Enemy of the people? Why the trial of Milada Horáková must never be forgotten
Seventy years ago, the world watched in horror as Milada Horáková – a fearless campaigner for liberty – was subjected to what may have been the most grotesque show trial of the communist era. The Czech Republic is still coming to terms with what happened. So is her daughter. By Richard Askwith
When Jana Horáková-Kanský was 15, she returned from school one day to find neither of her parents at home. Her mother had been arrested that morning at work. Now the secret police had come for her father – unaware that, while Maruška, the young housekeeper, flirted to distract them, he was escaping through the back garden.
The scene was Prague, September 1949. A communist regime had been established in Czechoslovakia in a coup 18 months earlier. Jana’s parents’ crime was to oppose it.
It was not the first time Bohuslav Horák and Milada Horáková had suffered for their democratic beliefs. A decade earlier, both had come close to death in Nazi concentration camps. But that had been easier to understand: both had worked for Úvod, the Czech resistance group. These new accusations, of conspiring to overthrow the regime by violence, were baseless.
That did not make the couple’s prospects less bleak. The dark age of Czechoslovak communism was beginning, and Milada Horáková, in particular, had been chosen as a symbolic victim. A leading figure in the pre-war women’s movement as well as in the social democratic National Socialist party (nothing to do with the Nazis), she was unbending in her peaceful insistence that the new regime was illegitimate, and had resigned as an MP the previous year in protest at its subversion of the democratic process. Somehow she had to be silenced and discredited – and, ideally, broken.
So began an episode that still stands out grotesquely, even in Europe’s vast, bleak landscape of totalitarian crimes: a saga of fake news, mob justice and judicial murder that casts a shadow over the Czech nation; and from which Jana, who now lives in the US, still carries the scars.
Jana’s aunt and uncle took her in, just as they had when the Gestapo came. Her parents’ property was confiscated. Bohuslav (a radio journalist) escaped on foot to the west. Milada was interrogated and tortured, along with 12 other defendants, for months. No contact with her family was permitted.
As time passed, Horáková’s alleged crimes multiplied. She was accused of spying, organising underground cells, terrorising party functionaries, planning to kidnap party leaders, and conspiring with half-a-dozen western countries – plus the Vatican – to foment nuclear war. Soviet advisers oversaw the writing of the script; Soviet-trained torturers taught the defendants to stick to it; and the state-controlled media disseminated the concocted “facts”.
Jana watched helplessly as her mother was turned into a national hate figure. “I was in panic, when I realised how bad things might get.” At the same time, she attempted to negotiate the normal challenges of teenage life: “When you are 15 or 16, you just try to put your troubles as far away from you as possible.” Some schoolmates began to shun her – a more immediate pain than the still theoretical horror of the fate awaiting her mother.
When the trial started, on 31 May 1950, Jana’s sense of isolation got worse. But, she remembers, “some fantastic people did stick with me”. So, less pleasantly, did the secret police, who kept the 16-year-old (as she was by then) under constant surveillance.
The court proceedings were broadcast daily, not just to radio listeners at home but in factories, cafes and bars, even in the streets. No one could be unaware of the prosecutors’ savage denunciations of the “monsters” in the dock, or of the dull-voiced defendants’ carefully scripted “confessions”. “It was horrible,” shudders Jana. “You couldn’t avoid it.”
Authorities had received more than 6,300 separate communications relating to the trial, most urging them to enforce ‘the will of the people’ with the utmost severity
What made it worse was the accompanying campaign of “popular anger”. At first, it was just the state-controlled newspapers that expressed this, condemning the “hyenas” in the dock and singling out Horáková for particular abuse. A woman who had devoted her entire adult life to public service, championing unfashionable causes from single mothers to the rehabilitation of released prisoners, was denounced as a woman of “bestial cynicism” who had “lost every ounce of humanity”. Then the public joined in.
Party representatives across Czechoslovakia made it clear that every loyal citizen was expected to declare their disgust at the accused – and to call for the severest possible punishment. Workers were summoned to vote on motions calling for the death penalty. “Somehow,” one former factory worker told me, “everyone’s hand went up.” None of this was compulsory: it was just state-orchestrated peer pressure – like a grotesque parody of the kind of benign social consensus that impels us to “clap for carers” today. Only the bravest and stubbornest refused to join in, and many of those soon found themselves without employment or, in some cases, in prison. Even schoolchildren were pressed to sign petitions demanding that these “traitors to the people” be shown no mercy. If no one volunteered, “volunteers” were nominated.
Most people deemed it best to jump in enthusiastically before they were pushed. A petition in the Prague 16 district received 55,000 signatures. By the end of June, the authorities had received more than 6,300 separate communications relating to the trial, most urging them to enforce “the will of the people” with the utmost severity. Many appeared to be spontaneous: the hate campaign had gone viral.
