Victors Tend to Forgo Revenge Against Ousted Communists : East Bloc: A witch hunt could paralyze these nations in transition. But some worry that leniency may endanger the future of the democratic revolutions.

Fate gave Antonin Kapek the second chance he didn’t always extend to his political opponents.

The former Prague Communist Party boss attempted suicide just after the New Year, saying he had come under unbearable personal pressure since this country’s democratic transformation. Ironically, he shot himself with a revolver he had been issued for self-protection in 1984 because of his position as a party functionary.

But according to his doctor, Marie Dvorakova, Kapek is recovering from both his physical and his psychic wounds after a telephone call last weekend from a man he had helped persecute for years.

The caller was Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright-turned-president, who, according to Dvorakova, “through us wished the patient an early recovery and added that he is interested not only in his acquaintances, but in all people, and that he doesn’t want anybody to be troubled or persecuted.”

Havel’s action is a particularly dramatic example of what East European experts describe as a regionwide trend of leniency by victorious pro-democracy movements toward those who served the discredited Communist regimes they overthrew in a startling series of mostly peaceful 1989 revolutions.

There are no precise figures available, but all the signs so far are that despite what might seem overpowering temptations for revenge, the victors are treating the vanquished far better than would surely have been the case if the region’s political fortunes last year had been reversed.

Safety in Numbers

Some analysts contend that such leniency may even endanger the very future of the democratic revolutions.

But for hundreds of thousands of Communist Party faithful, their sheer numbers may be their best defense. To engage in an anti-Communist witch hunt, it is feared, could paralyze these countries just as they attempt what already promises to be a difficult transition to market economies and political democracy.

“You’ve got a choice of shooting the bastards or letting them get away with some of their ill-gotten gains in the belief that social harmony is more important than rough justice,” said Norman Davies, a professor at London University’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies.

Before last year’s political upheavals, there were about 11.5 million Communist Party members in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania--more than 10% of the region’s total population. That’s a far higher percentage of party membership than in the Soviet Union, whose 19 million registered Communists constitute less than 7% of its population.

A smaller but still substantial number of East Europeans were among the so-called nomenklatura-- those people directly appointed to their jobs by the party or whose employment had to be approved by party bodies at some level.

Such was the obsession for political reliability in these Soviet-style Communist systems that those requiring party approval included government bureaucrats, factory directors, school principals, newspaper editors, librarians, army officers, trade union officials and even leaders of tiny competing parties that were tolerated to maintain the illusion of democracy.

The number of such nomenklatura jobs in the region is uncertain, but it is believed to have run well into seven figures. In Czechoslovakia alone, the party acknowledges about 10,000 direct “apparatus” employees, and it is said to have exercised veto power over approximately 500,000 additional positions.

The numbers of non-party members who nevertheless faithfully mouthed the party line, or even acted as informers on their neighbors, will never be known. Some of these people now claim to have been secret democrats all along, forced by job and family considerations to pretend loyalty to the Communists. Others have been publicly proclaiming their democratic conversion in an orgy of self-recrimination.

Admit Opportunism

A Times of London reporter in Bucharest wrote about Romanian professors who have taken to prefacing their lectures with admissions of shameless opportunism in the past and about Romanian journalists who end their articles with the announcement that these are the first true words they have written in 20 years.

A joke currently making the rounds in Prague says that there are so many turncoats on the loose that it’s impossible to find a winter jacket in the stores.

Not all of East Europe’s Communists have escaped retribution.

Romania’s former dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and his wife were executed after last month’s bloody revolution in that country. Sixty Ceausescu relatives and top party officials are reported to be under arrest, and trials of captured members of the dreaded Securitate secret police have begun.

But given the violence of its revolution and the millions who actively paid homage to the late tyrant, even in Romania the retributions have been relatively modest, said Jonathan Eyal, an expert on Romania and assistant director of London’s Royal United Services Institute.

A handful of top hard-line Communist Party officials, such as East Germany’s Erich Honecker and Bulgaria’s Todor Zhivkov, face possible imprisonment. Functionaries of each nation’s secret police are particularly despised. And untold thousands of full-time Communist Party bureaucrats--the so-called party apparatus--are looking for real jobs now that party membership is plummeting regionwide and new coalition governments such as the one in Poland have voted to cut off public funds to the Communists.

