Who still remembers František Kriegel, member, in 1968, of the Czechoslovak delegation summoned to Moscow and one of the few to stand up to Brezhnev? And who remembers his itinerary through the International Brigades in Spain? His epic in China during the war?
If there is a destiny that aptly illustrates the complexity of communism, the bankruptcy of its utopia, and a struggle for one and the same freedom from the beginning to the end of his existence, it is indeed that of Franz Kriegel, “Franta.”
Franz Kriegel was born on April 10, 1908, in Stanisławów in Ukraine (in Poland, between the two wars), into a Jewish family of the “petty bourgeoisie” (his father a baker or an entrepreneur? One does not know; the sources diverge). After passing his baccalaureate in his native town in 1926, he left — on account of the “numerus clausus” — for Czechoslovakia, to study medicine at the German university of Prague1. His father died very young, and his mother not having the means to pay for his studies, Franta found himself obliged to earn his living by giving private lessons and doing odd jobs. In 1934 he completed his studies and began an internship at the general-medicine clinic of Prague.
In Prague, the communist adventure began for him: in 1931, he joined the Czech Communist Party (CCP), of which he quickly became an active member. He would be an instructor in the trade unions, also bringing political support to the Party’s workplace cells. When the Comintern decided to send volunteers to Spain, Franta would ask the Party for permission to go there. At the end of November 1936, he thus set off from Prague for France and arrived in Spain on December 10, 19362.
There he would “climb the ranks,” if such a vocabulary is at all suited to the reality of the foreign volunteers’ struggle in Spain. From the Base of the International Brigades at Albacete, he was sent to the XIth Brigade, where he would take charge of the medical responsibility for evacuation. He would become chief medical officer of the XIth Brigade3 and would hold this function until the month of June. He would be raised to the rank of captain, then of commander. Later, he would for a long time be chief medical officer of the 45th division4. In 1938 he would receive the card of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE).
In Spain, Franta took initiatives, displayed a great gift for organization. His interventions were highly prized, astonishing for a man who, ten months earlier, was still only a civilian to whom military service was unknown. He had under his command 21 doctors and 3 Spanish “practicantes”5 (who at the time sometimes performed the function of battalion doctor); his division then numbered about 6,000 men.
Difficult with his collaborators or his subordinates, and even with the higher authorities, Franta was never submissive, neither in Spain nor later in Czechoslovakia.
While acknowledging his medical, military, and political aptitudes, his comrades in Spain spoke also of his faults. The commander of the 45th division, Hans Kahle, thus mentions his temperament: “violent” and authoritarian. Dr. E. Sanmartí (head of the Health Service of the Brigades from the summer of 1938) and the political commissar of this sector, Carlos, as well as Dr. Minkov, a high-ranking communist cadre of the Health Service in Spain, accuse him of often having “individualistic attitudes.” Another doctor come from Poland, Samuel Flato, writes in his “Opinion” — that must so characteristic of communist mores — on Franta: “Kriegel, an energetic and capable man but with a very strong personal ambition that sometimes leads him to serious faults and even to indiscipline toward the Party”6. Wiktor Taubenfligel, another doctor of Polish origin who, in the company of Kriegel and other doctors, would undertake, after Spain, the campaigns of China and Burma, writes in his memoirs7: “Kriegel is… sure of himself… often behaves in a brutal manner toward others… despite all that, he is no doubt the most gifted of us all.” Still more severe, from the standpoint of the communist leaders, was the opinion of Edo8 who, in 1940, taking up the reproaches made to Franta in Spain, speaks of his undisciplined conduct in the internment camp in France and of the defense he had brought to Dr. Bachrach (“Kuba”), a “very suspect” man according to the all-powerful André Marty, an opinion taken up by l’Humanité with a warning against this doctor. The more discerning knew what this language signified. Edo writes: “It is only after observing that he cannot leave for China without the Party’s agreement that he (Kriegel) acknowledged his wrongs, as well as his error of judgment regarding Kuba… The Party’s confidence in Kriegel is limited. It may be that all this depends on a deviation of his character or on a very pronounced individualism that puts his own interests before those of the Party.”
