LIQUIDATING LIBKOVICE : WHAT HAPPENS TO A BOHEMIAN VILLAGE WHEN CAPITALISTS SEEKING COAL ARRIVE?

“I think you will not like this story,” begins Mayor Stanislav Brichacek, his 6-foot frame and paralytic left foot perching delicately on the floor of his office. When the sandy-haired 57-year-old says this, he gazes out his window, taking in Libkovice: the red and rusting cupola atop the abandoned Catholic church, the orange and oxblood bricks peeking through peeling facades on every other house, the silence of the muddy lanes--as if this sooty, 800-year-old Bohemian village bore witness to his own misfortune.

The office is dark and musty but warm. It is one of two heated rooms in the mid-19th-Century village hall. In a plaid shirt, Bavarian-style sweater and blue corduroys, Brichacek adjusts his glasses and stoops to his bookcase, withdrawing some documents. Above his head, on plaster yellowing with age and tobacco smoke, coal soot traces the outline of an imposing picture frame, recently removed.

The missing picture bore Czechoslovakia’s coat of arms, politically retouched with a red star (replacing the crown) over a golden lion, upright, splay-clawed, embattled. On the opposite wall, Brichacek has hung two smaller frames. One is the standard color portrait of Vaclav Havel, who resigned last month as president, the first and probably last man to preside over post-communist Czechoslovakia, which seems headed toward a split into separate Czech and Slovak republics.

The other is a montage of old black-and-white photographs: of Tomas Masaryk and Edvard Benes, the men who shaped Czechoslovakia’s constitution in 1918 and served the new republic; of Masaryk and his son, Jan, who, with Benes, were serving when the Nazis took over Sudeten Bohemia, Libkovice and more in 1938. The pictures in Mayor Brichacek’s office reflect the way Bohemian history has of making people and places vanish amid upheaval. During the Reich Protectorate of Nazi-occupied Sudeten Bohemia, Jews and Jewish places disappeared. With the end of the war in 1945, Sudeten Germans were driven from Bohemia. Upon the Communist takeover in 1948, Jan Masaryk himself vanished, mysteriously, through a window casement.

After 1950, homes and villages and towns began to disappear with devastating frequency in Bohemia, a region five times the size of Los Angeles County with a population of more than 5 million. “The state-run mining companies liquidated more than 100 towns and villages to dig brown coal,” Brichacek says. The same coal that yielded synthetic gasoline for Hitler’s Wehrmacht powered Czechoslovakia’s postwar industrialization.

“I came to Libkovice in 1950, when I was 15 years old, to find work in the coal mines,” Brichacek says. Now, under the post-communist regime of Bohemian capitalism, the coal beneath the village may drive the old man away.

“I’m afraid we have not much time,” Brichacek laments. “My village may vanish.”

Libkovice (Lib-ko-VEE-tsuh) is the first Bohemian village to face liquidation since the revolution in 1989. More to the point, it would be the first destroyed as part of a capitalist business scheme rather than a Communist plan. Eons old, Libkovice coal is now the fresh corsage in a very contemporary courtship: of Western corporate buyers, by a revolutionary. The irony is not lost on Brichacek and many of the 73 Libkovice families who remain in the village. Brichacek’s face flickers between resignation and resentment toward the novy sef --the new boss.

In this case, the novy sef is Zdenek Struzka, a former dissident, a professed environmentalist, a Havel colleague and a co-founder of Civic Forum, the political midwife of the Velvet Revolution. It is as the director of Hlubina, the state-run mining company, that Struzka is of concern to Brichacek and Libkovice.

Struzka has revived a communist-era scheme to liquidate Libkovice so that his company and a foreign suitor can extract a seam of coal more than 700 feet beneath the village. But first Struzka must dispossess, and perhaps arrest, Brichacek and the families who refuse to leave Libkovice. On the outskirts of the village, outside the walls of a glassworks that the Nazis converted into a prison camp during World War II, Struzka also must exhume the mass graves of thousands of Allied prisoners of war. Then he must bulldoze the Stalinist-era gulag that Czech communists made of the Nazi prison and dig up the graves of political prisoners buried there during the 1950s.

