Ideological blinkers in the film Vlny: How rewriting history undermines democracy

26. 8. 2024 / Muriel Blaive

On the bright side, Vlny is an enjoyable film, both appealing and well-crafted. Moreover, as a historian, I am always pleased when a fictional work encourages a segment of the public, who might not typically engage with their own history, to reflect on it.

Before delving into a critique of the film’s historical narrative, I would like to highlight two other commendable aspects: first, the shock of the 1968 invasion by Warsaw Pact troops is well-rendered (as an aside, in view of this history it always baffles me how anyone in this country can still support Russia today, particularly its invasion of Ukraine.) Second, while the story is set against the wrong historical backdrop it is refreshing to see an individual episode of collaboration with the secret police depicted in all its complexity rather than in an overtly judgmental way. The film demonstrates that even a fundamentally good person – who later proves to be quite heroic – can be made to compromise themselves with the secret police, in this case to protect his younger brother.

Vlny exemplifies the current rewriting of communist history in the Czech Republic

It remains that from a broader perspective, the film contributes to a troubling trend of historical revisionism in the Czech Republic. It suggests in its opening sentence that some characters are “inspired by real people and share their names”, which sets the viewers’ expectations for a documentary-like accuracy and adherence to the “historical truth.” However, this is immediately followed by these claims: “The Soviet Union controls Eastern European countries, their governments are subservient to Moscow, 1,300,000 political prisoners, 5,800 executions, millions of ruined lives.”

Where and when exactly did such cruel repression take place? The film does not specify it. I tried to piece it together mentally: perhaps if we take Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the GDR, Bulgaria, and Romania for the entire communist period…? No, the figures are still much too high. Including the Soviet Union...? Then they are too low. Back to Central Europe but including the post-World War II settlings of accounts…? The Polish civil war of 1945-48...? The Hungarian revolution of 1956, perhaps…? None of these combinations fits the provided figures.

As the subtitles scroll across the screen, we see familiar communist imagery in the background: portraits of Klement Gottwald, the historical leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and the first communist dictator in 1948, Antonín Novotný, who served as first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and president of Czechoslovakia until 1968, and others.

When the film specifically mentions 1,300,000 political prisoners, it shows an image of Milada Horáková at her trial.

And as the precise moment when the subtitles mention 5,800 executions, the film shows a trial scene that, while not explicitly identified, strongly reminds of the infamous Slánský trial or of any other political trial – the kind of image Czech viewers have seen countless times.

Mission accomplished. Although these numerical claims are historically implausible, the political and normative implications of the images are clear: this repression looks like it took place in Czechoslovakia. But as the film only implies it rather than stating it word for word, it will be easy to feign innocence if or when challenged by someone familiar with the actual figures. I can imagine Mádl protesting in good faith: “I never said there were 1,300,000 political prisoners and 5,800 executions in communist Czechoslovakia!” He never said it indeed, but there is little doubt the public left the cinema believing exactly that. And he can reasonably expect that the vast majority of his audience will be unaware of this discrepancy in the first place.

In reality, during the Stalinist period (1948-1953), Czechoslovak camps and prisons held about 50,000 people who could be classified as “political” prisoners, while there were approximately 178 “political” executions. These figures are based on research by Karel Kaplan and other historians in the 1960s and although they have slightly adjusted since 1989, they remain within this general range. Thus, the film exaggerates the scale of repression by roughly 3,000%.

Does it matter? After all, who cares? It’s only one film. It is true enough that the communist repression was harsh and that it traumatized the country.

What distorting history reveals

It does matter. As noted by various authors (Jan Čulík here, Veronika Pehe here, Alena Zemančíková here, Karel Veselý here, Albín Sybera here, for instance), a distortion of the historical figures is linked to a misunderstanding of the historical context and to a misrepresentation of the atmosphere of the time. The film’s portrayal of the political, social, and cultural atmosphere is fundamentally flawed. For instance, the historical figures portrayed in the film did not live in fear in 1967-68; they did not experience a sudden sense of freedom due to a new communist party ruling; the regime could not have concealed police actions against students; it is unlikely that a 17-year-old would be terrified of being sent to a disreputable children’s home when opportunities for normal adult life awaited him; and the StB's activities were far more subdued at this time than depicted, among other inaccuracies. But mainly, the second half of the 1960s, especially the Prague Spring, was a period of freedom and enthusiasm. People could study, travel to the West, freely express themselves in culture, debate and criticize politicians and the party even before the official abolition of censorship.

In this sense, Vlny is more reminiscent of the Czechoslovak society of 1951 than that of 1967-68, a society in which the level of societal passivity is misrepresented in any case. For those who mistakenly believe that individuals were paralyzed by fear under Stalinism, let alone during the Prague Spring, I recommend reading Josef Škvorecký’s novels, such as Miracle or The Engineer of Human Souls. Before anticommunism became a fad of the post-1989 era, and without remotely relativizing communist repression, his novels vividly illustrate how people did their best to dodge the terror regime by pretending to be unaware, idiotic, ignorant, overzealous, or by any other means that allowed them to navigate the worst of the orders they received while trying to gain as much as possible for themselves – as they had done under Nazism, too, which Škvorecký also shows in his novel The Cowards. This nuanced reality is now accessible through the methodologies of micro-history and the socio-political history of everyday life, but such approaches have been consistently cast by primitive anticommunists in complicit media as “communist.” They have been mischaracterized as minimizing the extent of the repression and sadly, the public believes this.

