The terror of the air raids for peace omened the end of the Nazi occupation. But terror also paved the way for the rapturous welcome given to the columns of Soviet tanks bearing red stars as they rumbled through the torn-up streets of Prague in May 1945. Out from under their turrets leapt weather-beaten, sandy-haired young men bearing machine guns. Young women in nylons posed before cameras, sitting on gun barrels laced with flowers. Crowds cheered, threw hats in the air, kissed the soldiers, invited them to their homes, offered them gifts, bore their children. The good-humoured Russians laughed and brought out their accordions. People chatted about a new and happy life in a free, democratic, truly people’s Czechoslovakia. They danced, drank, and sang. Fragrance and joy filled the cobbled streets of Prague. From every lamp post and window the Soviet flag flew beside the red, white and blue colours of free Czechs.
The air raid and the rumbling tank: two key symbols of the killing power of the twentieth century. Though nobody yet knew, they were the midwives of a new system of government that would corrupt and deform the lives of Czechs for at least forty years. The basic elements of the new regime were detectable in the organized political attacks on Havel’s Uncle Miloš at the start of the cold peace. On the last day of June 1945 — a day bathed in brilliant Prague sunshine — the new Minister of Culture, Václav Kopecký, freshly back from exile in Moscow, accepted an invitation to address a gathering of film-industry workers and others on the restaurant terraces at Barrandov. It was a charity event to raise money for families whose loved ones had died at the hands of the Reichsprotektorat. Kopecký seemed irritable. He used the occasion to hurl insults, threats and warnings at all those in the industry who had ‘collaborated’ with the Nazis. Later that day, when introduced to Miloš for the first time at a meeting of the National Committee for Prague District 16, Kopecký kept up the class-war offensive. ‘I’ve heard some unpleasant things about you,’ he said in a loud voice, not shaking hands. ‘Since I am an outspoken person, I shall tell you these things to your face.’
It was a bad start for Miloš and the rest of the family. In front of other members of a Prague branch of the resistance organization of Communists and non-Communists, Kopecký went on to accuse ‘that film-industry Havel’ of associating with senior Nazis, like Karl Hermann Frank, the Higher SS and Police Leader in the Reichsprotektorat. Kopecký repeated the Nazi claim that Miloš had willingly joined the Cultural Section of the Czech National Council. And he insisted, pointing a finger at Miloš, that anybody who owned capital in either the First Republic or the Reichsprotektorat — and then made money off the Nazis — must be politically suspect.50 Miloš later denied each of these charges in a carefully worded letter to Kopecký. No reply was forthcoming. Kopecký’s aim was to discredit Miloš as a ‘class traitor’ and to expel him from the soon-to-be nationalized film industry. He succeeded — using well-tried Bolshevik methods. Rumours, even bigoted remarks about his homosexuality, continued to circulate. A network of informers was set up around him. Attempts were made to recruit his chauffeur at Barrandov studios. Elaborate secret-police files on him were built up. Miloš was soon carted off for interrogation by the Commission for Internal National Security.51 During the month of October 1945, the Communist-dominated Senate of the Disciplinary Council of the Union of Czechoslovak Film Workers voted to expel him from the film industry.
Hemmed in by methods of harassment that sometimes resembled those of the Nazis, Miloš (reported his brother, Václav’s father) began to suffer a ‘great disillusionment’.52 Many of his former friends, now concerned about their careers, their children and their lives, abandoned him. There were even family friends — like the father of Václav Havel’s good friend Radim Kopecký — who said privately that they considered Miloš to be a collaborator.53 And some former colleagues, like Otakar Vávra, atoned for their co-operation with the Nazis by becoming Communists and pitching in with their own denuciations of him. During the first week of March 1948, he and his brother were informed that the Lucernafilm company would be nationalized and renamed Czechoslovak State Film. Their appeals to have the decision reviewed were rejected, as was their own free-standing plan for nationalization. Miloš was then offered a job by the Israeli envoy in Prague to help set up film studios in the nascent state of Israel. His application to emigrate to that country was personally refused by Václav Kopecký, without any proffered explanation.
Shortly afterwards, on the last day of March 1949, the penniless and haggard Miloš was picked up by the secret police, charged under the Law for the Protection of the Republic, and put in Prague’s Pankrác prison for three months. While awaiting trial, he tried to escape across the border to Austria. But a Russian patrol nabbed him, and handed him back to the secret police in Budějovice. He spent the next two years in the dreaded Bory prison and in a labour camp near Ústí nad Labem. Depressed and ill, his face covered in a ‘glassy look, the look of a hunted man who had lost faith in human justice’54, Miloš finally returned home to stay with Václav’s family for Christmas 1951. It was a mixed homecoming. His sister-in-law, Václav’s mother Božena, concerned to protect her sons from political trouble; told him that he couldn’t stay indefinitely. ‘We’ve had enough troubles already because of you,’ she reportedly said.55 Meanwhile, young Václav, now fifteen years old, sobbed over the state of his loved uncle. So too did his brother Ivan. They were last together with Miloš at Havlov, where one summer’s afternoon, chatting while sitting on a log, he gave them each 500 crowns. Václav had the distinct impression that his favourite relative was saying goodbye. He was right. During the first week of September 1952, he and his parents heard over the wireless from Radio Free Europe, which broadcast from Frankfurt am Main, that an ‘important refugee, Miloš Havel’, travelling under the name of ‘Karel Stránský’, had been helped by American troops to escape through Vienna safely to the Federal Republic of Germany.