In Czechoslovakia, a second former Prague party chief, Miroslav Stepan, is under arrest and faces up to 10 years in prison for allegedly ordering the violent police crackdown against student demonstrators last Nov. 17, the incident that sparked the mass uprising here.

Reports surface almost daily about local chapters of the Civic Forum democracy movement demanding that someone be fired. Examples include a school principal in the town of Chocerady accused of being “captive to Marxist-Leninist ideology,” a plant manager in Pilsen who wanted to use his “workers’ militia” to help suppress the democracy movement last November and the head of state television who is considered too conservative for the new era.

Given Civic Forum’s almost unchallenged power in the current circumstances, and the loose coordination even at the organization’s center, the possibilities of revenge-seeking and other forms of abuse are certainly present.

Still, noted a Western diplomat, Havel and other top Civic Forum leaders have promised there will be no widespread purges.

“Some identified in a high-profile way will have to go, but they want to put an end to this purge syndrome, where each generation purges the last and, in the process, makes enemies out of the purged officials’ children from the next.”

Civic Forum leaders “want to let the best and the brightest rise to the top through the normal working of merit,” this diplomat added. As competition for jobs opens up, the result is expected to be that those among the old nomenklatura who were loyal but incompetent will simply sink of their own weight. A purge wouldn’t be necessary.

Thirty-five of Czechoslovakia’s approximately 140 ambassadors have been recalled since the interim coalition government took over in early December, but most of them had already been scheduled for removal by the previous regime.

Statute of Limitations

The state prosecutor even announced last week that although those who collaborated in the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion to put down the so-called Prague Spring reforms of 1968 were guilty of treason, the statute of limitations now applies.

And the new Roman Catholic minister of the interior, Richard Sacher, said that although he intends to punish those police officers who abused their positions under the Communist regime, he sees no reason to fire those who simply obeyed orders.

In both Poland and Hungary, there have been complaints that middle-level Communist officials have been taking advantage of their privileged positions to set themselves up in emerging, lucrative business opportunities--disappearing, as Eyal put it, “under dark pinstripe suits.”

Polish sociologist Jadwiga Staniszkis called the phenomenon “the privatization of the nomenklatura “ and said its spread is “very rapid.” In one case, she said, party officials in a district near the Soviet border declared their area a free-trade zone, gaining tax advantages for an import-export business.

In Hungary, according to Eyal, some factory managers have capitalized on new joint-venture laws to find foreign investors who give them a healthy stake in reorganized companies.

In addition to their sheer numbers, there is another argument for dealing cautiously with the former loyalists: Given the Communists’ 40-year monopoly on power in the region, they are about the only people with the practical experience necessary to run a government.

There is also concern that engaging in a widespread purge would back the bureaucrats into a corner where they might see fighting as their only alternative. The alternative approach is to avoid unnecessary rocking of the boat in hopes that the Communist bureaucrats will evolve into normal, Western-style civil servants.

On the other hand, protesters in Romania, East Germany and--to a lesser extent, elsewhere--worry that their revolutions may be “hijacked” by so-called reform Communists who will frustrate supposedly free elections scheduled throughout the region this year--elections meant to fortify the move toward truly democratic systems.

Fears Are Fueled

Fears that unpurged Communist loyalists may even act as Fifth Columnists were fueled earlier this month when Hungarian opposition leaders produced evidence at a press conference of Watergate-style election spying by elements of the still-functioning secret police. And in Romania, the concern is such that people gossip, despite official denials, about well-armed Securitate forces supposedly hiding out in the hills, waiting for an opportunity to strike again.

Eyal contends that the real danger to Eastern Europe’s democratic revolutions is not so much Communist Fifth Columnists as popular cynicism. These are populations weaned on a fundamental distrust of power, he noted. By being so lenient toward those who served the Communists, the democratic movements only encourage the skeptics.

“As long as they continue to be there, you don’t have the legitimacy these governments need,” he said, adding that this is “potentially one of the biggest disasters of the revolution in Eastern Europe.”