Milos Jakes
Czechoslovakia’s last Communist leader, slavishly devoted to Moscow but hated by his countrymen
MILOS JAKES, who has died aged 97, was Czechoslovakia’s last Communist leader before the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Born in Ceske Chalupy on August 12 1922, he started his career as an uncharismatic junior communist in a Moravian shoe factory, and until the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 had faint hope of advancement.
But after Alexander Dubcek’s experiment in reform was crushed by Soviet tanks, Jakes’s slavish devotion to Moscow propelled him from provincial obscurity to the central Politburo and eventually to leadership of the Communist Party.
Shortly after Dubcek’s dismissal, Jakes was appointed to head the Control Commission charged with purging the party and society of reformers.
In this process of “normalisation” nearly half a million party members lost their jobs. Their children were denied higher education and joined their parents in inner exile. Under Jakes and his politburo colleagues Czechoslovakia had perhaps the world’s most highly qualified dustbin men, train drivers and boiler stokers.
It was a suitable irony, then, that in November 1989, as protesters gathered in Prague to demand democratic elections, the Communist Party finally ousted Jakes as its leader in the forlorn hope that it would stave off these demands.
Jakes had only been confirmed as
General Secretary in 1988 and, like Erich Honecker, the hardline communist leader of the former East Germany, was completely unprepared for the Gorbachev revolution.
He failed to appreciate that without the support of the Soviet Union (and without the threat of the military intervention), the Czechoslovak Communist government lacked authority and therefore needed to reform if it were to survive.
Gennady Gerasimov, Gorbachev’s spokesman, had already made this clear when, in reply to the question – what is the difference between Dubcek’s reforms and perestroika? – he replied: “Twenty years.” But Jakes failed to get the message.
He reluctantly launched “prestavba”, his own brand of perestroika, but was never committed to reform. In interviews he sought to justify the Soviet invasion of 1968 and defended the Czechoslovak government’s human rights record.
He said that Charter 27, the reform movement started by the dissident playwright, later president, Vaclav Havel, was a threat to the country’s stability.
In the summer of 1989 Gorbachev told Jakes that the Soviet Politburo was about to repudiate the ’68 invasion, and if he did not want to be undercut by this move he should purge the Czech Politburo of all members tainted by the invasion – except himself – and rehabilitate all those expelled after 1968.
At first Jakes agreed, but then reneged and tried to adopt an even harder line. At this point he became an object of ridicule both within the party and without; bootleg videos of him spluttering directives for greater party discipline were widely seen.
As the news of Jakes’s departure spread through the protesters on Wenceslas Square there were cries of jubilation.
Jakes was one of the most widely hated figures in post-’68 Czechoslovakia. After the revolution it was discovered that he had wanted to use troops against the protesters.
The new democratic government hoped to prosecute Jakes for treason. They believed that he had conspired with the Soviet authorities to prepare a government to replace Dubcek.
Charges against him were dropped, however, because the necessary KGB documents were not forthcoming and the relevant files of the Czechoslovak secret police had been destroyed.
Jakes enjoyed a quiet retirement, but remained unrepentant.
“Perestroika opened the room for unbound openness,” he complained in 2017. “Everybody said whatever they wanted, criticised what they wanted, and instead of unity, this led to ruptures.”
His wife, Kvetena, died in 2013. They had two sons.
Milos Jakes, born August 12 1922, died July 10 2020