An Old Czech TV Detective Causing a Ruckus

He was the archetypal television detective. Steely, smart yet bighearted, with a nice Slavic chin, Maj. Jan Zeman always got his guy.

Between 1974 and 1980, Czechoslovak Television produced “Major Zeman’s Thirty Cases,” and the series, using the best Czech actors, directors and scriptwriters, was a critical smash. Czech viewers, saddled with television best described as gray, tuned in religiously, giving the innovative, exciting show stratospheric ratings.

“It was enormously popular,” says Jakub Puchalsky, general director of Czech Television.

Small wonder, then, that “Major Zeman” seemed like a natural for a nostalgic revival on Czech Television when the idea was first suggested this year.

But nothing is simple in post-Communist Europe--not even reruns.

Major Zeman, to put it bluntly, was a Commie. His exploits as a secret police apparatchik were as much about ideological purity as entertainment.

The series, in fact, was ordered by the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, which launched the crushing repression that followed the 1968 democratic reform movement called Prague Spring. The aim was to burnish the image of the secret police.

Thus, a fierce political debate has broken out. And in the Czech Republic, where “lustration”--the exorcism of former Communists from all corners of society--was carried out with more gusto than elsewhere in Central Europe, some see Major Zeman as just another despicable functionary best consigned to history’s dustbin.

“It was psychological manipulation of the masses, and a certain part of society could still take it seriously,” said Rudolf Husak, secretary of the Confederation of Political Prisoners, which represents the interests of people imprisoned by the Communist authorities.

Others, including Puchalsky, believe the show--viewed nearly 20 years after the last episode was made--is almost comical in its political affectations. Moreover, he said, the willingness to see “Major Zeman” for what it is can help Czechs confront their past and serve as a measure of the maturity of the country’s democracy.

A major in the Statni Bezpecnost, or StB--the secret police of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic--Zeman entered the popular culture just as the regime was most virulent.

Each episode, about 75 minutes long, was built around an actual event that took place each year between 1945 and 1975. In one, a village police chief, under siege from alleged reactionary vandals, praises the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion, which violently put down the Prague Spring.

“Last year, in ‘68,” the chief laments, “the locals broke my windows. . . . God knows what would have happened to me if those guys hadn’t come.”

Other episodes imply that nefarious American agents, employing alcoholic, sweaty reactionaries, foment all kinds of upheaval and murder among the good people of Czechoslovakia. In one of the last episodes, now something of a cult classic, members of the famous dissident rock group Plastic People of the Universe are fictionalized as junkies and drunks who want to hijack a plane.

And in each show’s denouement--when some slobbering enemy of the state finally gets popped--Czechoslovakia is yet again safe for, well, communism.

“I watched one episode recently,” said Puchalsky, who at 29 only vaguely remembers the show’s original impact, “and I laughed the whole way through it.”

Since a private station in neighboring Slovakia first showed “Major Zeman” reruns in January, fan clubs and Web sites have been launched, and bootleg copies are advertised in the Czech press. Puchalsky said he would like to air the first episode sometime next year, the 10th anniversary of the collapse of Communist rule.

Vladimir Brabec, 64, who played Major Zeman, declined to be interviewed. But he recently told a Czech newspaper: “In the past, movies were banned for political reasons. . . . It would be stupid to do the same thing now. Some will like it and some won’t; those who won’t can switch to another channel--and that’s OK.”