On Guilt
Marx’s Street
“…It was not Stalin, nor Brezhnev, nor Novotný who made me a communist. What made me one was my experience, my fighting spirit, my upbringing, and my way of feeling.”
(Ladislav Mňačko)
Laco couldn’t see much. He tried standing on his toes, but it was futile. The heads and backs of the adults around him were blocking his view of the city square. However, he could hear their anger: the whistling, the insults, and the clenching of fists preparing for a fight. Thousands of his neighbours and friends had gathered there for another demonstration in support of the Communist Party. The rage was spreading throughout the crowd, drawing them closer to the doors of the city hall; they were poised to erupt into revolt at any moment. All that was needed was a trigger.
The mayor of the city decided to give a speech from the balcony, hopeful that he would be able to defuse the tension, but in vain. Immediately after he stepped out before the crowd, a barrage of shouts and whistles drowned out his attempts to address them. Suddenly, a stray stone flew past his shoulder, shattering the balcony glass behind him. He rushed inside, trying to shield himself from the barrage of pebbles now flying his way. The protesters went on the offensive.
Laco didn’t linger either. Even though he was one of the youngest in the crowd, he was ready and knew how to fight. Together with the others, he continued hurling rocks at the police while also charging at them directly. However, the battle was hopelessly uneven. The police had guns, batons, and horses at their disposal and were able slowly to force the crowd to concede defeat. Laco, together with a few of his friends, was not spared and retreated from the square with cuts and bruises. And a powerful sense of injustice. “In that moment, I decided I would become a communist.”
Fights like this marked the childhood of Ladislav Mňačko, or Laco, as he was known to his friends. He was born in 1919 and spent his entire childhood in Martin, a city wedged between the mountains of northwestern Slovakia and part of the newly formed Czechoslovak state. His family had an unshakeable working-class background, and both of his parents belonged to local left-wing political organisations. They were not unique in that regard. Almost everyone on his street, aptly named Marx’s Street, was organised in one way or another too.
The political involvement only intensified in the aftermath of the Great Depression. Czechoslovakia, a country largely dependent on export markets, was heavily affected by the global economic downturn and experienced a steady decline in GDP after 1929. Unemployment fluctuated in double digits for most of the first half of the 1930s, with a quarter of the population without jobs at the peak of the crisis. An extensive state welfare system was almost non-existent, and workers relied heavily on their family or union membership for any social support. This was fertile ground for the communist movement. Abolishing class divisions, nationalising industrial production, and achieving full employment were all ideals painting a brighter future for the despairing workers. Seeing the deprivation and daily injustice faced by his family and neighbours, and, simultaneously, the flickers of hope in their eyes gave Laco a vague, idealistic appreciation of communism. Fighting for human dignity became synonymous with fighting for communism.
As he grew older, he not only became a regular at protests and other, smaller altercations, but also started helping in their organisation. He listened to the elders discussing strategies for political involvement, union strikes, and fighting the police. His passion and understanding of the communist movement thus kept evolving, and his friends did not fail to notice it. “You are going to be a revolutionary,” the regulars at the local pub kept telling him, seeing the sparkle in the eyes of the bright young man.
“You are going to die on the gallows,” a Gypsy fortune-teller later told him, noticing the same sparkle.
In a sense, they both turned out to be right.
Heavens Ablaze
Fly there, behind Stalin,
my dreamers, my birds,
fly there, behind Stalin,
my birds of fire!
In his hands is everything
the poor man ever dreamed,
that land of Stalin’s
is the wellspring of our strength.
Drink, birds, drink
from that deep well,
and with your fiery feathers
set the heavens ablaze.
(Milan Kundera, Člověk, Zahrada Širá, 1953)
The outbreak of the Second World War put an early end to any short-term political objectives of the communist movement in Czechoslovakia. The republic, barely twenty years old, broke into two pieces in 1939 under the weight of Hitler’s geopolitical demands: Bohemia and Moravia became detached parts of the Third Reich, while Nazi-friendly political leadership was allowed to declare an independent state in Slovakia. The newly formed totalitarian regimes in both entities officially banned all opposing political movements and quickly turned to persecuting them. Democratic and communist political leaders had no choice but to either continue their activities in clandestine form or flee into exile.