From June 1938 on, Franta was seconded to the Ministry of National Defense, to the Sección Ayuda Médica Extranjera, where he would remain until the demobilization of the Brigades. He would then join the grouping of demobilized Poles at Palafrugell. When the Republic lost Barcelona, in January 1939, the Pole Wacław Komar, military commander of Palafrugell, would appoint him “in charge of the affairs of the town hall”9, a function that Franta describes in an article entitled “10 days as mayor of Palafrugell,” published in the Polish bulletin of the internment camp in France10. “The first and the only inter-brigade alcalde,” he writes in his account.
Having arrived at the Saint-Cyprien camp in February 1939, he fell out with the communist leadership of the camp because he refused to take charge of the health service for the inter-brigaders’ enclosure, arguing that one must first receive from the French authorities a minimum of means. The refugee volunteers then “lived” on an expanse of sand bounded by barbed wire, guarded by colonial troops, where nothing had been prepared or provided for, except… the sand, the sea, the wind, the barbed wire, and the military guard — and no more. This refusal put him at odds for a long time with the party cell of the Polish group. The Poles, along with other inter-brigaders, were transferred, at the beginning of April, to the camp of Gurs. Franta would be sidelined from the Party’s activities and from medical work in the camps.
When, at the end of April, the party organization proposed to the doctors of the Gurs camp that they put their names on a list to go to China, several inter-brigaders of various nationalities (about 40 volunteers) signed up. Franta, for his part, made direct contact with doctor friends he had known in Spain, Doctors Jensen and Crome11: they were in London and they managed to get him onto the list of the medical group engaged by the Red Cross.
It was thus that Franta left, in August 1939, with seven other doctors from the Gurs camp12, for China. Of the five Polish doctors who departed, he is the only one not to have obtained the prior permission of his Party cell. As a result, he is sidelined from any responsibility in China by Samuel Flato, cell secretary of the group. He who, in Spain, had proven to be one of the best military doctors among the foreign volunteers, would never have a position of responsibility in the group of the “Spaniards” in China.
Franta’s conflicts with the Party would continue in China. In December 1939, before the departure of the volunteers from the base of the Chinese Red Cross at Tu-yun-guan13 for the front, situated in the province of Hunan, Franta, at a cell meeting, refused to make his self-criticism. He was removed from the committee of this cell. Later, still in China, his colleagues would reproach him for having declared that “in China, in the field of medicine, it is solely the missionaries who are worth anything.”
The “Spaniards” would be directed to the vicinity of the city of Shin-shy-chou14; Franta found himself at Chau-lo-gay, not far from his comrades of the same Army Corps as his own. They are all discontented because the villages where they find themselves are quite far from the front line, even though the front is quiet. The working conditions are difficult, as are relations with the Chinese colleagues. The initiatives of the “Spaniards” are frequently held back, and they are prevented from being as useful as they would wish. Despite this, they would bring improvements in the sanitary domain, introduce courses for the personnel, organize a school for mid-level cadres of the health services. Franta would be one of the teachers at this school.
They would return to the Red Cross base in June 1940. The group’s disagreements with Franta continue: he is reproached for not having worked according to the decisions taken beforehand, that “one cannot count on him because his personal interest comes before the interest of the Party,” etc. Having taken the decision to provisionally remove Franta from the Party, the cell sends a record of this decision to the delegation of the Chinese Communist Party, which was then at Ch’ung-ch’ing and whose head was Chou En-lai15. In 1940, when Edo criticizes Franta, he would also rely on this record.
The “Spanish” doctors, having returned to the base of the Chinese Red Cross (CRCh), manage to convince its president to send them to the front, to divisional hospitals. They would be separated into two groups. Franta, who belonged to the second group, whose head was Dr. Kaneti, would go to the I-ch’ang front16, where the foreign doctors are charged with reorganizing the Sanitary Service, a task they would actually manage to accomplish within the limits of what was possible in the China of the time.
The split between the Kuomintang and the CCP at the beginning of 1941 — even more than the neutrality pact in April between Japan and the USSR, and the outbreak of the German-Soviet war — would change the situation of the foreign doctors, who were known to be communists. During the year 1941, they are little by little recalled from the I-ch’ang front17 to the central base at Tu-yun-guan, where, under police observation, a forced idleness is imposed on them. This situation would last almost the whole of 1942. Franta contracts a serious amoebic dysentery, which his “Spanish” colleague Coutelle, having a microscope at his disposal, confirms18.
