Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

In the spring of 1972 Andropov had a private meeting with Kaska. His manner was more assertive than that of Tsvigun a year earlier. He insisted that opposition forces were still strong, despite the “stabilization” in Czechoslovakia and the strengthening of the Communist Party’s authority, and that they were being infiltrated by Western intelligence services. Agent penetration of the opposition therefore remained essential. 24The opposition source to which Andropov attached most importance probably remained Leo Lappi (FREDDI). Still posing as a committed West German supporter of the Prague Spring, the illegal FYODOROV had regular meetings with Lappi in Prague and East Berlin. On January 25, 1972 Fyodor Konstantinovich Mortin, who had succeeded Sakharovsky as head of the FCD, sought Andropov’s permission to trick Lappi into becoming a Soviet agent by a “false flag” deception which concealed the role of the KGB. Andropov gave his approval on January 29 and FYODOROV went ahead with the recruitment, claiming to be working for the West German BND. An additional reason for the Centre’s interest in Lappi was that his brother Karl was a West German citizen who, according to KGB files, was “close” to two prominent FRG politicians. 25

Despite Kaska’s personal sycophancy towards his KGB advisers and the extensive purge which he had overseen, the Centre remained dissatisfied with the ideological purity of the StB. In August 1972 Andropov reported to the CPSU Central Committee that “internal adversaries” in the StB were striving to prevent the completion of “normalization.” 26A further KGB report to the Central Committee in November cited complaints from its agents and informers within the Czechoslovak Ministry of Internal Affairs that leading posts in the ministry continued to be occupied by “people who do not inspire political confidence.” 27The KGB also received numerous protests from its informants that the disgraced leaders of the Prague Spring and their families were being insufficiently persecuted. Viliam Šalgovič, who had assisted the Soviet invasion in 1968 and had been promoted to the CPCz Central Committee in 1970, complained that the children of “right-wing leaders” were being allowed to enter the universities. Worse still, the children of three disgraced former members of the Presidium—Dubček, Štefan Sádovský and Julius Turček—had been given “excellent marks” in their entrance examinations. 28

Šalgovič’s complaint reflected the self-righteous vengefulness of the Soviet sycophants rather than any failure to purge the universities. In 1969-70 900 out of 3,500 university professors were dismissed. All Czech literary and cultural journals were closed down. Unemployed academics and writers were forced to seek new careers as lavatory cleaners, building laborers and boiler-room stokers. Soon after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972, Heinrich Böll described Czechoslovakia as “a veritable cultural cemetery.” 29

MANY OF THE reports received by the Centre throughout the period of “normalization” concerned continued covert feuding within the CPCz leadership. In December 1972 Jakeš complained to the KGB liaison office that Husák had ordered the telephones of all Presidium members to be tapped. The working atmosphere within the Central Committee was now, he claimed, so poisonous that the Novotný era appeared, by comparison, a golden age. 30In February 1973 Jakeš and three other leading Soviet loyalists—Presidium members Karel Hoffmann and Antonín Kapek and party secretary Miloslav Hruškovič—again protested to the KGB about what they claimed were “attempts to squeeze out internationalist Communists from important posts.” 31Among other intrigues within the Party leadership reported by the KGB to Moscow during 1973 was the claim that the realist Prime Minister Štrougal was seeking to ingratiate himself with Husák’s internationalist deputy Bil’ak by methods which included giving Bil’ak’s daughter a present costing 10,000 crowns, debited to the budget of the Czechoslovak television service. 32

On February 28, 1973 Kaska was killed in an aircrash while visiting his Polish opposite number and was succeeded as Minister of Internal Affairs by Jaromír Obzina, who promptly gave a sycophantic display of his internationalist credentials. “For the CPSU and for Comrade Brezhnev,” he told the KGB liaison, he was “ready to carry out any assignment.” 33Obzina, however, quickly became caught up in Husák’s attempts to increase his personal prestige by combining, like Novotný before the Prague Spring, the post of President of the Republic with that of General Secretary of the CPCz. At the end of 1973, probably at Husák’s request, Obzina began trying to win over internationalists opposed to his ambitions for the presidency. According to KGB reports from Prague, a group of Soviet loyalists headed by Hoffmann, Indra, Jakeš and Kapek (all in close touch with both the KGB and the Soviet embassy) continued to resist any attempt to combine the two posts. 34The growing senility of Ludvík Svoboda, who had succeeded Novotný as president in 1968, however, played into Husák’s hands. In May 1975 he replaced the by now demented Svoboda as head of state. Rudé právo celebrated the occasion by publishing five large photographs of Husák, each showing him in the company of one of the leaders of the five Warsaw Pact countries who had invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968. 35

At the time of Husák’s apotheosis, Dubček was working as a mechanic with the Slovak Forestry Commission under constant surveillance and frequent harassment by the StB. 36On October 2, 1975 the Centre reported to Brezhnev that Dubček had sent compromising material on Husák to the Western media. Based on information supplied by Dubček, the West German and Austrian press had reported that during the war Husak had accompanied a group of Nazi journalists to the Katyn Wood near Smolensk, where the Germans had exhumed the bodies of several thousand Polish officers shot by the NKVD (an atrocity blamed by Moscow on the Germans). Dubček was twice summoned for questioning by the StB at the Slovakian interior ministry. The KGB was deeply dissatisfied by the outcome. “At the interrogation,” it informed Brezhnev, “Dubček conducted himself provocatively, categorically refusing to answer questions and declaring that in future he would protest against being subjected to pressure.” Dubček refused to sign either a denial that he had provided the information on Husák or a protest at the use of his name by the Western press, and threatened to react “decisively” if “repressive measures” were taken against him. Husák meanwhile wrote to Obzina to protest his innocence of the charges against him. 37

Despite Husák’s success in capturing the presidency, his power was more circumscribed than Novotný’s a decade earlier. His second-in-command, the internationalist Bil’ak, enjoyed greater authority and influence than any other deputy in eastern Europe. Having rejected the idea of a regime wholly dominated by notorious hardliners, the Kremlin, with some misgivings, regarded the Husák-Bil’ak combination as the best available. A KGB report from Prague at the end of the decade reported in thinly disguised language that, despite growing friction between Husák and Bil’ak, neither was attempting to topple the other because they knew that Moscow would not allow it:

Business-like relations between the leaders of Czechoslovakia are being maintained largely because of the fact that Husák Bil’ak and other members of the Presidium of the Czechoslovak Communist Party know that the top leadership of the CPSU gave their full, firm and uncompromising support to Husák and Bil’ak. For both, this is a serious restraining factor for maintaining normal working relations between the two of them, and the situation in the Presidium of the Czechoslovak Communist Party largely depends on their mutual relations. 38