Aware of the potential danger looming over him as a communist, Mňačko decided to try his chances elsewhere. He attempted to escape to the Soviet Union, land of his dreams, twice, and both times unsuccessfully. He was released shortly after his first arrest, but the second time it was different. He was trying to escape through ports in Holland and was captured on his journey by the German police. As a foreign intruder, he was shown no mercy and sentenced to forced labour in a work camp in Essen. After several grueling months there, he managed to escape, and in 1944 was again at large, this time moving closer to his homeland. He returned to what had been Czechoslovakia and spent months on the move, frequently changing his residence to avoid arousing the suspicion of the Gestapo. In the second half of 1944, partisan brigades started forming in multiple mountainous regions around the country, fighting guerrilla warfare against the German military and waiting for the advance of the Eastern Front. Mňačko didn’t hesitate and enrolled in the partisan brigade of Jan Žižka, operating in the region of eastern Moravia. He continued fighting under their command until the beginning of 1945.
With the end of the Second World War and the fall of the Third Reich came a double liberation for some. On the one hand, a tyrannical enemy was defeated; on the other, this also meant the possibility of a new society being born. Czechoslovakia was re-established, with a coalition between exiled and underground democratic forces and the communists. Support for the latter was at an all-time high, and they became the dominant party, amassing around 40% of all votes in the elections of 1946. They gradually exploited this position to infiltrate extensively the state bureaucracy and the police, preparing for a full takeover. In February 1948, against the backdrop of mounting pressure from the Soviet Union, the Communist Party mobilized its broad masses and officially hijacked the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the state to establish a single-party regime fully backed by its utopian vision.
Mňačko was monitoring the situation closely and with excitement. After the war, he started working as a journalist for several smaller newspapers and reported on the rise of the Communist Party. Fortunately, his working-class upbringing, his war experience, and his undeniable communist background were all factors working in his favour, and very soon after the regime change in 1948, he found himself rising through the new regime’s journalistic hierarchy. He was hired as a reporter for Rudé právo, the central party paper in Prague, and was soon drawn into the circles of high-ranking politicians, including Klement Gottwald, chairman of the Communist Party. He received invitations to cover the Party’s most consequential meetings and even entered the private lives of its top officials—riding with them in their cars and seeing what went on behind the scenes of their public appearances.
He was proud to be able to witness first-hand how the ideas of building a better society were being implemented across the country. He was young, spurred to action by the end of the most destructive war humanity had ever seen, and eager to do his part in rebuilding the world anew. He was not the only one who believed that they were part of a historic moment, a movement of people taking the reins of destiny into their own hands. A whole generation of intellectuals, writers, artists, and other public figures eagerly extolled the beginning of a new era. Milan Kundera, who would later publish from French exile the masterpiece The Unbearable Lightness of Being, wrote a collection of hymns to Stalin and the new regime; Dominik Tatarka, one of the most prominent authors of Slovak literature, wrote multiple exuberant long-form pieces on the topic of industrial production. And these are merely a handful among many. The Party, the nation, and art were now understood to form a singular force aiming for the same objective.
Fire!
But should I betray you, my Party,
to which I swore my life,
then aim well, my comrades;
and you, my own brother, give the order: Fire!
(Ladislav Mňačko)
“Mňačko, from the Pravda newspaper.” He showed his badge to the state police officer stationed at the entrance to the hotel. The man, in a dark green uniform and clean-shaven, examined the credentials thoroughly and let him through the door without saying a word. Once in, Mňačko headed towards the main hall, where the trial was to take place. The hall, a glamorous and spacious room built during the era of the old Austrian-Hungarian Empire, was typically used for balls and concerts. But this time, the state repurposed it to accommodate the large audience expected to attend the trial. Mňačko found an unoccupied chair in the back, in a section reserved especially for journalists. He sat down, took out his notebook and a pen, and glanced around the packed hall to see whether he would recognise anyone. Confounded, he spotted many familiar faces patiently awaiting the arrival of the jury. In the front rows sat directors of major state companies, the regional chairman of the party, and the regional chairman of the state police. He had already crossed paths with several members of the jury too. He was vaguely acquainted with the circumstances of the trial, but only now, overlooking the crowd, did he understand that he had not been sent to some insignificant local case. This felt like something much larger.