In December 1942, Franta, already completely recovered, leaves for Burma with eight others of his colleagues: they are engaged as doctors in the Chinese units of General Stilwell’s American army, bound by contract (Army Contract Surgeons) until the end of the war.
For the whole year 1943, they would remain in a training camp for Chinese troops at Ramgarh (Bihar) in Assam19 and would set off, at the beginning of 1944, with the Chinese divisions in Burma, Franta being placed in charge of the Health Service in a tank unit. In the spring of 1945, he would work for three months in the field hospital of Dr. Seagrave20. At the end of the war in 1945, the doctors under “contract” would almost all receive decorations as well as letters of congratulation for their work in the army. Particularly laudatory were those for Franta and Taubenfligel. In November 1945, Franta and seven other “Spaniards” take the plane at Ledo (India) for Frankfurt am Main, and at the end of the same month, Taubenfligel, on his way to Warsaw, accompanies him to Prague in a car he has just bought in Germany.
In Prague, Franta returned21 quickly to the political work that, visibly, he had been missing. He becomes a Party activist and, in 1947, the deputy of Antonín Novotný, the future leader of the CCP in the 1960s, whose acquaintance he had made before the war. Novotný was an “apparatchik” without great political capacities but who knew how to surround himself with collaborators of worth. He appreciated Franta, his talents for organization, his knowledge, and his political perspicacity. It is probably thanks to Novotný that Franta’s fate, during the great trials of Prague at the start of the 1950s, would prove more lenient than that of the other veterans of the International Brigades and of the Jews in the party apparatus. Franta’s political rise would be rapid: in 1948 he is Party secretary for the city of Prague and replaces the head of the people’s militia. In 1949, he is appointed deputy minister of health. When the Stalinist trials of Prague22 begin, Franta is removed from his post at the ministry and from all political tasks. During the year 1953, he would seek work at length: he would end by managing to take employment in a factory as an occupational physician. With the political thaw in the USSR and in the fraternal countries, he would be rehabilitated and would receive several distinctions23.
As early as 1956, Franta returns to his profession and specializes in rheumatology in a Prague clinic. Four years later, his specialization completed, he leaves, at the request of the Cuban government, for Havana, where he becomes adviser to the Minister of Health in the years 1960–1963. He contributes to the setting up of a medical structure, running from the ministerial apparatus down to the local centers and dispensaries, the transport of the sick, the training of nurses and care staff, the vaccination of children, etc.
Back in Prague, he would work at the Institute of Rheumatology (1964–1965) and would also be a member, in 1967–1968, of the Scientific Council of the Ministry of Health.
Always active in the Party, he is elected to parliament and to its presidium, where he chairs the Committee for Foreign Affairs. In 1966 Novotný brings him into the Central Committee of the party, and in April 196824, in the midst of the “Prague Spring,” Franta is elected to the Presidium (Politburo) of the CCP, which appoints him chairman of the Central Committee of the National Front25. The high point of his life was beginning. Dubček writes in his Memoirs: “My most faithful allies in that period were called… Kriegel…” [five other names also appear], “Kriegel… showed himself firm and consistent in the implementation of our reforms…”26
The “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia aroused an enormous popular enthusiasm, and the attention of the whole world was concentrated for a time on this country. The stakes were high: was the pseudo-socialism in the Soviet manner capable or not of reforming itself and of drawing nearer to the socialist dreams of a more just society respecting individual freedom? In fact, the Czechoslovak promise was unacceptable for the USSR and for the other dictatorships under its sway. But the optimism of the Czechs at the start was immeasurable. When, in March 1968, Franta’s old comrade from Spain, Dr. Crome, asks him, at a meeting: “Do you think you’ll be able to pull it off?”, the immediate reply was “Yes, we are strong enough.” Even a man with Kriegel’s experience was optimistic. After a few weeks, Crome sent him a telegram of congratulations.
