A Picaresque Political Career

NEW YORK —  One would have thought by now that Jan Kavan’s endlessly convoluted saga could hold no fresh prospect for surprise. One would have thought wrong.

Last month, Kavan achieved vindication (of a sort) beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings--except, perhaps, his own. K. at last achieved the Castle, Dreyfus was proclaimed pope: Kavan was named foreign minister of the Czech Republic.

Kavan has been one of those astonishing East European lives, a microcosm of a half-century in which history seemed to turn itself inside out, time and again. The son of a true-believing Czechoslovak Communist who had loyally served as a press attache in the hard-line regime’s London embassy during the late ‘40s, only to be called back to Prague in the early ‘50s and dragged under in the vicious anti-Semitic purges of that late Stalinist era, Kavan grew up determined to avenge his father’s fate. A noted student activist during the Prague Spring of 1968, Kavan lived out the ensuing 20 years, following that flowering’s suppression, in feverishly shabby exile, mostly in London, cobbling together the indigenous Czech opposition’s single most effective smuggling conduit--mimeograph machines in, manuscripts out.

Within days of the “Velvet Revolution,” in November 1989, Kavan returned to Prague, a conquering hero. Notwithstanding his parallel reputation as a prickly, complicated and endlessly complicating character, he was rewarded with a slot on Civic Forum’s parliamentary slate, and won election to the country’s first post-communist legislature. Within months of that triumph, however, he was being denounced as a longtime collaborator of the StB, the prior regime’s secret police--charges he vehemently denied--and his next seven years devolved into a nightmarish miasma of endlessly deferred exoneration.

Kavan became the poster boy for lustration-run-amuck, the campaign of settling accounts with the prior communist regime that, in the Czech instance at least, seemed to career wildly out of control. It didn’t help his cause that he remained an unrepentant Social Democrat and a former antinuclear activist to boot in the brave new Thatcherite world of post-communist Czech politics, especially in the wake of Vaclav Klaus’ installation as prime minister. Or that, unlike most of the fierce new hypercapitalists, Kavan and his friends could point to long records as activist opponents of the old regime. If anything, such records only served to goad guilty feelings of resentment on the part of the majority of the country’s previously quiescent population. Wouldn’t it be great, many began to imagine, if all those heroes turned out to have been treacherous turncoats all along?

In Kavan’s case, everything came to hinge on the interpretation of an ambiguous set of jottings buried in a confidential secret police file dating back to 1969. Twice--in 1994 and again in 1996--Kavan was able to eke out grudging judicial confirmation of his complete innocence of the charges ranged against him. But it didn’t seem to matter: The right-wing anti-Kavan smear campaign continued unabated.

As recently as a few weeks ago, the implacably litigious Kavan was knocking down a newspaper smear to the effect that he had been declared “persona non grata” in Britain owing to his status there as “a convicted liar.” Brandishing a cordial letter, on official letterhead, from his old political ally, the new Labor foreign minister, Robin Cook (“I have taken the precaution of having the official record checked [and] can confirm that there is no suggestion that you have ever been guilty of committing perjury in the UK, or indeed, of any similar offense . . . . As far as I am concerned, you are a valued friend of Britain”), Kavan was able to secure a court-ordered retraction of the first half of the slur, though, bizarrely, not of the second.

Meantime, Kavan had fought his way back into politics as a leading senatorial candidate of the opposition Social Democratic Party--indeed, the party’s foreign-policy spokesman--at a time when Klaus’ own administration was becoming increasingly bedraggled: scandalously corrupt and, worse, economically inept. In the most recent elections, two months ago, a coalition led by the Social Democrats captured the leading plurality, and there followed a tortuously delicate and extended process of governmental formation.

Things were not rendered any easier for the leader of the Social Democrats and the prospective new prime minister, Milos Zeman, by his insistence that Kavan serve as his foreign minister. President Vaclav Havel, despite the fact that he himself had, in the past, benefited from Kavan’s tireless efforts, let it be known that he had his doubts about so incendiary a choice--a public misgiving that only seemed to stiffen the independent-minded Zeman’s resolve.

Nor was Zeman dissuaded by another quintessentially Kavanian mini-debacle earlier this year: A 1 a.m. incident on the near-vacant streets of downtown Prague, in which Kavan managed to scrape three parked cars while trying to maneuver his own car out of a narrow squeeze, and then declined to take a Breathalyzer test when the police informed him that, as senator, he wasn’t required to. (Typically, this incident was reported in the rabidly anti-Kavanian press as the ostentatiously drunken senator’s totaling his own and five other cars and then being foiled in his panicky attempt to escape by a furiously righteous mob.) Zeman accepted Kavan’s (and the police’s) far milder version, subsequently adding, perhaps facetiously, that it might have cost the senator a slightly higher posting as deputy prime minister.

When I reached Kavan the other day in his improbable new digs in the foreign ministry--the resplendent early-Baroque Cerninsky Palace, perched atop a promontory overlooking Havel’s own Hradcany Castle--he still seemed somewhat dumbfounded by this most recent turn of events.

It was by no means clear how long he had be able to survive at such heights--lurid exposes of his supposed misdeeds, entirely untethered from factual corroboration, were virtually a nightly staple on several of the more partisan television outlets. In fact, the fledgling government was even heading toward a parliamentary inquisition on the specific question of Kavan’s participation. (Now scheduled for the middle of this week.) But, on the phone, Kavan seemed to be battening down for the long haul, having already accepted invitations to visit the foreign ministers of Germany and Poland--the latter, his longtime Solidarity confederate, Bronislaw Geremek. He was also eagerly anticipating, if with some irony, how he might well be helping to preside over the Czech Republic’s entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, slated for April 1999.

Meanwhile, the thing that most seemed to awe him was the history of the place: There he sat, in the very office of Jan Masaryk, the beloved Czech foreign minister who, in 1948, when the Communist’s seized power, had either leapt or been hurled to his death in the wide courtyard below. There seemed to be a certain conflation as an audibly moved Kavan described the scene--Masaryk’s fate momentarily standing in for his own father’s. Whereas, of course, though his father was subsequently to suffer a similarly terrible fate at the hands of those same Stalinists, back in 1948, he’d been serving as their apologist in the new regime’s London embassy.

Nothing was ever simple in the life of Kavan--nor, it seems, is anything ever likely to be.*