In the front row, wedged between two state police officers, sat the defendant, Ladislav Galan, a man in his late thirties wearing a dark grey suit. He was pensively staring at the wooden floor, trying to avoid eye contact with anyone in the room. Just a few months ago, he was still directing the East Slovak Milling Enterprise, a state-owned company responsible for the production and supply of flour for the entire eastern portion of the republic. And now he was there, sitting in front of his wife, his friends, his old colleagues, and countless members of the public unknown to him, about to be publicly questioned about his purported attempts at sabotaging the communist regime.
The trial started with an expansive speech by the prosecutor detailing the accusations against the defendant. Galan was said to have intentionally infected the company’s mill storage warehouses with worms, to have knowingly supplied medically harmful flour to local bakeries, and, on top of that, to have used the company’s finances for personal purposes. The witnesses’ testimonies only strengthened the case. According to his subordinates and colleagues, his management style was condescending and abusive, and he was said to have physically attacked his employees on multiple occasions. The reason for his subversive behaviour and hatred of the working class was his deeply held bourgeois views, originating in his middle-class upbringing. It was a lost case, the prosecutor stressed—a working-class enemy without hope of change.
Even though the defence tried to counter the scathing picture of Galan, the prosecutor’s and the witnesses’ accounts seemed to have prevailed. Opinion in the room was starting to settle on the view that the defendant was an insidious and clever individual trying to infiltrate and undermine the advance of communist society.
The head judge, a ruthless lawyer who had presided over multiple other high-profile trials of that era, was hoping to see Galan break down, to publicly strengthen the legitimacy of the charges raised against him. He asked Galan whether he regretted any of his actions. Galan, stone-faced, took a deep breath and looked around the dead-silent courtroom as if to sear into his mind forever the faces of all those sitting in front of him. His old colleagues and friends all looked away toward the large glass windows, the padded backs of the chairs in front of them, and the wooden flooring.
“There is nothing to regret, as I have never committed any crimes,” Galan proclaimed without stuttering, upright, looking straight ahead. A penetrating silence followed. Mňačko, one of the few who dared to meet Galan’s eyes, felt a pang of doubt.
The head judge stepped in to dispel the heavy silence and accused the defendant of offending the court. A few more exchanges followed, and then the jury announced that they would withdraw to decide. After a short deliberation, they returned and silenced the room once more: the verdict was death, with no possibility of appeal. Galan buried his face in his hands, struggling to absorb the news. Behind him, his wife collapsed to the floor and burst into tears while the hall began to empty.
Mňačko was one of the first to leave the stifling courtroom. He stepped out into the summer streets of Košice feeling uneasy, unable to stop turning over in his mind what he had just witnessed. He believed the defendant had infected the mills, and could accept the charge of self-enrichment. But a death for that? And how could he explain Galan’s steadfast denial? The doubts were not going anywhere.
However, this was not a time for nuance. His editor was waiting for an article from him within the next couple of days, and the official view of the trial was now fully sanctioned by the Communist Party. “It’s a just sentence at its core; these formalities don’t matter.” Mňačko tried to convince himself of the correctness of the verdict and explain away any scepticism. On Monday, he returned to Bratislava and published a scathing piece in Pravda, ferociously attacking Galan and justifying the ruthless decision: “Galan is a dangerous individual, a sworn enemy of the working class, a cunning fox, and an arrogant criminal.” The message was unequivocal—they would not allow anyone to sabotage the advancing triumph of communism.
Galan’s trial was not the only prominent court case Mňačko covered. Later in the same year, he attended the trial of Žingor and his associates, honoured guerrilla fighters from the Second World War, who were now accused of organising a subversive plot against the state. Mňačko wrote another vicious news piece in which he condemned the actions of the group, again justifying the death sentences. In 1952, he added fuel to the fire during the famous Slánský trial, when he accused Vladimír Clementis, a politician and author, of being “a war criminal of the worst kind and an agent of imperialism”. In 1954, another celebrated author of his generation, Ladislav Novomeský, had to defend himself against an indictment on charges of anti-state rebellion. Mňačko, once a close friend and devoted admirer of his, did not let his feelings conflict with the official stance of the Party. He completely denounced Novomeský and ignored all cries for help from his relatives.
