"Continuity – My Main Impulse for Participating in the Movement"
"Continuity – My Main Impulse for Participating in the Movement"

The Role of Political and Social Ideals in the Life Story of František Kriegel

Summary/Abstract: The Czechoslovak politician František Kriegel (1908–1979) came to public attention primarily thanks to his refusal, in August 1968, to sign what came to be known as the “Moscow Protocol”. As a volunteer doctor, he had fought in the ranks of the International Brigades at the battlefronts of the Spanish Civil War as well as the Second World War in China and Burma, escaped political trials in the 1950s, served as an advisor in Cuba in the 1960s, and became a member of the top leadership of the Communist Party and chairman of the Central Committee of the National Front (Národní fronta) during the Prague Spring. After speaking out against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, he was dismissed from his posts in the spring of 1969. In 1976, he was among the first signatories of Charter 77. However, the way his life and positions developed was intricate and too ambiguous to be limited to a one-off heroic act. This article examines Kriegel’s life motivations and the role a political and social ideal played in his life. By confronting Kriegel’s ideal of a justand equal society with his publicly and privately declared positions throughout decades of public activity, the author seeks an answer to the question of whether and to what extent Kriegel distanced himself from his ideal or how he adapted and gradually transformed it. He comes to the conclusion that for Kriegel, his political position and belief in the possibility of achieving the ideal was so integrated and lived that he did not abandon it even at times when, on the contrary, the political implementation of the socialist or communist idea moved away from the declared ideal (whether in the 1950s or during the Czechoslovak normalization). According to the author, Kriegel’s approach to communist ideology was in principle emotional and based on the practical side of his personality. This doctor, soldier and communist official was not an ideologist of world communism, and the author is reluctant to call him even a pure intellectual, claiming that Kriegel was instead a practical person, skilled in organization, and a man of principles. This is also why Kriegel’s attempts at advancing his concept of a socially just ideal clashed regularly with the limitations of real politics and consequently actually distanced him from the possibility of pursuing it. The author concludes that this tension between a personally lived and embraced belief in a utopian ideal, and the dramatic twists of his life add a touch of drama, as well as tragedy, to František Kriegel’s life.

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