Swathed in velvet
Until recently I was of an opinion that the largest Circus performance the world has ever seen took place in December 1989 in Bucharest and in the Romanian provinces. It wasn’t just the little things, like the leader and compére of the “anticommunist” opposition, Ion Iliescu, who turned out to be Gorbachev’s schoolmate; not just the allegedly “independent” juggler and new Prime Minister of the revolutionary Romania, Petre Romanu, who was, amid some confusion, recognised as a representative of “golden communist youth” and as a regular in fashionable communist society salons, an individual painstakingly prepared to take up the mantle of a “perestroika revolutionary”; it wasn’t just the not very democratic way the Ceausescu couple were murdered to avoid any indiscretions on their part. The organisers of the Romanian Circus were so determined to stage their performance that when in mid-December of that memorable year, the populace did not show a satisfactory enthusiasm for the revolution, they decided to crank up the pressure by dragging out of the mortuaries bodies of people who died of extremely natural causes, and presenting them to the media as victims of a communist massacre.
Alas, not everything went according to the carefully laid out plans (it appears comrades cocked things up again) because the most trusted workers of the circus troupe of the socialist block – the conjurers otherwise known as “journalists” – demanded confirmation that the bizarre circus performance was really an authentic event of historic significance. The Polish authentication was provided by the veteran comrade Mazowiecki (serving his socialist masters faithfully since the Fifties). He looked slightly scared (would it make sense to find out what was Mazowiecki so afraid of in late 1989?) as he solemnly reassured the television audience that Romanian “counterrevolution” was of the highest quality.
For years I thought that only “Moscow coup” performers of August 1991 with Boris Yeltsin addressing a revolutionary crowd from the top of a soviet tank (in a faint déjà vu of V.I. Lenin in April 1917) got anywhere near the sublime skills of their Romanian circus comrades. After reading And Reality Be Damned… by Robert Buchar, I am less certain of that.
It is well known that Czech and Slovak comrades had particular difficulties in setting up the arena for their Circus or, more to the point, lions of the revolution turned out to be oddly lame and sluggish. The Economist reported in November 1989, with a note of disbelief, the strange lack of spontaneity on the part of somewhat lethargic demonstrators. The elderly Bishop of Prague tried to rescue the situation by calling for continuation of protests and the next wave of demonstrations looked a little better, which in turn gave police a pretext for a display of brutality. At the same time (perhaps out of anxiety that the revolution could possibly die of fear) communists promised to treat demonstrators more gently from then on. The key moment happened on the 27th November when much bolder crowd came to the building of the central committee chanting: end to one party rule thus repeating the notion put forward a few days earlier by the communist Prime Minister, Adamec. In response to this daring demand the demonstrators saw smiling faces in the widows of the party building and happy gestures of solidarity from party apparatchiks.
This was altogether a typical turn of events for Eastern European “political changes”. Something unholy was taking place, some sort of a provocation, which included the secret police, party and, of course – the opposition. We do not know to this day any details of negotiations behind the scenes – they managed to hide a lot underneath the velvety coat of revolution – and yet Robert Buchar’s interviewees uncover a staggering amount of secrets.
Petr Cibulka, a signatory of Charter 77, arrested during the velvet revolution and released as demanded by demonstrators, (Cibulka spent 5 years in total in communist prisons) does not have any illusions as to the nature of the velvet mutiny:
I believed that the changes were for real. But it took me just a few weeks to realize that the changes were just cosmetic, a changing of the scenery. I realized that power would remain in the hands of the communists and that the communists didn’t need to worry about losing anything. From that point I started to critically evaluate the situation, and as I descended deeper into it I realized that everything was just a game for the public, and not just for the local public but mostly for the West.
Cibulka quickly came to the conclusion that his old friends from the opposition, focused around the Citizen’s Forum, had different objectives to his own: instead of actively fighting communists (by introducing programmes of de-communisation, for instance), they preferred to attack people like Cibulka whom they branded as “extremists”.
The old opposition with roots in Charter 77 (which Cibulka identified himself with in the past, although now he believes it was created with secret assistance from gru and kgb), had new goals and a new programme. They also became dominated by new people who, according to Cibulka, were never active in opposition before 1989 and yet quickly managed to take control of the whole movement. All of them were – and still are – agents of kgb, gru or local secret services and are in total control of the political situation in the Czech Republic.
