Word: czeched
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Almost 60 years ago, a Czech author may have reported a Western spy to the local authorities. The man, whose reputation is in shambles after a report released last week, is Milan Kundera who, according to a 1985 New York Times article, did for Eastern Europe “what Gabriel Garcia Marquez did for Latin America in the 1960’s and Alexander Solzhenitsyn did for Russia in the 1970?...
...know today is that Kundera’s name appears on a short police report from 1950 and that Communist counterintelligence, perhaps based on that report, arrested and sentenced a Czech-born anti-Communist spy to many years of hard labor. But government documents were routinely fabricated under Communism and an 81-year-old historian asserts that the real informant (who is no longer alive) confessed to his testimony years ago. Given the evidence at this stage, it appears that the agent was betrayed either by his college friend, her jealous boyfriend or, only possibly, Kundera himself...
...would not have guessed that from Time Magazine’s loaded title (“Was Milan Kundera a Communist Snitch?”), which overshadows the reasonably balanced content of its article. A top Italian newspaper ran a headline that read, “Kundera helped the Czech secret police,” while the German paper Die Welt likened Kundera to Günter Grass, a Nobel Prize-winning author who hid his military service for the Nazis during most of his life. Several Czech journalists and intellectuals stated they are not surprised that Kundera had once...
...While not commenting on the accuracy of the allegation against Kundera, Czech historians suggest that presented with the context, the choice to expose a a suspected enemy of the state would have been quite widespread among Czech students of the time. "It falls within the context of that era," says Ondrej Tuma, director of the Institute for Contemporary History . "The Czechoslovak society, and especially the young people, the intellectuals, were crazy about the Communist ideology. They were absolutely serious about it, including the propaganda and spy-mania. Thousands and thousands of young people would have acted the same...
...Among other things, the flap underscores the difficulty of gleaning the truth from communist- era archives. Police files similar to the one in which this document was found exist in most post-communist countries in eastern Europe. And such celebrated opponents of communism as former Czech President Vaclav Havel and Polish dissident journalist Adam Michnik have argued strenuously against their contents being divulged to the public, for fear that the information will be misinterpreted, used for political gain, or to carry out personal vendettas. Skeptics also point out that the communist-era police frequently forged documents to embarrass state enemies...