His own family was not spared by his belief in the regime’s right to purge class enemies either. His brother, Jan Mňačko, was jailed in 1950 and accused of being part of a large network of anti-communist sympathisers operating in eastern Moravia. The so-called Svetlana group, comprising hundreds of members, was primarily composed of ex-guerrilla fighters and was actively trying to instigate a rebellion against the regime. However, the state police were able to infiltrate the group early on and acted quickly to arrest its members after gathering enough evidence. Dozens of public trials, whose purpose was rather ostentatious than substantive, were held against them afterwards. Thirteen people were executed, fourteen given life sentences, and the rest were sent to communist forced labour camps for terms that added up to hundreds of years in all. That was Jan’s fate too. He was sentenced to five years in the most feared forced labour camp of the regime, the so-called uranium mines of Jáchymov. Mňačko, sincerely believing in the righteousness of the trial and the fairness of the verdicts, never dared to help his brother and defended the punishment to the rest of his family and his closest friends.
The trials of Galan, Žingor, Slánský, and the Svetlana case all belonged to a systematic and persistent effort by the newly established communist regime to strengthen its grip on the state and suppress any dissenting voices. After 1948, amid a partial wave of exuberance over the regime takeover, the judicial machinery began by eliminating clearly designated enemies of the state—politicians of democratic parties influential in the previous political system, important business figures, and clergy. Multiple highly publicised political trials were intended to directly liquidate political opposition and dissuade anyone from continuing to express divergent views. Additionally, through the large-scale imprisonment of the clergy, the state neutralised a potentially uncomfortable critical force with major popular appeal. Žingor and Mňačko’s brother were both convicted as part of this first wave of political trials.
The judicial machinery, though, did not stop after eliminating explicit opposition to the state. The political trials continued in the first half of the 1950s, mostly targeting the so-called enemies inside the party. These were prominent members of the communist regime who suddenly found themselves convicted on the most outrageous charges of hiding anti-communist attitudes and even planning a regime change. These trials were mostly a public reflection of internal infighting within the Party itself and an attempt to deflect the blame for mounting economic failures. The trials against Galan and Slánský were perfect examples of this new wave of political exploitation of the justice system.
Even though Mňačko continued to appear publicly as an unfiltered mouthpiece of the regime throughout this period of intense repression, Galan’s trial privately triggered a process of disillusionment, and he began to entertain doubts about the infallibility of the communist system. This must have been a painful reckoning. Not only would any such revelation fundamentally tarnish the ideals and collective work of the past years, but Mňačko himself would also need to face the human wreckage he had helped cause: lives shattered, families destroyed, and men condemned by the machinery his articles had helped defend. Furthermore, anyone even slightly deviating from the officially sanctioned view of the communist justice system could soon find themselves among the accused. All of this made confronting the contradictory reality that much more arduous and that much more personal.
However, the evidence confuting the regime was mounting, and it took increasingly intricate explanations to keep justifying its actions. At first, Mňačko tried to brush away any doubts by appealing to formalities or his youthful ignorance. “When a forest is being cut down, the chips will fly” was a common saying among communists at the time—it meant that mistakes were inevitable, but all in the name of a higher good. As the reach of repression kept widening, though, it was harder to stick to these bare-bones excuses. Not only people Mňačko had never met were being devoured by the insatiable machinery of the regime; people closer to him were being drawn in as well. Some, fearing judgment and repercussions if they said anything critical in the presence of a journalist working at the heart of the beast, severed all contact with him. Others dared to confront him directly. More and more often, he found himself hearing variations on the same question: “Are you just naive, or a full-on hypocrite?”
As these confrontations kept piling up, one of his closest friends, whose sincere communist beliefs he had never doubted, was intimidated and arrested by the state police. This must have been an apparent misunderstanding, Mňačko thought. He rushed to intercede on behalf of his friend, hoping to leverage his extensive contacts and public persona to clear up the situation. However, he received a bitter response from the official assigned to the case at the justice department: “Why are you sticking your nose into things that are none of your business? Looking for trouble? Want to go after him?” Mňačko was left utterly speechless. He realised that this was no mere bureaucratic mistake, but a calculated and targeted abuse of power. And that was the final straw for him. His already frayed faith in the rule of law gave way.
