COMMENT
Communism and the Graying of Character
The name of Jan Kavan
has recently cropped up in the news and has been the subject of a long
article in
The Nel/! Yorker
(November 2, 1992). He is a former Czech dis–
sident and editor of Palach Press, a dissident anti-Communist publishing
enterprise based in London, and was a member of the Czech Parliament
after the fall of Communism . But recently he has been accused of having
been a collaborator with the Czech Communist government, of being an
informer. He has disputed the charge, but so far he has not been officially
vindicated. 1 have no way of judging the truth of the matter. But I might
add a footnote to the story.
In the 1950s we received an anti-Communist "Czech Letter" from
Kavan, and it was published in
Partisall Relliel/!.
Subsequently, we pub–
lished another letter of his anonymously . Shortly afterward, I met Kavan
in London. He told me he h3d had trouble in getting out of
Czechoslovakia. He had almost cleared Customs when the assiduous in–
spectors found the n3me 3nd address of
Partisall RefJiel/!
in his diary, and
they detained him for further questioning. Fortunately, Kavan said, he
had been able to convince them of the harmlessness of the reference to
Partisall Rellielll
and was permi tted to leave.
He then told me he was going back to Czechoslovakia. And when I
told him he should not go, that it was too dangerous, he might be ar–
rested or even shot, Kavan insisted he had to go. He said it was his cause,
his mission, to combat the Communists. I couldn't dissuade him, and al–
though I am not certain, I gather that he did go back. I might add that
my instincts in this area have been quite good, and I thought at the time
that he was telling the truth. Moreover, Josef Skvorecky, whose reputa–
tion is impeccable, has written in
COllllllelltary
(Letter to the Editor,
February 1993) that the charges against Kavan and other dissidents were
made by Communists and are worthless.
The entire incident leads one to reflect on the effect of Communism
and anti-Communism on people's lives, producing what might be called
the graying of character.
In
fact, the article in
The New Yorker,
which
seemed well-informed and well-argued, made the point that people under
Communism suffered such severe, unrelenting, and diabolic pressures that
many, even some of the dissidents, were forced into meaningless but
seemingly compromising situations, which they could not resist or per–
haps completely grasp. These pressures appear to have been greater on
dissidents than on ordinary citizens, whose daily lives lay largely outside of
politics. V:iclav Havel, for example, said recently that no one, not even