Naturally, Vlny alone won’t alter the Czech perception of communist history. However, each similarly misleading film – such as Burning Bush by Agnieszka Holland or Brothers by Tomáš Mašín –, each unprofessional historical study (including much of the recent output from the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes), each caricatural press article on the communist past, and each poorly designed historical exhibit (those of the Museum for the Memory of the Twentieth Century come to mind) contributes to a broader distortion. Together, these elements recreate the Czechoslovak communist past as a fictitious dystopia reminiscent of Orwell’s universe, one which is however inconsistent with the historical reality.

Distorting history is not merely a natural phenomenon

The indoctrination initiated by Pavel Žáček, founder of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, and his allies, has come to fruition. At the time when ÚSTR was established, Žáček claimed that a communist was a communist, as if the communist regime had known no historical phases, as if Stalinism and Gottwald were comparable with the liberal atmosphere of the Prague Spring and the popularity of Alexander Dubček, or even with Gustáv Husák and normalization. If every communist was a bad communist and every phase of the Czechoslovak communist era was oppressive, then communist Czechoslovakia was essentially a vast concentration camp populated by only three kinds of individuals: victims, heroes, and traitors. Law 181/2007, which established ÚSTR, mandated the institute to study repression and resistance, while conspicuously omitting collaboration as a research theme. It also mandated it to overlook the period 1945-1948, when democrats actively collaborated with the communists, primarily to expel the Sudeten Germans – and never mind that around 30,000 of them were killed in the process, Czech society remained “democratic” according to the law all the way until the 1948 communist takeover.

Concurrently with Žáček’s statement in 2008, anticommunist activists from the Platform for European Memory and Conscience, with the support of ÚSTR, succeeded in getting the EU to adopt the Prague Declaration on Memory and Conscience. This declaration suggested a moral equivalence between communist repression and the Holocaust by establishing a shared day of remembrance for both forms of dictatorship. As I have shown elsewhere, drawing such a parallel effectively denies that in Czechoslovakia, the Holocaust claimed 50 to 100 times more victims than communist repression. If antisemitism had been the underlying motive for establishing such a misleading comparison, its proponents could not have devised a better approach.

A year after Žáček’s statement, in 2009, a Czech-Austrian exhibit on borders portrayed Vorkuta and the Gulag as emblematic of “communism” rather than specific to Soviet Stalinism. Much like Vlny, the exhibit subtly created the impression that the Gulag could also have existed in Bohemia but without explicitly stating it, thereby maintaining its ability to plausibly deny the implication.

The same year, an exhibit of ÚSTR on Wenceslas Square commemorating the 1989 Velvet Revolution hinted that students such as Pavel Žáček and Monika Pajerová had started to plan the Velvet Revolution two years before it actually happened. What next? As historical narratives are shamelessly reshaped, the challenge is to cut through the distortions. How many people are still capable of doing this today, and for how much longer?

Badly written history threatens democracy

The everyday result of this collective distortion of history is irksome in its absurdity. Many younger Czechs, who know little about the country’s communist past or even the details of their own family histories, now cling to a comforting, almost smug belief that they are on the side of the victims. The prevailing sentiment seems to be, “I don’t know the specifics, but my family must have suffered.” Emigrants are seen as victims, those who stayed are victims, those who spoke out are victims, and those who remained silent as victims. Meanwhile, those who were imprisoned by the communist regime (the actual victims) are elevated to the status of heroes.

Czech society has positioned itself firmly on the right side of history, amassing enough capital of sympathy in its own eyes to judge others with a clear conscience. The days when dissident Václav Havel spoke of “auto-totalitarianism” and, as President, urged citizens to recognize their collective responsibility for the country’s dire state under communism are long gone. So too are the days when Hannah Arendt warned that if everyone is a victim, then no one is responsible and no one can be held accountable – culprits remain unpunished. The invigorating sense of individual and collective freedom from guilt and responsibility comes at the cost of forgetting these crucial lessons.

This somewhat sanctimonious attitude in Czech society today certainly doesn’t encourage young people to critically examine themselves, their families, their nation, or their country’s policies, and this lack of self-reflection is detrimental to the development of civic society and democracy. Not that this trend is unique – it can be observed worldwide. Although Vlny itself is innocuous enough and the Czech Republic is at no risk of turning into a genocidal society any time soon, the building of such a victimization complex led in the past to dangerous psychological patterns, similar to those observed in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda during the 1990s, or even in Israel today. There, the deeply entrenched narrative of exclusive victimhood has led many to justify the harsh treatment of Palestinians. Victimization rarely fosters tolerance or peace, and its toxic power should never be underestimated.