New book describes the fates of Czechoslovaks executed by Soviets

The fates of more than 100 Czechoslovak citizens and members of the Czech minority executed by the Soviet regime in Moscow have been described for the first time in a newly-published book entitled Moskevská pohřebiště (Moscow’s Burial Grounds). The author is historian Mečislav Borák.

The book, subtitled "Czechs and Czechoslovak citizens executed in Moscow 1922 – 1953", was released last week. It tells the stories of such people who were buried in Moscow after being executed there.  

Their fates have been all but forgotten, as often the victims’ families never learned what tragic ends they met. "Until now we haven’t known most of the names of those who perished during the repression. Some names were known, such as Jan Březina of Kolín, the famous polar aviator. I have managed to determine the names of 121 persons who were executed and who now lie in all five of the burial sites used for those purposes in Moscow during the 1920s and mainly at the end of the 1930s," Borák, who works at the Silesian University in Opava, told the Czech News Agency.    

The author believes that, in comparison with other regions from which hundreds of people died in this way, the number of executed Czechoslovaks is not high. He explains this by saying that only some members of the Czech minority, probably the intelligentsia, remained in Moscow after the revolution.

Those executed include not just Czechs, but also two Slovaks and Sudeten Germans. The number of victims is not considered final.

The gradual availability of the former Soviet archival collections provided the first information as to the extent and form of the Soviet regime’s repressive policies. The names of those executed and discussed in the book come from the intelligence files of the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs).

Borák says that in the Soviet system, anyone with a "touch of the foreign" about them was considered an enemy of the state. Political reasons were also gradually added to the definition.  

It was enough for someone to correspond with their family in Czechoslovakia to be suspected of espionage. In the introduction to the book, Borák reminds readers that the number of victims and their names have not been known for long.  

"During the time I have been researching this repression I have become quite hardened to it. However, when I saw how, for the vast majority of the cases, their interrogation files included information about how they were forced to denounce others or give false testimony through physical violence and threats, my blood ran cold," Borák said.  

The victims’ families were subjected to this terror until the first wave of rehabilitation during the 1950s, but were not definitively relieved of this burden until the 1990s. Roughly 10 % of the victims were linked with Moscow and its surrounding environs.

Most of the executions were performed without a court order. The victims now lie in unmarked mass graves in several of the burial grounds for the victims of political repression that have been discovered so far in Moscow.