East Bloc in Transition : Two Czech Editors Go From Jailed to Hailed

The worst thing for Rudolf Zeeman about being locked in jail was that he was unable to cover the greatest story of his life.

On Oct. 12, police seized Zeeman and his colleague, Jiri Ruml, as the two men rushed to put the finishing touches on the monthly Lidove Noviny (the People’s News), the voice of Prague’s dissident movement.

Sitting among the collection of old chairs and bare desks in the warren of small offices that now house Lidove Noviny in its new incarnation--Czechoslovakia’s first free press in four decades--the two men remember.

Ruml, his long face lined by the years, is a former Communist Party journalist turned dissident who spent most of the last 15 years facing the threat of lengthy prison sentences for his activities.

Zeeman, a bear-like man with dark hair and a full, graying beard, puffs constantly on an empty pipe as he talks.

Their story is, in miniature, the saga of Czechoslovakia and its dizzying transformation from dictatorship to free society. So, too, the issues they now grapple with as they attempt to launch their newspaper encapsulate the dilemmas facing the men and women rebuilding Czechoslovak democracy.

The editors, for example, must debate such issues as how to maintain independence from the government when the foreign minister is the former head of the paper’s editorial board and the leading presidential candidate, Vaclav Havel, is a frequent contributor.

And how will the paper find an audience now that it cannot count on the automatic readership that comes from being the one trustworthy source of information amid a sea of official lies?

“It will be difficult,” Ruml says. “We were a unique paper up until now. We were the only ones printing truth.” Now, however, Czechoslovaks will have many choices. “It will be more difficult to keep the readers.”

Not long ago, however, those questions were not even conceivable.

For 13 hours that day in October, a crew of up to nine policemen searched Ruml’s tiny, two-room Prague apartment, shoving aside his wife, son and daughter-in-law and their baby to take photographs, make videotapes and sift through papers.

A second crew took Zeeman to his apartment, seized six back issues of the newspaper and transported him to prison for 18 hours of interrogation.

The next day the two were formally arrested and charged with sedition. On Saturday, Oct. 14, they were jailed. Zeeman was the luckier of the two in jail: He was allowed to read newspapers.

“I would compare Rude Pravo (the Communist Party paper) with Mlada Fronta (the paper of the party’s Youth League), and I knew something was going on,” Zeeman says. As demonstrations here began to mount in early November, “I was so angry. I had waited 20 years for such a day, and as a professional journalist, here I was locked up.”

Ruml was more isolated. Forbidden to receive newspapers or calls as he awaited trial, he first learned of the stunning events that would quickly lead to his captors’ downfall one night when, from his cell, he heard men shouting slogans from a nearby building.

The next morning was the one day a week prisoners were allowed to shower. Ruml took a carton of cigarettes and traded them for a copy of Rude Pravo.

For the first time, he read about the founding of the Civic Forum opposition group. And on the front page of the paper, he could see that a Civic Forum delegation had met with Communist Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec. Leading the delegation was Ruml’s son, Jan.

“My first question,” he recalls, “was how come my son can sit with the prime minister and I’m still in jail.”

Six days before, police had attacked student demonstrators, and the spark of that attack had set a fire of peaceful revolution. By the time Ruml heard the news, the Communist government was in full retreat. Three days later, then-President Gustav Husak signed an order for political prisoners to be released.

It was Saturday again, eight weeks to the day since their imprisonment. Ruml’s wife drove to the prison and demanded that the warden release her husband immediately. “She was told by an official that the prosecutor does not work on Saturday so they’ll have to wait until Monday,” Ruml recalls with a laugh.

Civic Forum officials called the prime minister. “If they can arrest people over the weekend, they can release them over the weekend,” they said.

A few minutes after midnight, early Sunday, Ruml and Zeeman stepped into the night air of a suddenly free Prague. With friends, they drove to Civic Forum’s offices for a quick glass of champagne. Then, after a shower and shave, they were taken to the vast parade ground outside Prague where anti-government demonstrators were gathered.

“We were evidence, clear, live evidence of success,” Zeeman says.

“It was a drastic shock,” Ruml recalls. “In jail, the cell was 6 by 10 feet”--and he shared it another prisoner. “Suddenly, I was on the field . . . facing half a million Czechoslovak citizens.

“My first words were, ‘Last night, my dinner was in prison.’ ”

Half a million throats shouted back: “What did you eat?”