George Orwell’s imagining of the Two Minutes Hate in 1984 – published the previous summer – could have been written with all this in mind: “The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within 30 seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness… seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current.” But the hate against Milada Horáková continued day after day; and there was nothing imaginary about the fate that awaited her.
The object of the exercise was simple: to cow the population. For the same reason – as with other “monster trials” in Czechoslovakia between and 1949 and 1953, and as with the Soviet show trials on which they were modelled – little attempt was made to disguise the fact that the defendants had been tortured and terrorised into confessing their guilt. The crueller it all seemed, the better. No sane person would risk becoming an enemy of the people in a climate like this.
Yet there was one awkward fact, which even the carefully censored daily broadcasts could barely conceal: Horáková, among the defendants, kept going off-message. Despite pleading guilty, the quietly-spoken 48-year-old repeatedly found the courage to insist that, although she had broken communist law, she remained innocent in terms of pure justice, and in the eyes of her nation. “I remain faithful to my convictions,” she insisted. “No one in this country should be made to die for their beliefs.”
The court disagreed. On 8 June, all 13 defendants were found guilty of treason, espionage and conspiracy to overthrow the Czechoslovak Republic. Four, including Horáková, were sentenced to death; the rest were imprisoned for terms ranging from 13 years to life. Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt were among those who pleaded for clemency for Horáková. So were Jana and her aunt and uncle.
On 26 June, their pleas were rejected. That evening, for the first time in more than eight months, Jana and her aunt and uncle were allowed to visit the condemned woman. It was the last night of Milada Horáková’s life.
I remain faithful to my convictions. No one in this country should be made to die for their beliefs
Jana, who is now 87, can barely bring herself to think about those last minutes, let alone talk about them. “That’s still taboo for me,” she says; and her otherwise cheerful face begins to tremble. “Please don’t ask me to go there.” But it was, she concedes, “horrendous”. There were armed guards everywhere; mother and daughter were not allowed to embrace or kiss. Horáková eventually cut the visit short, before the allotted 20 minutes were up. She had written each of her loved ones a farewell letter, she explained. What she did not know was that the one to Jana would not be delivered.
She was executed at dawn the next day, in Pankrác Prison. Her “hanging” was actually an agonising 15-minute strangulation – reputedly at the prosecutor’s special request. Her ashes were never returned to her family.
Yet her story did not end there. In 1968, during the Prague Spring, Horáková’s sentence was overturned. A Soviet-led invasion soon put an end to that thaw, but 22 years later, following the Velvet Revolution, she was fully rehabilitated; at which point that undelivered farewell letter finally found its way to Jana, 40 years late. In 2005, the discovery of uncensored film footage of Horáková’s trial revealed the full extent of her stubborn courage in the dock. And then, in 2007, her most vituperative and vindictive prosecutor, Ludmila Brožová-Polednová, was convicted of Horáková’s judicial murder, and, after much legal wrangling, served 18 months of a six-year sentence from 2009 to 2010.
Today, in both the Czech and the Slovak Republics, Horáková is revered – too late – as a national hero. Streets and schools across the Czech Republic are named after her, and the annual Remembrance Day for the Victims of Communism is held on 27 June, the anniversary of her death. Commemorations this month – 70 years on from her execution – would have been more poignant than usual, although the intervention of coronavirus seems likely to keep public events to a minimum. Already, however, Horáková had been posthumously honoured this year with the Order of the White Double Cross, First Class – the highest award a foreigner can receive from the Slovak state. Zuzana Čaputová, the young Slovak president who conferred the honour in January, is a figure whose decency, courage, diligence and progressive values make her something of a spiritual heir to the murdered Czech.
Yet, even now, the business of Milada Horáková still feels unfinished. Her murder was just the blackest point in a dark age of Soviet-orchestrated repression that scarred millions of Czech and Slovak lives. More than 250 people were executed for political crimes in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, more than 250,000 were convicted, and at least 80,000 were sent to concentration camps. Yet Brožová-Polednová, who died in 2015, remains the only person to have been convicted for her role in the legal machinery of that repression. And while there have been other prosecutions, for example for killings of would-be escapees from Czechoslovakia by border guards, the Communist Party that oversaw these crimes is a lot less taboo in today’s Czech Republic than many people would like it to be, as are its former backers in Moscow.
The crueller it all seemed, the better. No sane person would risk becoming an enemy of the people in a climate like this
Fifteen Communist MPs currently provide parliamentary support to the minority government of Andrej Babiš – who has himself been repeatedly criticised for his closeness to the communist regime (and, many insist, the secret police) before 1989. Meanwhile, the Prague-based Centre against Terrorism and Hybrid Threats has warned against a proliferation of Kremlin-backed fake news organisations attempting to influence Czech politics, to the dismay of democrats. But Czech politicians who criticise Russia too freely do so at their own risk, as Zdeněk Hřib, mayor of Prague, discovered when he renamed the square where the Russian embassy is located in honour of the murdered Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. Hřib is now under police protection following reports that a Russian hit squad, carrying ricin in a briefcase, had arrived in Prague to kill him.