In the early Nineties, Cibulka was famous for publishing hundreds of thousands of names of secret collaborators of political police. He says today that materials he published were painstakingly combed before he got hold of them, and that names of agents of the intelligence service and counter espionage had been removed. Cibulka maintains that archives were deliberately sanitised well before 17th November 1989 and files of all promising and important agents discretely removed thus allowing the operatives to continue their work for the Moscow handlers.
This version is largely supported by Frantisek Doskocil, ex-central committee member but also a CIA agent. Imprisoned in 1990 by Czech security forces he was released after seven months on Vaclav Havel’s orders following signing a gagging order, which kept him quiet for 10 years. Doskocil based his revelations on the information received from his wife who had worked in the security service archives. It transpires that a long time before the velvet revolution, archives were carefully sorted, many files were packed and taken away. Some documents were taken to the airport and most likely taken to the soviet union. According to Doskocil, the operation was planned well ahead of the 1989 events and communists, as planners and organisers of these “changes”, could not have been taken by surprise.
Another voice is that of Vladimir Hucin, arrested in 2001 on trumped up charges of terrorism (he spent a year in jail and his trial went on until 2006). Hucin discovered shortly after 17 November 1989 that prominent opposition activists – Tomas Hradilek, for instance, who was to become the Minister of Internal Affairs – did all they could to allow uninterrupted destruction of the secret archives. That’s when he started to suspect that the revolution was not what it appeared to be. A lot took place outside the circus arena and dissidents took part in a game, which aimed at “assuring immunity to communist criminals”.
Buchar’s Czech interviewees (it is a group of almost ten people engaged one way or the other in Czech politics) do not have any doubts that the so called velvet revolution was in reality a communist provocation prepared and carried out by Czech and Slovak communists, not without strong support from soviet comrades, but also from oppositionists. Many accusations are thrown at opposition activists who took prominent positions after the revolution; most famous names are mentioned, including Havel and Klaus.
The latter case appears particularly interesting, although materials gathered against Klaus are decidedly one-sided in character. When assessing Klaus’s biography, Buchar refers to the information provided by Robert Eringer, a colourful personality with a bizarre past of a counterespionage FBI agent, an author of spy novels, a regular in both aristocratic and communist salons, creator and chief of the intelligence agency of the Principality of Monaco and an honorary member of… KGB’s Foreign Intelligence Veterans Association. It’s from Eringer, a proud member of this last organisation, that we learn some extraordinary things.
As a 21 year old student of University of Economics in Prague in 1962, Klaus was recruited, according to Eringer, by officers of Czechoslovak secret service and served under the cryptonym of Vodicka “as a spy against democratic reformers” with whom he studied and then worked. He was twice allowed to travel to the West, to Italy and the USA, ostensibly as an academic. In 1970 Klaus is alleged to have played the main role in “Operation Rattrap”, directed by Czechoslovak counterintelligence with assistance from the kgb. Klaus was publicly denounced as an “antisocialist element” and expelled from the Economic Institute. The objective of the operation was to portray Klaus as a “victim” of the regime and thus allow him to more effectively penetrate dissident groups. Very soon Klaus managed to strike a personal relationship with the “leader of the underground”, as Eringer calls him, Vaclav Havel. In 1987 Klaus was officially “rehabilitated” and could start his career in the Prognostics Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, which (according to Eringer) was seen by Communist secret service as a “nest of revolution”. In 1999, more than a year after he resigned his premiership (because of accusations of corruption), after safely removing his files from security service archives, Klaus is alleged to have contacted the Prague resident of svr (the heir of kgb). It isn’t clear from Eringer’s report whether Klaus was reactivated by the soviets. Eringer’s Moscow informers mentioned only the new operational cryptonym for Klaus – Kolesnikov. Eringer points out the warm relationship between Klaus and Putin, which, in his opinion, unequivocally proves that Klaus works for his old masters again.
It would seem that Eringer has to rely on conjecture. His Moscow comrades, with whom he probably spent many long evenings over vodka and caviar, turned out to be strangely reticent. Did Eringer appear untrustworthy to them? Or could it be that their knowledge did not extend that far? In typically light hearted way, Eringer seems convinced that during his exhaustive research in the state of deep alcoholic inebriation, he managed to extract well hidden information. We cannot allow ourselves to be that gullible, however strong his head might be.