Finally, there was nothing stopping him now from sobering up about his naive defence of the fabricated judicial trials. One moment in particular from those tense times kept coming back: Galan’s confident denial of any charges. Not long after the jury delivered the verdict, the justice department secretly commuted the death sentence to twenty years. To Mňačko, that already seemed like a tacit admission that a mistake had been made. Now, void of any illusions about the justice system, he was eager to confirm his suspicions. He began by visiting the prosecutor, an old contact of his. “Why do you even care about this anymore?” Annoyed, the prosecutor tried to brush him off, but Mňačko insisted: “You want to know how it was? They called me in the evening and told me I was flying to Košice the next morning. At the airport, they shoved the case documents into my hands. I had an hour to study them before the trial began. The final page contained the sentence: death.” He then heard similar stories from other witnesses who had originally testified against Galan. They confessed that they had been forced to give evidence against their will, and all of them actually believed that Galan was a great leader for the company and the region.
Gradually, and not without resistance, Mňačko thus realised that in Galan’s trial, and in so many others, he had been part of the machine that was imprisoning and executing innocent people. And not only that. He also understood that this would not stop until something fundamental changed. He realised he would need to fight once again.
Delayed Reportages
Prague’s Wenceslas Square was a chaotic whirlwind of people rushing from side to side, like any other working day at this central city junction. Mňačko was briskly charging ahead to reach its upper section, unaware of the bustle swirling around him. He was lost in thought, his gaze fixed on the cobbles disappearing behind his feet, as he turned over two small pieces of paper between his fingers. These were the skeletons of two versions of the speech he was expected to deliver shortly before a packed crowd of his fellow writers. In one, he was tracing the journey of literature in Czechoslovakia since the regime takeover, and taking pride in its achievements in helping to shape the realisation of communist ideals. In the other, much more personal, he wanted to open up about his doubts and failures in defending the truth as an intellectual. He was deciding between continuing to live under a creeping, silent resignation and publicly admitting to mistakes, thus unambiguously blaming the regime too, and committing himself never to repeat them again.
It was the second day of the national symposium of the Writers’ Association, where the majority of the nation’s authors had gathered to discuss developments in Czechoslovak literature over the past few years. Many dear friends and colleagues of Mňačko—poets, fiction writers, journalists—occupied the seats around him in the prestigious building of the National Council. The day was packed with speeches from morning until early evening, on themes as diverse as dissecting the relationship between Slovak and Czech literature and exploring gaps and opportunities in children’s literature from a socialist perspective.
Mňačko’s slot was scheduled for the afternoon, after a lecture by Adolf Branald on the need to reinvigorate Czechoslovakia’s native adventure literature. As Branald’s speech was nearing its end, Mňačko took the crumpled papers from his pocket and placed them folded on the desk in front of him. Staring decisively toward the front, he waited for his turn, facing the lectern on the dais where the chairman, the President of the Republic, and several other high-profile political functionaries were seated. Branald finished his speech with a call for his fellow writers to take up the neglected genre of adventure literature as a means of encouraging reading among younger generations. He folded the papers on the lectern, and the crowd took it as the signal to applaud. The chairman announced the next speaker. Mňačko lifted his head, rose, and stepped sideways to the end of the aisle. He walked purposefully to the front of the hall and stepped behind the lectern. He glanced at the faces of his friends and of so many others he respected and admired, and waited for the murmur to settle.
“Comrades, let me share with you what’s keeping me awake at night.”
Mňačko decided to open up, sincerely and unambiguously. He questioned his role as a journalist for failing to write about things that contradicted the official stance of the Party. He questioned his role as a writer for succumbing to artificial templates and clichés in his work. And he questioned his role as a human being for his naive justifications of imprisoning innocent people. He committed himself never to repeat these mistakes. At the end of the speech, he apologised for what seemed an irrelevant digression:
“Perhaps it seemed to you that my contribution was not very focused on questions of literature. It seems to me that human dignity, truthfulness, courage, the fight against bureaucratism, and honest commitment — both as writers and as citizens — are really questions of our standing in society. That is why they are, especially now, the most important questions for the future of our literature.”
Delegates interrupted his speech again and again with applause, and his closing lines drew long, loud ovations that filled the hall. At the end of the day, several of the attendees rushed to thank Mňačko for expressing publicly what many of them had been feeling inside.