Where do Bohemian villages such as Libkovice go when they vanish? The open-pit mining adopted after World War II transformed charming, well-preserved 14th-Century towns such as Most (population 56,000) into moonscapes of smoking craters. (Most’s destruction, captured on celluloid, lent realism to several mid-century war films.) Only the cathedral survived, relocated alongside the Most crater, where its bells toll stark and stranded. From homes and gardens on cobbled streets and quiet lanes, hapless families were dispatched to the panelaks --the high-rise, prefabricated, Stalinesque apartment blocks that crowd the Bohemian foothills.

Vaclav Havel traveled to Most two years ago, on the eve of the popular election that brought his Civic Forum coalition to power. Havel spoke out against the communists’ panelak vision. Havel denounced the liquidations. Havel promised change. Where do promises go when they are broken? The phone rings. Brichacek sighs. Lifting the handset, he raises his head toward the ceiling and bellows into the mouthpiece. He pauses, and, not bothering to cup the receiver, speaks softly to us. “Go with this man. He will show you something that you will not forget.” OUR GUIDE WEARS A SNAP-BRIM CAP, BLACK RUBBER BOOTS AND A brown cotton smock, slick with muck and soot from bicycle trips through winter’s muddy lanes. He was mustered into service from his post as a Libkovice street sentry, and he is old enough to recite World War II-era history from the back seat of our Opel sedan.

“How many bodies are buried next to the prison?” I ask.

“At least 13,000. Maybe 17,000.”

“From which armies?”

“The Red Army, and Polish, Belgian and French armies--all died in the Nazi camp,” our guide answers.

“And are there political prisoners’ graves from the 1950s era?”

“Yes.”

“How many ?”

Our guide is silent.

One hundred yards beyond the prison, Libkovice and the paved, tree-lined road out of town end abruptly at a high chain-mesh fence, which encloses an expanding 10-foot-deep trench where a work crew moves impassively and a backhoe jerks a muddy scoop.

With the blessing of the state-owned mining company, Hlubina, the foreman orders two workers to roll back the fence. Then we see the bottom of the trench. We have arrived at a disinterment, the mass grave exhumation that had begun a few days before our arrival in Libkovice.

The backhoe, dump trucks and a work crew with pickaxes and shovels go about their business in the trenches. The teeth of the backhoe rake the shallow grave bed, while the workers stack skulls and bundle bones into a single coffin. “When we see clay mixed in with soil one meter deep, we can guess there are bodies underneath,” remarks a member of the work crew. According to Hlubina, the remains will be cremated. The grave site was all that stood between Libkovice and the encroaching craters of surface mining.

MAYOR BRICHACEK SHUFFLES SPRIGHTLY ABOUT HIS OFFICE, where we collect after our tour of the mass graves. He brings us glasses full of Turkish-style coffee, with a zinc spoon and a tray with clumps of sugar. Then the mayor of Libkovice tells his story.

It begins one October evening in a hall above Libkovice’s Cooperative House pub. It is 1987, one year after this Czech-Germanic village celebrated its 800th birthday. Communist officials and mining company representatives called a town meeting. They announced that Libkovice would be destroyed to extract a rich seam of coal beneath the village. “ ‘The best coal in Bohemia,’ they said,” Brichacek says.

What happened in Libkovice that October evening was almost sensational. Responding as Bohemians sometimes do (and recalling the defenestration of the Hapsburg governors that ignited the Thirty Years War in 1618), “people rushed at the officials to throw them out the window,” Brichacek says. His plea for order prevailed. “ ‘Let them tell their story,’ I insisted.” Their story was a familiar one. Among the assembled were refugees from previously liquidated villages. They had moved here to elude the concrete chambers of the panelaks .

“After a letter-writing campaign protesting the liquidation, many residents began moving out. Then came the revolution, followed by Havel’s speech against the liquidations in Most. Some thought we had been spared. As it turns out, they were naive,” Brichacek says, bitterly.