But Franta gradually realizes, as do certain reformist communists, that the “Prague Spring” cannot succeed, that it is unacceptable to the Soviet empire. Freedom of opinion, freedom of the press27 and, above all, the purging of the security services by the minister of the interior Pavel, a former volunteer from Spain, who eliminated from these services agents both Czech and Russian and who dismissed pro-Soviet Czech officers, would decide the Soviet power to react. In May 196828, the new general secretary of the CCP declares before the party’s Central Committee: “Under the banner of a new model of socialism, the fundamental principles concerning the structure of the Party, its leading role in society, are rejected…”
On June 27, 1968, Ludvík Vaculík, one of the most virulent critics of fossilized socialism, publishes the manifesto of the “2,000 Words”: in it he called for a political discussion, expressing doubts about the possibilities of reform, for there were still too many conservative functionaries, partisans of the totalitarian dictatorship29. He also expressed, in this manifesto, the fear of the Soviet reaction. The Czech Stalinists declared that the “2,000 Words” constituted a counter-revolutionary and anti-Soviet provocation. Moscow used this situation as a pretext to exert additional pressure on Prague, convening a meeting in Warsaw30 in order to warn the Central Committee of the CCP against “the forces opposed to socialism,” and on July 18, 1968, at the close of this conference, the five accusing parties laid down their conditions31. To try to avoid the worst, the Prague power found itself obliged to negotiate with Moscow. The talks took place between July 29 and August 1, 1968, at Čierná nad Tisou. Kriegel would flatly refuse to sign the protocol imposed by the Soviets. Pavel Tigrid describes in his book the sarcastic irony of Kosygin: “Who is this Kriegel? Is he Czech? Is he not a Galician Jew?” This fact was confirmed by Dubček32. Mlynář33 writes likewise that Shelest repeated the same antisemitic remark in the course of this meeting34.
A compromise — in fact a semblance of a compromise — would be concluded, followed by the Bratislava agreement of August 3, 1968. This could satisfy Dubček but left many others skeptical. As soon as he returned to Prague, Kriegel, at a meeting of the Presidium, declares that certain elements of the Bratislava agreement are defamatory for Czechoslovakia; he criticizes its overly vague terms and notes the absence of preparation for the case in which “things should turn out badly”35. He would repeat it again on August 17, during a confidential conference with leaders of the country’s media36, concluding: “The sword of Damocles, whose thread grows thinner each day, hangs over our heads.”
On August 20, 1968, the troops of the Warsaw Pact made their entry into Czechoslovakia. The Presidium would sit without interruption and would issue a sharp protest, the essence of which would be contained in this sentence: “The presidium considers that this act is in contradiction not only with all the principles of relations between socialist countries, but also with the fundamental norms of international law.” In proceeding to the vote, a sharp dispute would ensue, caused by the declarations that Smrkovský and Kriegel had just made, affirming that they would regard as traitors those who voted against these principles. Of the eleven members of the Presidium there were seven votes in favor (including Franta) and four against.
On August 21, at 4 in the morning, Russian soldiers and tanks surrounded the Central Committee building. Eight soldiers burst into Dubček’s office, where the majority of the leadership was gathered, and point their submachine guns behind the ten members seated around a table, recounts Mlynář, who was present. “The soldiers,” he continues, “tore out the telephone wires. Around 5 o’clock, Kriegel looked at his watch and proposed (to his comrades) that they take a little nap, for, he added, ‘since nothing will happen before 8 o’clock and we have not yet slept, we’ll need a well-rested head.’ He stretched out on the carpet and at once began to snore.” Shortly before noon, Dubček, Kriegel, and three others are taken to the airport. In the evening, separated from the group and under heavy guard, Kriegel leaves by plane for Moscow. There he would be held incommunicado outside the Kremlin. The Soviets, at the express request of the Czech delegation, which would decline any meeting without the presence of Kriegel, would bring him to the Kremlin on August 26. It is Smrkovský who would inform him of the events and of the Russian ultimatum. Dubček writes in his memoirs that Kriegel categorically refused to sign this protocol of capitulation37. He also refused to take part in any negotiation whatsoever, asking to be taken back to the place where he was being held. Dubček recalls further that on August 23, as soon as they arrived in Moscow, in the course of a meeting with the four delegates38 of the Soviet Politburo, “Kosygin showed himself the most aggressive, the most coarse, attacking harshly, with downright antisemitic insults, the Jewish members of our central committee, and most particularly František Kriegel and Ota Šik.” The delegation, after signing the document of capitulation — with one exception: Kriegel, who refused to affix his signature to it — decides that it would not return to Prague without him and refuses to board the plane without the man the Russians did not want to let go. The Soviets would give way.
