to Britain. He in turn waved it at Beneš as a threat to reveal his former relationship with the Kremlin. Under that pressure, within a month Beneš stepped down and handed power in a bloodless coup to the Kremlin’s man, Klement Gottwald. At the time of the coup, Sudoplatov landed at a Soviet military airfield outside Prague with 400
spetsnaz
troops dressed in civilian clothes but equipped for clandestine operations – just in case.

Today the church of St Bartholomew still stands on Bartolomejská Ulice in Prague, but in 1950 the other religious properties on the street included a convent that housed 1,000 nuns working in the capital’s hospitals as nurses and doing charitable work. On one night in 1950, the nuns were forcibly expelled and transported in trucks to a prison camp so that the complex of buildings could become the head offices of StB. Day and night, cars arrived bringing arrested people in for questioning with all the techniques mentioned above. Most of the nuns’ cubicles in the convent were turned into holding cells for prisoners and some were used for ‘intensive’ interrogations. The neighbouring St Bartholomew’s church was converted into a firing range for StB officers.

By 1950, in the climate of growing paranoia, it became important to denounce one’s neighbours before they denounced you. Even some students thought it prudent to join the party. In October 2008 the Czech magazine
Respekt
published an article based on research by a young worker at the Institute for Study of Totalitarian Regimes, who had unearthed the police report of a denunciation dated 14 March 1950:

Today at around 1600 hours a student, Milan Kundera, born 1.4.1929 in Brno, resident at the student hall of residence on George VI Avenue in Prague VII, presented himself at this department and reported that a student, Iva Militka, resident at that residence, had told a student by the name of Dlask, also of that residence, that she had met a certain acquaintance of hers, Miroslav Dvoracek, at Klarov in Prague the same day. The said Dvoracek apparently left one case in her care, saying he would come to fetch it in the afternoon … Dvoracek had apparently deserted from military service and since the spring of the previous year had possibly been in Germany, where he had gone illegally.

The unfortunate Mr Dvoracek, a conscript in the fledgling Czechoslovakian Air Force, had fled abroad with a comrade during the 1948 coup and returned clandestinely to Czechslovakia, allegedly as an agent of a Western intelligence agency. He was arrested when returning to Militka’s residence to collect his suitcase – and sentenced to hard labour in one of eighteen strict-regime camps around Jáchymov, in the north-west of the country, near the border with the GDR. This was intended as a ‘socially useful’ death sentence. Under the supervision of Red Army personnel who had mining experience in civilian life, the prisoners laboured in inadequate clothing under grotesquely unsafe conditions in uranium mines, digging out the ore needed for the Soviet nuclear programme. Many died from radiation sickness. Dvoracek survived fourteen years’ slavery in the mine.

The preceding paragraph is true, but the name of Kundera, a student representative already known to StB as a dissident, was inserted in the report
when the original was rewritten
; his signature does not appear anywhere, which would have been the case if he had made the denunciation. Deeper digging by the young researcher would have revealed the falsified report to be no more than a delayed-action smear on the name of the famous author which, for whatever reason, was never used. Fortunately, a Czech friend of the author reacted angrily to the original story, saying, ‘Kundera would never have done that.’ And yet, he recounted how a friend, when a young and healthy student, had been imprisoned for the ‘crime’ of belonging to a group of intellectuals who imported and listened to Western pop music like the Beatles. Emerging from prison after three years, his left leg was severely damaged but he agreed to act as an informer for the StB, presumably to avoid worse treatment. Perhaps the most evil aspect of the Stalinist terror regimes was the fear induced by the fact that one never knew which friend was an informer, commonly referred to as
fizl
in Czech – a word that seems to be derived from
fies,
a German word meaning ‘nasty’ and the diminutive
–l
, so ‘a nasty little man’.

Another young man labouring in the mines at Jáchymov was Ctirad Mašín, sentenced to two years’ slave labour in 1951 for failing to report someone else’s plan to flee the country. A teenage son of General Josef Mašín, a Czech tortured and eventually killed by the Germans in the massive reprisals for the death of Reinhard Heydrich, Ctirad was fortunate to be tried on this minor charge, because he and his brother belonged to an anti-communist armed gang, whose members later escaped to West Berlin, some shooting their way to freedom.

Those are personal dramas, unimportant except to the individuals involved. There were more important things for Czechs to worry about in March 1950. After Beneš’ resignation, with Gottwald replacing him and Antonín Novotný heading the party, StB proceeded to accuse anti-Soviet politicians of treason for blatant show trials during 1952, most of which ended in death sentences. Nor were rank-and-file party members immune. Stalin deeply mistrusted anyone who had travelled in the West and therefore could compare life in a democracy with the repression and perennial shortages in the centrally planned economies of the socialist bloc. The Czechs have their own sense of humour and joked that their socialist society was locked in a heroic struggle with problems that would not exist under any other system. Those targeted included decorated heroes who had fought on the communist side in the Spanish Civil War, men who had fought in Allied uniform during the war, as well as Jews and Slovaks – the last being accused of ‘nationalist deviation’. All these categories were arraigned in show trials and executed or given long prison sentences.

KGB General Alexandr Beshchasnov came to Prague with a support team to ‘explain’ to the StB officers the motivation that had supposedly led these traitors to commit treason. They transmitted regular reports back to Stalin.
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It suited his paranoia to have the various treason trials in the satellite states linked because this looked like proof of a Western conspiracy against the entire socialist ‘sixth of the world’. The vital link turned out to be Noel Field, an American who had been employed by the State Department pre-war before leaving to manage the Swiss activities of the Unitarian Service Committee, assisting refugees from Nazi Germany. Since these included many communists, he assumed after the war that he was welcome in their countries, but not in his own – not least because there is some evidence that he was an undercover NKVD/MVD agent and did not want to become ensnarled in the Alger Hiss investigations back home. Travelling about Central and Eastern Europe, he was in Prague – some say Budapest – in May 1949, when he mysteriously disappeared. His wife went there to look for him, and also disappeared. A brother and a stepdaughter of Field also vanished in other Communist capitals. Field’s government background and mysterious activities in Switzerland enabled the Soviets to portray him as an American agent and, since the USA was now being talked about as
glavny vrag
– the main enemy – it was sufficient to manipulate the suspects’ confession obtained in the usual Moscow manner to include admission of contact with him as proof of treason that would be accepted by a rigged court.
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