From his bookcase shelves Brichacek had pulled a six-page report listing problems at the panelak reserved for the remaining families. “The heating is inadequate,” he complains. Village funds are paying to fix that problem. “On top of this,” he says, “the panelak is nearing bankruptcy and may be auctioned off.” That means there could be no place for the families to move into. “It’s another reason to implement the moratorium.” The moratorium, an agreement between the company and the villagers that has no legal standing, would postpone the liquidation pending the outcome of an independent study to determine whether saving Libkovice is economically feasible.

“Look at this.” Brichacek now points to a clipping from a newspaper in nearby Litvinov charging him with dark motives in opposing the liquidation. “You see,” he says, “I am a former Communist, rank and file. Now they slander me like the old regime slandered the dissidents.”

He walks us to our car, ambling along on his nerve-deadened foot. “We are in a bad position,” Brichacek says. “Out of 1,000 people, only 166 remain.” He invites us to a town meeting and says goodby.

FREE FROM FOREIGN DEBT AND ITS ENFORCING PROTOCOLS, ENDOWED with heavy industry and enjoying cachet in the West, Bohemia began the footrace to capitalism in better shape than most East European and post-Soviet regions. But something other than the prosperous transition depicted in most Western accounts unfolded--certainly, something other than what the citizens of Libkovice had in mind.

From the leaded glass and wainscoted tasting rooms of the Pilsen Brewery to the nearly pristine ski slopes of the Slovakian Carpathians, Czechoslovakia is for sale. But to whom, and at what price? According to the course charted by Civic Democratic Party leader Vaclav Klaus, the former finance minister and current prime minister of the Czech republic, everyone could play, and win, in the kuponova privatizace --coupon privatization. Prior to June’s parliamentary elections in the Czech and Slovak republics, which Klaus’ party won in the Czech republic, privatization was the country’s hottest sweepstakes. In the first wave, about 2,000 state enterprises went on sale. For about one week’s wages, citizens could purchase stock. A flood of solicitous advertising urged people to acquire the coupon books by a March 1 deadline. Eight out of 10 adults participated, by one estimate.

Several mutual funds have sprung up, promising lucrative and quick returns for anyone who turns their coupons over to them. The funds, which are limited to a 40% stake in any one company, stand to gain considerable influence in determining what and how and why the new enterprises produce. This ownership of corporate assets and the gold-rush spirit it has engendered mark a bold leap into the casino capitalism of the 1990s. There is less and less evidence of the Third Way that students and intellectuals here had envisioned, a kind of northern European market socialism that could avoid the economic, environmental and moral shortcomings of both communism and capitalism.

In Czechoslovakia, well before the mutual funds or private coupon holders, foreign investors get first choice at state-owned enterprises. Directors of these enterprises--whether holdover apparatchiks or anti-communists like Struzka--see in foreign investors prestige, stability, hard currency and a global market connection. The buyouts and joint ventures have set in motion an odd orbit of characters and consequences.

For example, a publishing group headed by the former general secretary of the Communist Youth Movement bid successfully (against seven other groups) for a new franchise: the Czech national edition of Playboy magazine. Playboy set up offices off Wenceslas Square in Prague. In Bratislava, Slovakian nationalist leaders apply political pressure to protect and preserve, rather than convert, Slovakia’s weapons industry, which traffics in a global market extending from the Balkans to South Africa.

But the turmoil of the new order is more than some can bear. Unemployment in Slovakia is approaching 12% while foreign investment lags far behind that in neighboring Hungary and the former East Germany.

Former President Havel has commented directly and eloquently on the new order and its discontents. In his memoirs, “Summer Meditations,” he speaks of “an enormous and blindingly visible explosion of every imaginable human vice.” He suggests that “we are witness to a bizarre state of affairs: Society has freed itself, true, but in some ways it behaves worse than when it was in chains. . . . (A) new order that would limit rather than exploit these vices, an order based on a freely accepted responsibility to and for the whole of society, has not yet been built, nor could it have been, for such an order takes years to develop and cultivate.”