The symposium of the Writers’ Association in 1956 became a landmark event in the public life of Czechoslovakia. The previous one had taken place in 1949, not long after the regime takeover, and was characterised by the exuberant mood of the writers and their overwhelming commitment to engaged communist literature. Since then, society had undergone massive transformations. Extensive industrialisation was accompanied by consumer shortages and costly monetary devaluations. In the political realm, the persecution of dissent had continued relentlessly since the early days of the regime.
Additionally, there was a major shift on the international scene. The repercussions of Stalin’s death in 1953 gradually began to percolate through the fabric of Soviet society and culminated in the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1956, where the new chairman, Nikita Khrushchev, delivered the famous speech fiercely criticising Stalin’s cult of personality and its detrimental consequences for building communist society. He publicly acknowledged and denounced some examples of political repression (mostly against other communists) and urged a complete break with the recent past. This speech is heralded as the beginning of the so-called Khrushchev Thaw, a set of policies that would produce some easing in the level of political repression.
The speech did not take long to spread to other parts of the Soviet Union. All major communist officials from the bloc were secretly informed of its contents shortly afterwards. In Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party spent months trying to suppress the exact details of the speech, but acknowledged that there had been a change in official Soviet policy. They tried to deflect the main blame from Stalin onto an abstract cult of personality, and placed even greater emphasis on the message of a return to the original Marxist-Leninist ideals as they understood them.
This general shift in mood among Czechoslovak politicians and the intelligentsia, though still stifled, encouraged critical voices to emerge. The second Writers’ Congress was one of the first major events at which discontent became impossible to suppress. Mňačko was among the first, but he was not the only speaker to present a more nuanced view of literature’s role in the past few years. As the congress progressed, multiple other authors echoed and even pushed further re-evaluations of the regime’s failures. Jaroslav Seifert, who would later become a Nobel Prize laureate, brazenly criticised the silencing and persecution of undesirable authors. František Hrubín, another prestigious Czech writer, emphasised the need to abandon censorship and editorial interference. And many others called for a more open literature, accepting a wider range of styles and topics than the officially approved ‘socialist realism’.
For Mňačko, the Writers’ Congress was just the start of his redemption journey. He had already been asking the courts about the possibility of re-evaluating the verdict in Galan’s trial, but he resolved to press the case further. He used his contacts in political circles and sent several letters to the highest-ranking officials documenting the judicial mistakes made against Galan. Galan himself had been trying from prison to obtain a revision of his status, and it seems the combined efforts paid off: in 1956 he was freed, and after a few more legal battles was even entirely rehabilitated.
Mňačko didn’t stop there, though. In 1956, he left his position as chief editor of the Pravda newspaper to focus on writing again. Quickly and rather eagerly, he began getting into persistent conflict with bureaucratic officials and their censorship staff. For a couple of years, he brazenly stopped attending meetings of the Union of Slovak Writers, as he deemed it too conformist in its alignment with dominant political stances. The hostility escalated in 1961 when he physically attacked a Communist official during an informal meeting of the Party with artists. As a consequence, he was forced to resign from the Union of Slovak Writers and had to step back from his public commitments. He was now in an overt stand-off with the regime.
He didn’t stop writing, though. He resolved to travel extensively around Slovakia and listen to more stories of the communist excesses of the past decade. He was secretly gathering material for a book in which he would document those failures: examples of judicial abuse, bureaucratic overstepping, and economic mishandling—and his own failures to speak out. However, as an unwelcome author now, he had to wait for his time to shine again.
Fortunately, the situation in Czechoslovakia began slowly but firmly to undergo major shifts towards liberalisation in the early 1960s. In the political sphere, the Czechoslovak Communist Party admitted to grave judicial failures during the 1950s and created multiple commissions to rehabilitate the victims. As a result, several previously sentenced communists, including the author Ladislav Novomeský, were legally cleared of alleged wrongdoings and allowed to enter public life again. In the economic sphere, major reforms were being discussed that would reduce the Party’s control over individual companies—in both their day-to-day operations and their strategic direction.
