We have not learned to live in a democracy. We are not immune to totalitarianism, says the son of a tortured woman
In 1954, they sentenced Jarmila Potůčková-Taussigová to 25 years behind bars. They tortured her, but she did not confess to the fabricated charges. She saved her life. Two years earlier, its boss, Rudolf Slánský, former general secretary of the Communist Party, was executed. He confessed to the most absurd deeds. He should have been judged for something else. “My mother’s story is testimony to fanaticism and manipulation of people,” says Martin Potůček.
Descendants of communist functionaries who were executed or sentenced to many years in the trial of the Anti-State Conspiracy Center headed by Rudolf Slánský, as the propaganda of the time called him, give testimony about their parents or ancestors years later. Why did you do it in the new book “Anatomy of Communism: The True Story of One Family” and why only now?
The wrong done to my mother by her own regime has lived with me throughout my life. That is, since 1960, when she was released on amnesty after almost ten years in prison. And why now? Only recently were the relevant security and state archives declassified, so I only got access to the important documents five years ago.
Jarmila Potůčková-Taussigová became the victim of brutal interrogations by the communist State Security, many years of imprisonment, and yet she did not give up her faith in communism. This is hard to understand.
Let me clarify: although she did not abandon her communist beliefs even during the years of her imprisonment, she began to have fundamental doubts immediately after her sentence to twenty-five years in January 1954. She then definitively cut herself off from communism in the mid-1960s.
In contrast to many other co-convicted and then rehabilitated communists, she never again applied for membership in the Communist Party. In 1968, i.e. during the Prague Spring, she advocated for the rehabilitation of persecuted non-communists. There were many more of them than members of the Communist Party.
Your work is loosely based on the shorthand record of the trial with Slánský, in which communist leaders confessed to absurd accusations. Why do you think they did it? Maybe because “the KSČ was always right, even when it was wrong”, as was the principle of the time? Or because those people thought that they would cleanse the Communist Party with their confession? Or because the arrested communists did not want to endanger their family? Or simply because the brutal interrogations and torture have completely broken them?
The interrogations of the arrested were really brutal. They were watched over by Soviet advisers, so the level of cruelty and torture we can’t even imagine today.
As the investigators began to accuse each other of crimes they did not commit, their determination not to confess gradually began to weaken. Eventually they succumbed to the idea that by confessing they would help the Communist Party they still believed in and perhaps themselves in terms of punishment. They had such a strong belief in communism.
They weren’t fools, so maybe they knew what was coming. After all, they knew about Stalin’s monstrous purges in the 1930s in the Soviet Union. I don’t think they were under any illusions.
Your mother Jarmila Potůčková-Taussigová, however, was not broken even by the torture and brutality of the investigators – after all, just like, for example, Gustáv Husák. Which saved her life. Was your mom really that exceptionally strong woman?
I am deeply convinced of this. She was greatly influenced by her father – Masarykov Otakar Janovský. To put it somewhat pathetically: she was brought up as a woman who was supposed to love the truth. In the end, she also loved the Communist Party. However, in a borderline situation where she was arrested and accused of something she did not commit, she still preferred the truth to the party.
Just to make this clear: a First Republic engineer, imprisoned by the Nazis and then by the Communists for many years, writes about herself: “I entered the technical department and became a fanatical member of the Komsomol and an admirer of the USSR.” Did she cling to communism as a religion?
That’s how it was. But we have to be very sensitive to the fact that in the 1930s it tended in one way or another to the left and later to communism. They were bothered by the fact that the capitalism of that time left millions of people on the margins of society.
Martin Potůček (74)
Photo: Jan Gazdík
- Prof. PhDr. Martin Potůček, CSc., Ing. is a university teacher, public and social policy analyst, prognosticator and publicist. He works at the Institute of Sociological Studies and at the Center for Social and Economic Strategy of the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University.
- He is devoted to researching public and social policy in the Czech Republic and other post-communist countries, with a focus on the regulatory functions of the market, the state, the non-profit sector and the media, as well as public administration reforms and European integration.
- In the years 1998-2006, he worked as an adviser to the Ministers of Labor and Social Affairs, in 2002-2004 and 2014-2017 as an adviser to the Prime Ministers of the Czech Republic.
- He is the author or editor of 88 professional books and nine textbooks. He has published approximately 80 original papers in professional journals and nearly 100 research reports and policy projects.
- According to Martin Potůček, the new book “Anatomy of Communism: The True Story of a Family” is “…a document about the fact that any ideology can be reversed in a totalitarian regime, which harms the people who live in it, as well as those around them. It is a danger, before from which no society is immune.”
Not even mom’s education (she had the title engineer-geometer – editor’s note) it was not sufficient enough to understand all the complex social processes that took place from the 1930s to the 1950s. And she was far from alone. On the other hand, for example, intellectuals such as the writer Vladislav Vančura joined the Communist Party, only to be expelled from it after sobering up. Mom was probably too young to understand all the complexities of that time. Too young to be catapulted into high party positions after the war.