It could take even longer with the potential breakup of the 74-year-old federation of the Czech and Slovak peoples as a single nation. The two sides are working on proposals for dissolution, with a deadline of Sept. 30.

HLUBINA HEADQUARTERS IS SUBURBAN, A QUARTER OF A MILE OFF the road that connects Most to Litvinov, a panelak city that retains a portion of its old square. Zdenek Struzka, coughing and chuckling and full of bonhomie , leads us to the boardroom. At the center of a cross-shaped, blond-veneer table, Struzka’s secretary sets down a plastic thermos of fresh drip-ground coffee, a yellow tin of African cigars and a tray of pop and tonic bottles.

Struzka appears to be a man in his 30s who has trimmed his beard some since his days as a dissident anti-communist. Placing a bundle of files next to me, he walks to the head of the table. He wears polyester gray pants and clogs.

Struzka is a man who says what he thinks. He thinks that “the real question here concerns old factions of the Communist Party and secret police stirring up trouble.” That is how he began our interview. Then, exchanging a glance with Vladimir Zemanek, another company official, and apparently thinking better of this tack, he turns to a mining map and begins again: “It is technically impossible to save Libkovice.”

“Technically impossible?” I inquire.

Struzka traces the development of surface mining around Libkovice. Pumping his hands, he describes how years of digging and drilling and obstructing subterranean geologies around Libkovice have bequeathed the village a quicksand-like substrata. He shows us charts that illustrate vertical and horizontal slippage. “Libkovice is dangerously unstable. People should move out now simply for safety.”

“There is no way to save the village, technically?” I ask.

Zemanek says it might be possible if “one could pump out the water and quicksand and stabilize the homes.” Struzka concedes that but now says: “It is too costly to stabilize the village.” Flinging his hand over the area representing Libkovice on the map, he says, with more force: “It’s preposterous to try to save the village; people are already moving to safe ground.” Then he reads from an “expert study” advising against saving Libkovice.

“Who sponsored the study?”

“The Brown Coal Research Institute,” Struzka replies. The mining industry, Struzka tells us, endows this institute.

“If it is dangerous for the village, can miners extract Libkovice coal safely?” I ask.

“We must use underground mining, not open-pit techniques,” Struzka explains, insisting that underground mining will be safer. A fit of coughing overtakes him.

When his throat clears, I ask him about the panelak reserved for the remaining families of Libkovice. I convey the main points of Mayor Brichacek’s report on the panelak , its heating problems, its bankruptcy and its possible auction.

Struzka looks at Zemanek and says: “This is not our problem. I sympathize with them. I would protest, too, if I were in their position.”

Returning to the map, Struzka points to Libkovice and says: “It is nearly the lowest point in the Bohemian Basin,” and, recalling what his predecessors told the people of Libkovice that October evening in 1987, adds: “It is the best coal in Bohemia.”

I ask how much profit Hlubina will make from the mining of Libkovice coal. “At current prices,” Struzka says, “we will lose 35 million crowns (about $1.3 million).”

“You will lose money mining Libkovice coal?”

“Yes, but it is good coal. It is worth it,” Zemanek says.

“Is Hlubina scheduled to be privatized?”

“Yes,” Zemanek and Struzka reply. “During the second wave of privatization, about eight months from now,” Struzka says.

“Have foreign buyers expressed interest?” I ask. Zemanek looks at Struzka, who looks away and does not reply. I repeat the question. Struzka coughs and says, quietly, “Yes, a French group.” Clearing his throat, looking up, he smiles and says, “and a German group.” Asked to identify them, Struzka declined.

“There is one more thing. Didn’t your colleague and president, Vaclav Havel, come to Most and promise an end to the liquidations in Bohemia?”

“Havel was speaking broadly,” says Struzka. “Libkovice will be the last village to be liquidated by Hlubina.”

“Are other villages marked for liquidation?” I ask.

“Yes, perhaps, by other companies,” Struzka replies.

