Past, Present, and Future: When Legitimate Anticommunism Becomes a Danger for Czech Democracy

Wasn’t the jurist who erased in December 1989 the article defining the leading role of the communist party in the Czechoslovak constitution the very same Pavel Rychetský who had inserted it in the socialist constitution of 1960 in the first place? Still the same Pavel Rychetský who also pursued his career after 1989 and was the uncontested president of the Constitutional Court for years? In his recent piece in Britské listy, which was itself a reaction to the defense of Josef Baxa’s nomination to the Constitutional Court by Boris Cvek also in Britské listy, Jan Čulík kindly recalled my research in České Velenice. In it I had showed that even in a localized, extreme version of the communist dictatorship, the regime found some ways of accommodating the needs of the workers: the latter were allowed to swim in a biotope pool located in the middle of the border forbidden zone in an exotic landscape of control towers and armed border guards, as well as to pick mushrooms and blueberries amidst the same armed guards while enemies of socialism were presumably reduced to slaloming between them on their path to freedom. This shenanigan was justified by the need of the regime to please its public opinion beyond its usual display of force and restraint. On the other hand, Jan Čulík also underlined that certain professions were discredited beyond repair under normalization, amongst which those of judge, soldier, procurator, and policeman, so that a certain tolerance vis-à-vis the “social contract” is finding its limit here. The behavior of such professions, he wrote, “shows that they are capable of collaborating with whatever regime.”

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