The Strange Case of Martin Šmíd

On November 17, 1989, there was a student demonstration in Prague. This was the height of the turmoil in the Warsaw Pact: the Berlin Wall had fallen two weeks before, and the Czechoslovak government would fall just two weeks later. About 3,000 students marched to Prague's National Cemetery to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of a Czech hero killed by the Nazis. While they were milling around at the cemetery gate, somebody started shouting, "To Wenceslas Square," the hearth of the city. So the marchers changed directons. Just before they reached the square, their path was blocked by riot police. Eventually some of the police attacked and beat the protesters, and around 120 were arrested. 

This is where the Czechoslovak Revolution enters the murky, looking-glass world of Kafka and Švejk, spiced with a hint of John le Carré. Rumour travelled fast in Communist capitals and it was generally believed, certainly more so than the official media. Within hours, the word was that the prone body seen lying on Narodni Street was that of a mathematics student, Martin Šmíd. It was spread mainly by the dissident Charter 77 activist Peter Uhl, who daily provided information from the opposition underground to journalists from the West. Uhl had been told about the death by a woman calling herself Drahomira Dražská, who claimed to be an old friend of Šmíd. Uhl immediately told Radio Free Europe, the BBC and Voice of America, which reported the death of Martin Šmíd as fact. There was a public fury throughout Czechoslovakia. The regimed denied that anybody had died in the 'riot' and the next day managed to produce two Martin Šmíds, both of them alive. One, who had been at the demonstration, appeared on nationwide TV breathing and talking. It did little good. Nobody believed the regime's denials.

That weekend huge spontaneous demonstratione erupted in Prague on an unprecedented scale. An archway on Narodni Street where many of the police beatings had taken place was turned into a shrine visited by scores of thousands of people. Someone had painted a cross on a wall nearby and passers-by lit candles. "The news about that death changed everything, not just for us, but for our parents' generation," said Dasha Antelova. "They had been silent since 1968, terrified of what they could lose. But not they were as enraged as we young people were."

But it was all a fake. Nobody had been killed on November 17. After the government had been overthrown in the "Velvet Revolution," people started looking into what had really happened. A new rumor spread, that the whole thing had been cooked up by a faction of the Communist Party who wanted to overthrow the old hardline leaders and replace them when Gorbachev-style reformers. That would not have been surprising, since coups of exactly that type had recently taken place in East Germany and Bulgaria. One of the people who believed and spread that rumor was a Hungarian journalist named Victor Sebesteyn, whose book 1989 I am reading and from which this comes. Sebesteyn's account continues:

The plan was the brainchild of General Alois Lorenc, head of the StB [Czech KBG], and a small group of Party reformers who looked at events in Poland and Hungary and thought the only way of maintaining their own positions was to find a means of negotiating from strength with a divided opposition. At the same time, the other essential step in the operation – codenamed Wedge – was to infiltrate the dissident movement and find opposition figures willing to do a deal with reform Communists. . . . A key player was Lieutenant Ludvik Zífčak, a young StB officer who, under orders, had infiltrated the student opposition underground. In a classic 'provocation', he was one of the leaders of the main march to the National Cemetery and one of the students shouting at the top of his voice "To Wenceslas Square." He knew there would be a trap when the students arrived. He kept his head down as far as possible when the violence began. He lay on the ground and pretended to be dead. Drahomira Dražská, who subsequently disappeared, was another agent. She had orders to pass on the news to Uhl that a student had died.

The new Czech parliament eventually convened a committee to look into the matter, and they were unable to confirm the story. But the version they put out, that Drahomira Dražská had cooked up the whole thing by herself, has never persuaded most Czechs.

One of the things I find fascinating about 1989 is the way, in that crazy time, small sparks could set off big explosions. For example, the poor wording of the East German spokesperson whose announcement of a proposed plan to loosen travel restrictions convinced thousands of hearers that the border was open, leading to the breaching of the Berlin Wall just 12 hours later. In Sebesteyn's version, an attempted coup by a communist faction instead launched the protests that overthrew the whole regime. But what if it really was just a mad story dreamed up by an obscure woman who wanted to feel like she was playing some part in history? What if Drahomira Dražská's lie launched the revolution?