As for the substitution of religion for communism. This is probably hard to understand or explain today.
you know? People have always more or less attached themselves to something that transcends their existence. In addition, it often accompanies the need to communicate one’s ideas to others, to convince them. That their faith is the true one. This can be traced back to both my parents – František’s mother and father.
For a while, I looked up to Klement Gottwald, the president and chairman of the Communist Party, almost as if to God. She experienced an even greater shock when Gottwald nodded to her conviction and the death sentences of tens and hundreds of other people.
Some may find such adoration laughable.
I don’t think it’s funny. Look at the authoritarian regimes, their dictators are to the east of us. Everyone has the aforementioned need to extend their own life to varying degrees. Some put it into their children, others into their work. Dictators then want to go down in history. Today’s society suffers from a certain deficit of something that goes beyond the individual life of man. This is also very relevant today.
Explain it.
Ideology is just a simplified view of the world. It often helps us orient ourselves in situations that we cannot fully recognize. But if ideology is not tamed by reason, it will always lead to tragedies for individuals and society.
Perhaps it is worth recalling the self-examination of Oskar Valeš, a member of the shock units in the Spanish Civil War, a partisan, after the war the head of Czechoslovak intelligence and finally a prisoner, who was also never broken by the communists: “In reality, I have committed a lot of evil and stupidity. , that people are unteachable. The biggest harm and human tragedies are always and constantly fanaticism. And this as a person for whom the party was once more than religion, more than anything else. And it will be like this, unfortunately, all the time. Only for a different political party and other religions.”
Nothing to add to that.
Did your mother pay for being close to Rudolf Slánské?
When Soviet advisers with Czechoslovak helpers were preparing political trials with top representatives of the Communist Party of the Czech Republic and Rudolf Slánský ended up in their crosshairs, Jarmila Potůčková-Taussigová as his closest collaborator had to end up in them as well.
Slánský, as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Czech Republic, is undoubtedly involved in the illegal arrest of people. Mom, however, had nothing to do with it. Unfortunately, she mistakenly believed in the “growing threat of the communist regime”. Outside and inside. However she had doubts about some of the arrests. As a member of the party control commission, she even objected to Gottwald in an interview with him that something was happening that was out of the hands of the Communist Party. Still, she naively believed that the mistakes and distortions of communism could be corrected within the control apparatus of the Communist Party. So she did not participate in the search for enemies or their arrests.
We talk together about the lawlessness and repression of the 1950s in Czechoslovakia, and I actually feel as if we are witnessing something similar in Russia now.
I knew it would come up. That is why I say again: for every ideology that is not corrected by reason, there must be someone at its head who symbolizes that ideology towards the citizens, actually rather towards the formless obedient mass, in which the nation is then recognized and transformed. Through the lens of this Putin ideology, Ukrainians turn into subhumans or cockroaches that must be eliminated, exterminated.
My book “Anatomy of Communism…” is a document about the fact that any ideology can be reversed in a totalitarian political regime, which harms the people in which they already live, as well as their surroundings. It is a danger from which no company is immune.
Why wasn’t your mom rehabilitated until 1968? Almost twenty years after his arrest.
Later president and first secretary of the Communist Party Antonín Novotny with Bruno Köhler in November 1951, the mothers are threatened with illegal arrest as the main accomplices of Rudolf Slánský. Therefore, both of them did everything to hinder mom’s rehabilitation. Otherwise, they would actually indirectly accuse themselves of illegality. In addition, Mom always criticized the Stalinist Köhler, who worked closely with Soviet advisers – long before the communist coup in February 1948.
So, in my opinion, it was about their personal revenge. That’s why mom was still on probation in the sixties, so she could be re-incarcerated for any offense against half of the law at the time. And for eleven years.
Nevertheless, he actively participates in the revival process that resulted in the Prague Spring. And it continued to do so even after the occupation by the allied military states of the Warsaw Pact. She published books in the samizdat and tried to cleanse Czech and Slovak society of the ideological deposits of communism.
Your mother also lived to see him fall in November 1989. How did she take it?
Like all reasonable people: with great satisfaction that a regime that harmed the people fell. But that was clear to her a long time ago. In our discussions, she never denied her post-war naivety. She said: “We were terribly stupid to believe in communism.”
Does the forty-year reign of communism still affect us today?
Of course. Today, the main talk is about the economic downturn. However, the marasmus that still remains in people’s minds from the years of totalitarianism marks us very negatively. It was also manifested in the strong polistopada party of the Communist Party, whose members sat in the parliament until recently. They greatly influenced our lives as well. In summary: we still haven’t learned to live in a democracy. We do not act like democrats in democratic institutions.
So, if we are not sufficiently perceptive, wise and courageous, we can again slip into some form of autocratic regime. This too is one of the consequences of the forty-year rule of communism.
Video: “What grandfather did to this nation is unspeakable,” says the grandson of the executed Rudolf Slánský (December 3, 2022).
Grandpa was convicted for something he didn’t do, but he was never judged for what he did. He was jointly responsible for the devastation of society, says David Černík. | Video: Martin Veselovsky