Perhaps some people are letting their fears run away with them. Yet the populist nature of Babiš’ ANO party, combined with his secretive, autocratic style of leadership and his perceived closeness to Vladimir Putin, has done little to calm the concerns of liberal Czechs who worry that their country could slip back into its dark age of Russian-backed repression. Nor have the pro-Kremlin sympathies of president Miloš Zeman; or, for that matter, Zeman’s matching enthusiasm for the communist tyranny in China, which has also been taking an increasingly overbearing interest in Czech affairs. In January, the speaker of the Senate, Jaroslav Kubera, collapsed and died after receiving a “threatening” letter from Chinese diplomats in connection with a trip he was planning to Taiwan.
For those old enough to remember, each sign of communist or Russian resurgence is traumatic. Shortly after coming to power, for example, Babiš appointed former Communist police chief Zdeněk Ondrácěk to head the parliamentary security forces commission. For those who remembered Ondrácěk’s role in the violent suppression of student protests that preceded the Velvet Revolution in 1989, it felt as though the country was being handed back to its old oppressors. One leading liberal commentator, Jiří X Doležal, suggested in Respekt magazine that, by giving power to Babiš and his backers, “The nation itself has democratically chosen a retreat from liberty and democracy…”
There was similar outrage earlier this year, when former justice minister Helena Válková was nominated to be ombudsman, only for claims to emerge that she had once co-authored an academic article defending the persecution of dissidents under communism. The problem was less with her theme – “protective surveillance” – than with the identity of her co-author: the late Josef Urválek, the most notorious senior prosecutor of the 1950s show trials and, perhaps even more than Brožová-Polednová, the lawyer who sent Milada Horáková to the gallows.
Today we think of the Czech Republic as a model democracy: liberal and open but also efficient and cohesive – as demonstrated by its effective response to coronavirus. We forget that Czechoslovakia, too, was a model democracy before the Second World War – and became a democracy again (up to a point) after the Nazis’ defeat. The parliamentary election of 1946 remains the only free national election ever won by a European communist party. An advanced, industrialised, sophisticated nation at the heart of Europe’s capitalist civilisation considered its options and chose communism. That is to say: the Czech and Slovak Communist parties – like ANO in 2017 – won by far the most votes (38 per cent) but no overall majority. Some suspected Russian hands behind the shock setback to the political establishment (just as they did with Babiš’ winning share of the vote in 2017).
Yet although the Soviets backed the Communists, the popular support was real, prompted by a mixture of idealism and disillusion with the old regime. Even when the Communist minority government had used its foothold on power to engineer a coup in February 1948, and Soviet backing for what was now a one-party state had turned into more or less overt control, mass enthusiasm persisted – for a while. Future liberals and dissidents who fervently supported the revolution in its early days included authors such as Milan Kundera and Pavel Kohout; Luděk Pachman, the chess grand-master; and Emil Zátopek, the athlete. Kundera, Kohout and Pachman proclaimed the party line – and trolled dissenters in print – as aggressively as any Twitter-happy Corbynite; Kohout even held his wedding on Stalin’s birthday. Zátopek, hero of the Prague Spring, was more passive, but he did allow his name to appear under a letter in a newspaper denouncing the defendants in the Horáková trial. That was what young idealists did in those days: not, I think, from wickedness but from idealism. The old order had failed, and communist values had momentum.
Could something similar happen today, in 21st century Europe? It sounds far-fetched, but modern societies have no special immunity against ideological epidemics of intolerant fervour. David Mrnka, the Czech-born US filmmaker behind Netflix’s 2017 Horáková biopic, Milada, told me that, in his view, “History is repeating itself, and we find ourselves again being jeopardised by the Russians. The Communist Party is again gaining popularity and teaches lies to the young generation.” That was before coronavirus. Today, the historical echoes seem more compelling.
What propelled the communists to their first handhold on power in Czechoslovakia in 1946 wasn’t, in the first instance, the imperial ambitions of Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was the fact that millions of voters sympathised with their ideals. As Kundera later wrote: “The communist regimes of central Europe … were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise.” A worldwide catastrophe – the second in 30 years – had left civilisation on its knees. Many reasonable people felt that it was time to try a new, fairer approach. It hardly needs saying that such sentiments are not unknown today.