The protocol required the ousting of certain persons. Kriegel, already resolved, gives up his seats: that of the presidium and that of the chairmanship of the National Front. “Normalization” was beginning.
On October 18, the National Assembly is convened in emergency plenary session to ratify the treaty imposed by the USSR on Czechoslovakia. Nearly 20% of the deputies are absent39; ten would abstain from voting and four would vote against the treaty, among them František Kriegel. For several days, people would lay flowers in front of the house where he lived, on the 5th floor, in a modest apartment, for all his life he would remain modest.
Eight months would be needed to pass from “normalization” to the “socialist” norm. Toward the end of the month of May 1969, the Central Committee adopts three resolutions, the 3rd of which (“organizational questions and problems relating to cadres”) includes disciplinary measures against the reformists. Kriegel would be expelled, not only from the Central Committee, but also from the Party, the stated motive being that he had voted in the National Assembly against the treaty and the statute concerning the Soviet forces in Czechoslovakia. In a speech delivered during the session, Kriegel would reaffirm his position. This text would be circulated throughout Czechoslovakia and posted in one of the faculties of the University of Prague: in it he explained (Le Monde of 7.6.69) that he had refused to sign the protocol in Moscow because it “tied the hands of the Republic and was contrary to the sentiments of the population, to the Charter of the UN, to the principles of international coexistence… an agreement that had been signed in an atmosphere of political pressure… under the threat of cannons and machine guns.” Kriegel, evoking the Stalinist period, firmly declares his opposition to the hardening of policy in Czechoslovakia. “This speech was greeted by the icy silence of the 180 members of the Central Committee,” adds Le Monde, “and Husák, the new first secretary of the CCP, violently denounced Kriegel’s remarks to justify his expulsion on account, he said, of the anti-party, anti-socialist, and anti-Soviet platform.”
The name of Kriegel becomes the symbol of resistance. The anniversary day of the entry of the Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia was marked in Prague by numerous demonstrations. “The demonstrators shouted ‘Long live Dubček!’, ‘Long live Smrkovský!’, ‘Long live Kriegel!’,” writes Le Monde of August 23, 1969. This renown would protect him from prison or from a street “accident.” But it would not preserve him from the daily harassments. He is attacked in the press and at the hospital where he works; he is forced to take retirement as early as 1970. He would be deprived for a long time of a telephone. To prevent him from traveling, his passport is taken from him, his letters reach him sporadically, with delay, or not at all — in short, he is kept under surveillance. In 1975, his lifelong Polish friend, Victor Taubenfligel, companion of Spain, of China, and of Burma, having become a Canadian citizen after emigrating from Poland in 1968, would visit him in Prague. Franta invited him for a walk, for, he told him, “the walls have ears.” As it began to rain, Victor proposed that they sit in a café. With the humor that was so characteristic of him, Victor, after a moment, went out and proposed to the plainclothes agent who was watching them from outside that he come and join them, since “it’s cold, it’s raining” and he could thus “write a more complete report.” The agent vanished… After a while, they went out and noticed that another sad fellow, still in plain clothes, was following them…40. On November 23, 1976, Le Monde reported that “Dr. Kriegel, one of the principal leaders of the ‘Prague Spring,’ and his wife had been attacked on Friday, November 19, in their apartment in Prague, by two masked unknown men who then took flight… /they/ first set upon Mrs. Kriegel… then upon her husband. The neighbors having been alerted by the noise, the two men fled aboard a car. Questioned on Saturday evening by telephone, Mr. Kriegel confirmed the facts.”