From the Hlubina headquarters, we drive to Litvinov. At a storefront cafe in a corner of the old town square, a late lunch crowd lingers. The cafe, like nearly every shop and stall in Czechoslovakia, has recently been privatized. The new owner is painting watercolor flowers on the floor-to-ceiling window that looks onto the square. The cafe smells of tobacco, beer and roasted chicken.

At the table next to ours, Jan Kuban, representing the Litvinov chapter of Helsinki Watch, the international human rights organization, overhears our conversation about Libkovice and introduces himself. “Some in the government know about Libkovice. Some want to save the village. But there is no money for this,” Kuban says. I tell him we just came from an interview with Struzka, who told us Hlubina stands to lose money mining Libkovice coal. Kuban smiles and shakes his head. “Hlubina wants to sell coal to Germany. Everyone knows this. It is cheap for Germany. And Libkovice coal is Hlubina’s most attractive asset.” The calculus takes shape over our table: Libkovice’s destruction entails a bargain for the richest country in Europe and clears a hard-currency path to privatization for Hlubina, Struzka’s company. And panelaks for the people of Libkovice.

Kuban says the village and Hlubina struck a “gentlemen’s agreement” about the moratorium on liquidation, pending the release of an independent study. “What we hear is that the company is ignoring the agreement” he says. Earlier, Struzka had confirmed that rumor.

AS PEOPLE GATHERED FOR Libkovice’s town meeting one week later, I walked the contested village lanes with Brichacek. What had begun earlier this day was the razing of Libkovice proper. We watched Hlubina bulldozers and Hlubina dump trucks shovel and haul away the rubble of the first four Libkovice homes. They were not on the outskirts, near the prison, but in the center of Libkovice, next to the church and in full view of the mayor’s window.

As we walked, Brichacek showed us a restraining order that had arrived with the wrecking crew. The order threatened him with arrest for obstructing justice. As we surveyed the damage from the streets, the mayor spoke philosophically about his life as a miner, about his disenchantment with the party and about the grist Hlubina’s Struzka is making of his communist past. Brichacek says “For me, communism was a new religion, with a promised land. We never got there. But I used to believe in it.”

About the charges that he is politically motivated to stir up trouble, Brichacek says: “I turned in my card in 1990, the year I was elected mayor. Today it is different. We have had a revolution. People should be judged on the work they have done, not on past affiliations.”

“We were in a state of shock; no one knew,” recalls a baker and activist known as Jaroslava, one of a dozen people attending the town meeting in Mayor Brichacek’s office. She is speaking of the October evening above the Libkovice pub when the Communists announced the liquidation. She is bundled in a blue greatcoat. “We should have thrown them out the window; then it might never have begun.”

Jaroslava and others talk of erecting barriers on the road to safeguard their homes from the demolition vehicles. She and her husband, Josef, say they have been told, by “high-up Hlubina employees,” not to resist the Libkovice liquidation.

Today’s demolition has lent immediacy to their housing dilemma. Old and outstanding issues are current again.

“The first wave who moved out, in 1988, got the least compensation” from the state, Brichacek says.

“Unless you were a member of the party. They got higher appraisals,” Jaroslava adds.

“Is today’s compensation better?” I ask.

“It’s a little higher now,” Brichacek says.

“It’s for beggars,” Jaroslava says. “Still all but five of us have signed the contract with Hlubina.” The contract entitles them to compensation for their homes, including 10% of the cost of purchasing new household appliances they will need in the panelak . The understanding is that people can remain in their Libkovice homes until the panelak is available and habitable. But with the designated panelak facing bankruptcy and the bulldozers razing the village, the people are now concerned about homelessness. Outside it is gray and windy.

“Are there homeless people in the United States?” Jaroslava asks me.

Sitting on top of his small desk in the corner of his office, Brichacek keeps looking out the window at the demolished homes. He speaks often during the town meeting. “We have written letters, two to Havel, one to the prime minister of the Czech Republic. We wrote to (former U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia) Shirley Temple Black. We invite them to come to Libkovice.” No one replies. No one has come.

“The company says the coal is clean, that it will provide jobs. That the economy needs coal,” I say.