The obvious question is: what was the objective of that bolshevik leak with Eringer as the messenger? Was it to compromise the Czech president and Putin’s friend in one person? Or was it perhaps a warning to Klaus and all those who would contemplate a departure from the strictures of political directives? I’m afraid we can speculate to our heart’s content. It could have simply been a reminder for the Western part of the bolshevised eu who is really in charge in Europe (Eringer’s article was published shortly before Klaus took over the presidency of the union in January 2009). It was surely a show of bolshevik power, even if their motives remain unclear, unless Eringer invented the whole story, which seems the least probable of all possibilities.
Debating the causes and course of the velvet revolution Buchar gets to another report, which is difficult to dismiss: the statement of Ludvik Zifcak, not just another participant in the November 1989 events but a man who directly performed the most important role in the communist provocation.
Zifcak remains to this day a communist activist (since 2001 he is the leader of the Czech communist party). In 1989 he was an officer of the Czechoslovak security service and worked under the pseudonym of Milan Ruzicka. As Ruzicka, he was one of the founders of the Independent Alliance of Students and he led the student demonstration in November 1989, which in turn triggered the velvet revolution. It was Zifcak aka Ruzicka who subsequently played the role of the “dead student”, Martin Smid, allegedly “killed” in the brutal police attack on demonstrating students. Reading his account gives us a rare glimpse of the provocation not from the usual point of view of the victim but direct from the provocateur:
Well, there was a whole story prepared, prepared in advance. The story had to be believable. You can’t just send news out that somebody died. You need a foundation. The situation was rigged in such a way that myself along with people working with me on Narodni Trida were surrounded by many personalities from Charter 77 to eyewitness the whole action. The whole story had to be based in “reality”. It had to be believable. […] There was a confrontation, physical contact with the riot police, and the body of a man on the ground. Other things happened around it that would support the whole fable of the story. The body was then transported to the hospital…
I am probably the only living man on Earth who has had his own memorial where thousands of people come each November to honour my “death.”
Despite his role of agent provocateur, Zifcak is convinced that communists lost power in 1989, and yet has no illusions as to the real state of affairs at the time:
There were no conditions for the revolution at the time… […] only 12 percent of the population wanted to change the political system…. They just wanted some cosmetic adjustments to it.
Zifcak’s revelations must raise the same doubts as Eringer’s leaks. First of all, why would an experienced officer, clearly seen as trustworthy by his superiors in the secret service, show so much frivolity and irresponsibility, as to tell the story of his provocation as soon as in 1990? Zifcak disclosed the details of his operation only a few months after the allegedly dramatic events took place, whilst still an active member of Czechoslovak security forces. Is it conceivable that he acted without permission? If it were so would he spend only a few months in prison (he was arrested on spurious charges)? However, should we assume that his strange behaviour in the spring of 1990 was not just a personal aberration, then we must ask the next uncomfortable question: why did someone decide to blow the cover so early? (It is also interesting to note that Zifcak’s disclosure did not register among the general public at the time.) Was situation in Czechoslovakia in early 1990 so serious as to justify Zifcak’s revelations? The rest of Buchar’s interviewees do not support this view. It seems that the whole process of restructuring went on rather smoothly.
Zifcak’s case is first and foremost astonishing. The minimalistic means employed in the provocation are amazing. Zifcak organised the students’ movement, Zifcak prepared the demonstrations and then he personally fell on the Prague’s cobbled street pretending to be dead. This allows us to conclude that the communists in power were incredibly nonchalant in assessing the real mood of the street crowd or their possible reaction to the provocation. It also demonstrates once again that the true epicentre of the alleged “changes” was not on the streets but in the hushed silence of the rooms of power, and that the heroes of the events were not the anonymous leaders of the revolt but well prepared political operatives.
The course of the velvet revolution, which for some unknown reasons was for years seen as a rare example of a successful anticommunist rebellion, is just another proof that there was nothing spontaneous in the events of 1989-1991 and moreover, that this extraordinary operation, so terrifying in its immense scope, operation of guided collapse of communism, never slipped out of control of its planners.
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