At the beginning of 1977, Franta would sign “Charta 77” (Charter 77) and, once again, he would serve as a target for the slanders, the insults, the defamatory attacks of the official press, where it was written: “Kriegel behaves exactly like Judas… well, they are of the same origin”41. Le Monde writes on March 5, 1977: “The authorities are multiplying their pressures against the signatories of Charter 77… Czech radio has raged against Mr. F. Kriegel, one of the principal signatories…”
František Kriegel was among the most hated by the Czech Stalinists in power. One of the notorious pro-Soviet dignitaries, Vasil Biľak, attacked in 1978, in the periodicals Novoye Vremya (Moscow) and Rudé Právo (Prague), the “traitors,” explicitly naming Kriegel.
On his birthday, April 10, 1978 — Kriegel had just turned 70 — the police set up a table in front of his door, the better to monitor the many visitors who came to congratulate him. El País reported that “Kriegel, because he had signed Charter 77, was deprived of his driver’s license, his passport, his telephone, and was constantly watched by two policemen”42. The PCE having decided to organize a solemn banquet on the occasion of Kriegel’s birthday, it invited him to Madrid, but the Prague power would not allow him to go43. Foreseeing these difficulties, he recorded on cassette a speech in Spanish which, by good fortune, would reach Madrid on the appointed date and would be listened to with great emotion by all who were present at this banquet.
According to Franta’s friends, it is Mlynář who, in his book, knew best how to appreciate Kriegel and to judge him at his true worth: “Endowed with a vast intelligence, he was surely one of the best in the party; learned, a man of culture, a remarkable personality, he was also a first-rate organizer. With his rich political and personal experience, with prospects for the future that surpassed the provincial political horizon of the great majority, Kriegel, a rational man, very sure of himself, liked to impose his opinions and his conceptions in an authoritarian manner… Distrustful, obstinate, he also knew how to realize his ideas, for he was a fine tactician. In private, Kriegel was a good man who knew, in moments of danger or of dejection, how to console and to instill courage and optimism. Medicine was not only his profession, it was his vocation”44.
Nor did the regime forget him after his death, for the cremation of Kriegel’s remains took place very early, before daybreak: they wanted to avoid a gathering at his burial45. The police confiscated all the notes, the manuscripts, etc., hidden until then, and his wife was able to recover them only after long judicial proceedings46.
František Kriegel died on December 3, 1979, in Prague.
Notes
There were two universities in Prague: a Czech one and a German one.↩︎
CRC, 545-6-48/24, 545-6-664/77-78.↩︎
The chief medical officer of the XIth IB was Dr. Fränkel who, having left in the second half of January 1937 for Paris, would not return to Spain and would be replaced by his deputy Dr. Imre Beer, “Gorian.”↩︎
From August 1937 on, the XIIth and XIIIth IB would be incorporated into the 45th division.↩︎
A “practicante” in Spain corresponds to a qualified nurse.↩︎
CRC, 495-73-188/20.↩︎
The unpublished memoirs of Dr. Wiktor Taubenfligel, written daily in China: “he /Franta/ is very honest but too sure of himself; he believes himself more capable… than the others; he wants to dominate, otherwise there is a quarrel that can go as far as a rupture… Kriegel is often mistaken in his judgment of people, but he does not want to admit it…”.↩︎
CRC, 545-6-664/77-78. Edo: Eduardo d’Onufrio, close Italian collaborator of Luigi Longo (“Gallo,” inspector general of the International Brigades in Spain, member of the PCE commission in Moscow charged by the Comintern with reviewing the archives of the Brigades and giving its opinion on each of the volunteers).↩︎
“Dr. Crigel, Mayor-Médico Encargado de los asuntos de la Alcaldía por disposición de la Comandancia de la Plaza,” in the “Boletín editado por el Comisariado de la Plaza,” no. 2 of 1.2.39 and no. 4 of 3.2.39.↩︎
“Informator Obozowy,” 18.4.1939, no. 57.↩︎
Dr. Jensen, an Austrian, and Dr. Crome, an Englishman, had important responsibilities in the Health Service of the Brigades.↩︎