In this environment of advancing openness, Mňačko was readmitted to the Union of Slovak Writers in 1963 and entered public life again. He rushed to complete the draft of his book, and after battling political reluctance and repelling censorship pressure from the hard-line wing of the Party, he was allowed to publish it. And the public response spoke for itself. Delayed Reportages became an overnight success, a true bestseller in the modern sense of the word. The publisher had to reprint the book twice within a few months, and total circulation passed 100,000 copies—an extraordinary figure in a country of thirteen million, comparable only to what the biggest bestsellers achieve today.
The simple fact that the book was allowed to be published and discussed publicly amid such interest was proof that the times were changing. And culture was only one part of this widening of freedoms. The Party approved the economic reforms in 1965 and thus officially embraced market forces. Citizens began engaging politically again, organising protests, petitions, and public discussions. The opening up of the regime culminated formally in 1968, when the reformist politician Alexander Dubček became chairman of the Communist Party, thus initiating the well-known Prague Spring. The atmosphere recalled the early post-war years: a renewed belief, among intellectuals and ordinary people alike, that the country was moving towards something better. The future looked hopeful again.
Seventh Night
“Dear listeners, stay by your radios. Wake your friends in the night; wake your fellow citizens in their homes — because in a moment Czechoslovak Radio will broadcast an extraordinarily important message.”
The country had just been lulled to sleep; the streets had emptied; the rattling of cars and trams in the cities had subsided; and the mosaic of lights had waned. It felt like a normal summer Tuesday night, warm and still. Only a few were aware that in a couple of hours their fellow citizens would be waking up to a sobering new reality.
The employees of Czechoslovak Radio were among the few. Their headquarters on Vinohradská Street in Prague stood in stark contrast to the surrounding serene streets—the lights gleaming from the large glass windows onto the street, people rushing around the narrow corridors, phones buzzing without interruption. They had been receiving reports from the ground, from the border territories of the republic, and were beginning to realise the nature of the tragedy they were witnessing. They felt the suffocating weight of the moment, like a secret too burdensome to carry. At 1.55 a.m., the radio commenced a historic broadcast announcing the invasion of the Czechoslovak Republic:
“Yesterday, 20 August 1968, at about eleven o’clock at night, the armies of the Soviet Union, the Polish People’s Republic, the German Democratic Republic, the Hungarian People’s Republic, and the Bulgarian People’s Republic crossed the state borders of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic — without the knowledge of the President, the Chairman of the National Assembly, the Prime Minister, or even the First Secretary of the Party. The Presidium of the Communist Party Central Committee condemned the act as a violation both of the principles of relations among socialist states and of the fundamental norms of international law.”
People started waking up en masse shortly after the announcement, with tanks arriving in the capital at five in the morning. The initial confusion surrounding the intent and scale of the invasion quickly turned into outrage at the betrayal by their ‘friendly’ socialist neighbours. Full-on confrontations around the country followed—from setting tanks on fire and building barricades to erasing street and direction signs meant to mislead the foreign invaders.
Much as the news caught Mňačko off guard, it was not a complete surprise to him. He could still remember his feelings of disbelief on hearing the news of Soviet troops passing through the streets of Berlin and other East German cities suppressing civilian unrest in 1953. He also had fresh in his mind images of protesters resisting Soviet tanks as they invaded the streets of Budapest in 1956. He was no longer the naive revolutionary who had looked on Russia as a dreamland and a world saviour, as he had twenty years before. As he approached his fiftieth birthday, he was acutely aware of the destabilising and potentially detrimental effect that Goliath had on its neighbours. And now he was seeing it with his own eyes: the cities of his country brimming with tanks, Soviet officers patrolling the streets, and protesters being attacked and violently dispersed.
As the invasion was unravelling across Czechoslovakia and citizens were desperately trying to come to terms with the consequences, the highest political officials were flown to the Soviet Union to discuss the future of the country. Soviet officials, headed by Chairman Brezhnev, had for some time been looking with alarm at the liberalisation efforts and were determined to reverse them in their entirety. The discussions between Czechoslovak and Soviet officials were thus mostly formal—the reality of the armed presence left reformist politicians little room to manoeuvre. With no space to negotiate, on 25 August they signed the so-called Moscow Protocol, agreeing to a ‘temporary’ intervention and committing to reversing the democratisation achievements of the past few years. On 27 August they were flown back to Prague and announced to the nation the unalterable conditions of the intervention.