And so, my only young daughter, little girl Jana, new life, my hope, my future forgiveness, live! Grasp life with both hands! Until my last breath I shall pray for your happiness
Meanwhile, across modern Europe, a younger generation has been gaining influence that has no first-hand memory of just how sour the communist dream turned in the 20th century. You need to be over 50 (as I am) to remember those familiar news motifs from east of the Iron Curtain: dissidents, psychiatric hospitals, gulags, purges, trigger-happy border guards and, not least, show trials. To voters who came of age after 1989, such words and phrases evoke little. Of course, that isn’t the only reason for the generational divide in modern politics, but it is striking that, in recent UK elections, the faultline has fallen at pretty much that point, with those aged 49 or under showing an increasingly gung-ho enthusiasm for no-holds-barred utopian socialism and the over-fifties still showing a marked aversion.
In an age of populist governments and orchestrated campaigns of social media intimidation, such enthusiasms matter. It may not be true that, as George Santayana claimed, those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, but it is easier to avoid repeating old mistakes if you know that they were made. Unfortunately, beyond the borders of former Czechoslovakia, the story of what communist zealotry did to Milada Horáková has been largely forgotten.
But Horáková’s daughter, 70 years on, is in no danger of forgetting – even though she has lived a lot, and has come a long way, since that terrible summer. For 18 years after her mother’s death, Jana remained in Czechoslovakia. Her attempts to go to university and find rewarding employment were hampered by the stigma of being a monster’s daughter; it didn’t help that she spurned several invitations to declare to the authorities that she did not consider her mother’s trial unjust. Instead, under the continuing surveillance of the secret police (“We were being watched all the time”), she endured her fate, eventually finding a job as a dental technician, working diligently, learning new skills at night school, and keeping her thoughts to herself.
The brief thaw of 1968 resulted in her being allowed to emigrate, and she was reunited with her father in the US. Within three years she was married to the academic Karel Kanský, and “all that I wanted for my life was suddenly mine”. Now retired from a second career as a trainer in a dental college, she lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, not far from Washington DC.
When I met Jana – we were both visiting Prague – she came across as a contented pensioner: funny, self-deprecating and warm, keen to talk about her two children and three grandchildren, radiating kindly normality. Of course, we talked at length about her past as well, but she seemed at peace with the world. She had acted as a consultant when Mrnka was making Milada, helping him to reconstruct her mother’s stolen life. The experience had been desperately painful at times, but she was glad to have done her bit to keep her mother’s memory alive. “People in the west should know about her courage,” she says.
Since then, her life has taken a turn for the worse. Karel died in September, aged 90; and for the past few months Jana has been locked down while one of America’s fiercest local coronavirus storms rages through Montgomery County. But she is not the type to complain or even to dwell on her misfortunes. “I have been lucky,” she insists, “because America welcomed me with open arms.” The trauma of her mother’s murder is never far below the surface, but she is usually able to maintain her equanimity – as long as she steers clear of certain memories
But then, in her rawest moments, she remembers her mother’s final letter – the one that arrived 40 years late. It has been widely reproduced. I have a facsimile of it next to me as I write this. A poignant mixture of the profound and the banal, it is hard to contemplate without asking yourself what you would write, if you had to send a letter to your child or children a few hours before your execution. And at that point any glib formulations about needing to break eggs to make omelettes seem suddenly hopelessly dishonest.
Horáková, her last hours ticking by, struggles to make the best use of this final opportunity. She expresses her regret at not having found more time for her daughter: “I could not give you nearly all that my mind and my heart had prepared for you … I understood that my task here in the world was to do you good … by seeing to it that life becomes better, and that all children can live well.”
She pours out mundane motherly advice, fussing about how Jana wears her hair, how she dresses, the physical exercise she takes, her studies, her future career, and whether or not she will keep up her music lessons.
And then, at moments, her soul finds its voice: “Death is not bad. Just avoid the gradual dying that happens when one suddenly finds oneself apart from the real life of others…” Or: “Life is hard, it does not pamper anybody … Don’t let it defeat you. Decide to fight. Have courage and clear goals and you will win.”
The final paragraphs form the climax of Milada, in a scene in which Jana (played by Tatjana Medvecká) reads her mother’s farewell letter for the first time. With a little searching on YouTube, you can also find footage in which the real Jana attempts, with heartbreaking courage, to read out those same words, and to keep her composure while doing so.
She is reading in Czech, but there is no mistaking Milada Horáková’s words as Jana struggles to pronounce them: “And so, my only young daughter, little girl Jana, new life, my hope, my future forgiveness, live! Grasp life with both hands! Until my last breath I shall pray for your happiness, my dear child! I kiss your hair, eyes and mouth, I stroke you and hold you in my arms. (I really held you so little.) I shall always be with you…”
I am quoting from the text rather than the recitation because, even now, Jana cannot quite reach the end.
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