“They will sell it abroad,” someone says. “The existing heating plants cannot burn such coal; the heat is too intense,” another voice jumps in. Then the mayor, asserting: “In fact, many local coal-fired boilers are inadequate to burning Libkovice coal.”

“What about mining jobs?” I ask. Hlubina predicts unemployment without Libkovice coal.

“It is not the truth,” says one. “There was a ceramics factory in Libkovice lost to mining. In Bohemia, many other factories, lost to mining. They use this employment argument as a political football,” Brichacek says.

After a pause, the mayor adds: “The company is continuing Communist practices.” Jaroslava and others gesture their agreement. Brichacek continues: “The old mafia has departed, and a new one has arrived.”

I ask if they would vote for Havel if there were a direct election. Jaroslava and nearly half those assembled say ne . No one says ano-- yes.

The day’s events prompt them to reaffirm their compromise offer to Struzka and Hlubina: to postpone demolition until after an independent feasibility study, or, at a minimum, to get a house, not a panelak apartment, as compensation. They are willing to let the company excavate but only on the northern outskirts of town. Jaroslava vows to fight to the last person. No one disagrees.

Jaroslava’s face is taut again. A ripple quivers across her cheek. She tells me, and reminds her neighbors: “There is coal under other villages.” Then she speaks of the Libkovice official who made the deal with the Communists to destroy Libkovice back in 1987. “This man is now the director of public housing in Lom,” the village next to Libkovice.

“We should have thrown him out the window, too,” Jaroslava says.

HISTORY IS UPROOTING Bohemia again, making things vanish. The gamble in Libkovice was unthinkable as recently as three years ago. The stakes remain barely scrutable: the battle, the graves and the village are over a bed of coal Czechoslovakia may never burn.

I call Zemanek at Hlubina headquarters. I thank him for his time. I ask him to respond to charges by the mayor and citizens that, by reviving the liquidation, Hlubina is “continuing Communist practices.”

“They are wrong,” Zemanek replies. “We are not Communists. We are businessmen.”

It is an odd business. There is an energy glut in Czechoslovakia and Germany. No one there will lack for heat or electricity by the withholding of Libkovice coal from the market. A report from Prague projects a substantial decrease in overall energy output through the year 2000 due to anticipated economic slowdown and greater efficiency in energy use. It sees an aggressive move away from coal-fired power plants. It is as if the textbook motives Adam Smith conferred upon the invisible economic hand had themselves vanished.

Rather than bootstrapping its own version of capitalism, as was possible in 18th- and 19th-Century Europe, Prague aspires to the hyper-capitalism of an integrated global market with all its turbulence and dreck at the center. It is to that center that officials and businessmen have looked for loans, expertise, a model, consultants, sponsorship, investors, some luck. The new order bears the stamp of this accommodation. The accommodation is fresh, rude and improvised. It combines the vicious buffoonery of the robber-baron capitalism in the United States and Western Europe 100 years ago with contemporary economic hustles.

Is it any surprise that, at its periphery in Bohemia, capitalism reminds us of what it has long been capable of--including “Communist practices”? On the outskirts of a vanishing Bohemian village, the road to capitalism is strewn with no greater obstacle than the time-honored maxim of any popular revolution: that people expect the new to be fundamentally different from the old. In Libkovice, what is striking is the quick-change artistry with which hats have been switched. An anti-communist paves the capitalist road by liquidating the past as thoroughly as Stalin’s historians.

What of Jaroslava, Brichacek and the others? The revolution has given them the courage to speak up in public, to resist, and the hope that, in Prague Castle, compassion might prevail. They speak up, but no one of consequence listens. The standoff with Hlubina and Struzka continues into early summer.

Maybe all that remains of Libkovice will be a story. It is a story that casts the living and the dead as the merest obstacles to progress. When it is told in the cafes of Litvinov, in the back yards and lanes of Lom, in the panelaks of Most and throughout Bohemia, it may temper even cautious optimism for the kick-start that Vaclav Klaus and Western capital are applying to Bohemia.