For Mňačko, this was the end of it. The country was now destined to remain utterly under Soviet control for an indefinite period. This meant a full stop to any reformist or liberalisation efforts—a full stop to further economic freedoms, to freedom of speech, and to freedom of the press. Mňačko had no doubt that this meant an end to his journalistic career. But not only that. He feared that the heavy presence of Russian intelligence and political officers might also signal an end to his freedom. As one of the most vocal and prominent journalists, with several acclaimed, critical books to his name and known for regularly voicing opinions contrarian to the regime, Mňačko now saw his future in jeopardy.
He could stay, abstain from public life, and pray that the guardians of the new regime would be merciful—or would forget him in the whirlwind of the upcoming changes. Or he could leave the country. Maybe forever. Leave behind his friends, the bustling press offices of Pravda in the centre of Bratislava, the calm bank of the Danube that had given him shade and refuge in times of doubt.
On the seventh night after the occupation, as the situation started crystallising and there was no end in sight to Soviet control, he and his wife decided to leave. In the middle of the night he made quick, heartfelt calls to his closest colleagues and friends, suppressing tears and pushing aside doubts about whether he would ever see them again. They rushed to leave as quickly as they could, before remorse could take hold.
“Could you get us to the border crossing with Austria?”
The taxi driver stared at the couple for a while, realising the purpose of this assignment. His eyes made it clear that he had made this run before. He signalled them to get in, started the engine, and pulled away. The late-night streets of Bratislava were barren, void of any human presence; only an occasional car passed in the opposite direction, mostly carrying workers home from their night shifts. They drove along streets embellished with Czechoslovak flags, past buildings tagged with anti-Soviet proclamations—all reminders of the drama creeping beneath the surface of the tired city.
They arrived at the Berg crossing. Mňačko handed the driver the notes, a generous tip among them, shook his hand, and they stepped out of the car. They took their luggage from the boot—the two suitcases now comprising all their possessions—and walked towards the unassuming side buildings demarcating the border. Until recently, this had been a highly guarded and monitored area, with any access to Austria strictly forbidden unless explicitly approved by the Party. However, the chaos of the invasion had made the border much more permeable, with police patrols even helping people cross.
Mňačko stopped before the barrier, turned around, and looked at the murky outlines of the buildings of Bratislava in the distance, daylight slowly beginning to rise above the skyline. He was leaving behind the country he loved. The country whose destiny he had wished to shape for the better. He had failed; he had stood up, dusted himself off, and continued hoping, persistently—some would say obstinately. But history was moving in a different direction now, and for the first time he felt he no longer had the power to fight it.
He clutched the hand of his wife, and started walking across the border.
Sources
Bauer, Michal, ed. II. sjezd Svazu československých spisovatelů: 22.–29. 4. 1956 (protokol). Prague: Akropolis, 2011. https://static.artforum.sk/media/products-files/0a/67/131689-DB73865.pdf.
Česká televize. “Televizní vysílání v srpnu 1968.” https://www.ceskatelevize.cz/porady/12398563569-televizni-vysilani-v-srpnu-1968/268531346430003/.
Kinčok, Branislav. Politické procesy na Slovensku v rokoch 1948–1954. Bratislava: Ústav pamäti národa, 2019. https://www.upn.gov.sk/publikacie_web/politicke-procesy-na-slovensku-1948-1954.pdf.
Leikert, Jozef. Taký bol Ladislav Mňačko: v historickom kontexte do roku 1968. Brno: Onufrius, 2007.
Mňačko, Ladislav. Kde končia prašné cesty. Bratislava: Vydavateľstvo Osveta, 1963.
Mňačko, Ladislav. Oneskorené reportáže. Bratislava: Vydavateľstvo politickej literatúry, 1963.
Mňačko, Ladislav. Siedma noc: Skúsenosti a obžaloba jedného komunistu. Translated by Agnesa Juríková. Bratislava: Práca, 1990. First published as Die siebente Nacht: Erkenntnis und Anklage eines Kommunisten. Vienna: Fritz Molden, 1968.
Strothmann, Dietrich. “Flucht nach der siebenten Nacht.” Die Zeit, November 1, 1968. https://www.zeit.de/1968/44/flucht-nach-der-siebenten-nacht.