When we look back at those epochal times and the rejoicing mobs, we usually forget, or at least do not notice, that we’re seeing only a portion, sometimes an inconsiderable one, even though it is the louder portion of the participants. Because besides its victors, every revolution has its losers, and they are usually greater in number than the victors.
When the Czechoslovak republic was coming into being, there were three and a half million Germans in the country. They were frightened by the emergence of a “republic of Czechs and Slovaks” because it meant the loss of their influence and their station as leaders. Not even the hundreds of thousands of citizens connected with the old monarchy rejoiced. Its downfall threatened the end of their world, or at least their careers.
When the German occupation ended, in addition to millions of Germans who had until recently been Czechoslovak citizens, there were hundreds of thousands of people who were somehow connected with the occupying power living in the country. They had served the Reich, informed on their fellow citizens to the gestapo. They hated both the Jews and the democrats. When the Communists carried out their well-planned coup, besides the jubilant crowd in Old Town Square in February 1948, besides the misled proletariat and several hundred deluded, naive, cunning, or party-disciplined artists who had signed the manifesto of cultural enslavement, there were many in our country who believed in democracy and had fought for it in armies abroad. There were many who refused to accept that in the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin human knowledge had reached its zenith. There were many who believed in God in the heavens, not in the palace of the Kremlin. There were thousands who owned something and suspected that the new regime would take everything from them, things that had often been the work of entire generations. But they were caught unaware by the impetuosity of the changes, numbed by the roar of the victorious crowd, the ruthless determination of the new leaders. Some decided to bide their time, others fled, and still others, out of anxiousness or calculation, decided to join the victors.
Every euphoria caused by societal change quickly disappears, and suddenly it turns out that the number of defeated outnumbers that of the victors. If the revolution enthroned a dictatorship, the new power tries to destroy the defeated by force, drive them from their cities, silence and imprison them. The most defiant are executed. Thereby an all-pervading terror is created, but at the same time disappointment, which gradually becomes apathetic inactivity or hatred, often precisely among those who allowed themselves to be lured by false promises. All of these will gradually prepare the fall of the revolutionary power.
If the dictatorship falls or even if it retreats in the face of democratic change, the elated victors soon realize with horror that the recently defeated representatives of totalitarianism are once more struggling to seize the power of which they have been deprived. One cannot defend against this intermingling of the defeated with the victors, not only because democracy refuses to persecute anyone who does not conspicuously commit an offense but also because it is often difficult to determine who is the victor and who is the conquered. It is precisely this condition that contributes to the fact that the expected societal rehabilitation seems to dissolve and disappear, and once again those who would welcome a more visible division between the victors and the conquered appear, assuming that they themselves would be among the new victors.
Thus swings the slow pendulum of history.
The Party
There were many who recognized that the goals of the Communist Party were subversive and nefarious. The moment the party took control after the war, these people were prepared to resist the new power. At that time, there were also many who believed the party would lead society to the goals that generations had longed for, and after the appalling experiences of war, the party would do everything to ensure that the long-awaited peace would endure. But even the faithful who joined the party, convinced of its ability to carry the people to lofty goals, must have seen relatively early on that it was an organization not above baseness, lies, intrigues, or even villainy.
When I joined the party, its name signified that it belonged to Czechoslovakia. In reality, however, it had long been a mere copy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The Communist Party arose in Russia (just as the Czech Communist Party did later) through the fragmentation of the Social Democrats. At the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party (it took place abroad because the activity of the party was illegal in Russia), the faction led by Lenin garnered the majority, and from that time on its shrewd leader used the epithet “Bolshevik” (that is, the majority). Lenin’s group, composed of several thousand devoted revolutionaries, seized power relatively easily with several armed campaigns at the end of the First World War. They then announced a dictatorship. And since dictatorships like to veil themselves with lofty or at least seemingly altruistic attributes, they called themselves the proletariat and announced that they were building a Socialist society, which during the next generation would become Communist, classless, and prosperous — the most just society in history.
The Bolsheviks were victorious in a country where political life, as far as it went, had been playing out in secret and where not only nonconforming politicians but also many intellectuals and artists were forced to spend parts of their lives underground or in exile. The party, whose fanatical leaders lived as conspiratorial outlaws, could not but differ fundamentally from political parties in democratic countries. Like every conspiratorial organization, it had to preserve strict discipline and introduce a military hierarchy. There could be no doubt concerning the leader’s orders; they were to be fulfilled without hesitation. In theory, this principle was called democratic centralism. The members of the party had the right to defend their opinions until a resolution was accepted, and then they had to comply. T. G. Masaryk captured the basic outline of Bolshevism in his book The Making of a State, published a few years after Soviet power took hold in Russia:
Bolshevik centralism is especially rigid; it is an abstract regime deduced from theory and forcibly implemented. Bolshevism is the absolute dictatorship of a single person and his assistants; Bolshevism is infallible and inquisitorial, and that is why it has nothing in common with science and scientific philosophy. Science, which is what democracy is, without freedom is impossible.
Lenin’s concept of dictatorship was merciless and was characterized by barbaric cruelty. Immediately after assuming power, he established a political police force that had the task of uncovering all genuine and imaginary enemies of the new regime. Lenin repeatedly demanded that the new power be ruthless. In the name of the revolution, it had the right to shoot, hang, or take hostages. Then it would take entire families hostage. If the enemies did not submit, the adults were executed and the children taken off to camps where most of them perished.