G. E. Sichon, “Médecins des deux guerres : Espagne et Chine” (Doctors of two wars: Spain and China), Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps, no. 19, April–June 1990.↩︎
Tu-yun-guan is a few km from Kuei-Yang, the capital of the province of K’uei-chou in southern China.↩︎
Shin-shy, a town situated about 95 km from Ch’ang-sha, capital of Hu-nan.↩︎
Chou En-lai: eminent member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).↩︎
I-ch’ang, a town on the Yangtze river, is in the province of Hu-pei.↩︎
Except for the small group of Dr. Baer, which was near the border of India and Vietnam and which was allowed to work on the spot.↩︎
Dr. Carl Coutelle worked for a long time in Spain in the laboratory of one of the IB hospitals at Murcia.↩︎
The state of Assam at the easternmost end of India.↩︎
Seagrave hospital unit, 896 Clearing Company.↩︎
Franta’s wife, Riva Kriegel, notes (letter to the author) that from his return he worked as an occupational physician in a large mechanical-engineering factory, ČKD.↩︎
In 1951 Slánský is arrested. These events are described in an impressive manner in London’s book “L’aveu” (The Confession).↩︎
The orders: of the “25th of February,” 1st class; of Labor; of the Red Star for his participation in the Spanish Civil War; of the Republic; and the Polish “Virtuti Militari.”↩︎
The session of the CC of the CCP that changed the composition of the Presidium took place between March 28 and the beginning of April 1968. Six members of the former presidium were replaced, and among the six newly elected was Kriegel. The presidium numbered fifteen members in all.↩︎
Formed immediately after the war, it brought together most of the political parties which, after the communist coup of 1948, became satellites of no importance.↩︎
Alexander Dubček, “C’est l’espoir qui meurt en dernier” (Hope Dies Last), autobiography, Fayard, Paris 1993, p. 206 and p. 196.↩︎
On June 28, 1968, the press censorship that had previously existed is abolished.↩︎
Cited after the book by P. Tigrid, “La chute irrésistible d’Alexandre Dubcek” (The Irresistible Fall of Alexander Dubček).↩︎
“The Two Thousand Words addressed to workers, peasants, functionaries, scholars, artists, and to all others,” published in Literární Listy and in several Prague dailies, was signed by a hundred or so Czech personalities.↩︎
The meeting of five communist parties — USSR, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the GDR — took place on July 14 and 15, 1968.↩︎
Le Monde of 19.7.1968 cites the conditions: resolute action against the reformists, liquidation of the activity of the anti-socialist organizations, taking control of the mass media, etc.↩︎
Alexander Dubček, C’est l’espoir qui meurt en dernier, p. 232, Fayard, 1993: “Kosygin called Dr. Kriegel a ‘Galician Jew,’ an insulting remark…”↩︎
Zdeněk Mlynář, Nachtfrost, p. 194, Frankfurt a/M, 1978.↩︎
Shelest, member of the Soviet Politburo and 1st secretary of Ukraine, was one of the delegates.↩︎
P. Tigrid, op. cit.↩︎
ibid.↩︎
The Moscow protocol, drafted in wooden language of the sort “the implacable struggle waged against the counter-revolutionary forces,” etc., decides that the “so-called” XIVth congress of the CCP, which opened on August 22, is declared null and void; that there will be dismissed from their Party and State posts “the persons… not conforming to the necessities” of the present situation; that censorship will be reintroduced; that the stay of the “allied” troops will be settled in a special treaty; that the (pro-Soviet) cadres who had been sidelined will be reinstated; and that there will be a “close cooperation with the other… socialist countries.”↩︎
Brezhnev, Kosygin, Podgorny, and Voronov.↩︎
Out of a total of 300 deputies, only 242 were present.↩︎
Interview and recording of Dr. Victor Taubenfligel in Toronto, in 1986. Dr. Taubenfligel died in Toronto in 1989.↩︎
Janouch, ibid.↩︎
May 20, 1978.↩︎
The PCE (Spanish Communist Party) was at the time one of the reformist communist parties, like the Italian party.↩︎
Zdeněk Mlynář, ibid. Süddeutsche Zeitung of 3.3.1980.↩︎
Süddeutsche Zeitung of 3.3.1980.↩︎
Mrs. R. Kriegel donated, after 1989, the entire archives and materials of her husband to the Institute of Contemporary History of the Academy of Sciences in Prague.↩︎