75 years ago today: Milada Horáková sentenced to death in Communist show trial in Czechoslovakia

"When you realize that something is just and true, then be so resolute that you will be able to die for it.”   – Milada Horáková, in a letter to her daughter

 

Image of Milada Horáková at her show trial

First wrote about Milada Horáková, the Czech democrat who resisted both Nazis and Communists, back in 2014, and her refusal to go along with the political show trial organized against her in 1950. 

She had been a member of the Czech resistance to the Nazi occupation of her homeland and survived torture in a Nazi prison. After Czechoslovakia was liberated from the Nazis in 1945 by the Soviets she became a member of parliament in 1946 but resigned her seat after the Communist coup of 1948. 

However she refused to abandon her country. 

She was arrested at her office on September 27, 1949 "on charges of conspiracy and espionage against the state." 

The show trial of Horáková and twelve of her colleagues began on May 31, 1950. 

Oxford Languages defines a show trial as "a judicial trial held in public with the intention of influencing or satisfying public opinion, rather than of ensuring justice." 

Vladimir Lenin called them "model trials", but they would eventually become known as show trials under Josef Stalin with hundreds of thousands executed and millions sent to work camps in Siberia, and they would take place not only in the Soviet Union, but in the East Bloc including Czechoslovakia, and as far away as Cuba. The Nazis also copied the practice, and so have other repressive regimes.

Adam D. E. Watkins in his 2010 paper "The Show Trial of J U Dr. Milada Horáková: The Catalyst for Social Revolution in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1950" explains the importance of the show trial in gutting democratic traditions and replacing them with Stalinism.

"The study deconstructs the show trial’s influence on inducing a country to foster the Communist movement against decades of democratic traditions. The research reveals the impact of the show trial of Dr. Milada Horáková in 1950 and how it was instrumental in reforming a society, marked the beginning of Stalinism, and ushered forth a perverted system of justice leading to a cultural transformation after the Communist putsch. Furthermore, the revolution truncated intellectual thought and signified the end of many social movements – including the women’s rights movement."

According to Watkins, Horáková was seen by the public as a symbol of  the First Republic and of democracy. Unlike others who did break under the relentless psychological and physical torture she never did. The communists tried to edit her testimony for propaganda purposes but as Radio Prague in their 2005 report on the discovery of the unedited tapes of her trial.

[S]he faced her show trial with calm and defiance, refusing to be broken. Audio recordings - intended to be used by the Communists for propaganda purposes - were mostly never aired, for the large part because for the Party's purposes, they were unusable.

Milada Horakova addressed the court in the final day of her show trial on June 8, 1950 in which she refused to go along with the script prepared for her. 

"I have declared to the State Police that I remain faithful to my convictions, and that the reason I remain faithful to them is because I adhere to the ideas, the opinions and the beliefs of those who are figures of authority to me. And among them are two people who remain the most important figures to me, two people who made an enormous impression on me throughout my life. Those people are Tomas Garrigue Masaryk and Eduard Benes. And I want to say something to those who were also inspired by those two men when forming their own convictions and their own ideas. I want to say this: no-one in this country should be made to die for their beliefs. And no-one should go to prison for them."

Because she refused to cooperate with the Stalinists her punishment was particularly severe, death by hanging.

During the trial Radio Prague reported that a note written by an anonymous eye-witness to Milada's execution quoted the young prosecutor recommending: "Don't break her neck on the noose, Suffocate the bitch - and the others too."  

Milada Horáková  was executed in Pankrác Prison on June 27, 1950 through "intentionally slow strangulation, which according to historians took 15 minutes. She was 48 years old." 

The urn with her ashes was never given to her family nor is it known what became of them.  She wrote letters to her mother-in-law, husband, and daughter. Only her daughter, Jana, would learn of the contents of the letter when it was published in an underground publication in Czechoslovakia in 1970. She finally received the letters in 1990.

In the letter to her 16 year old teenage daughter Milada explained why she had refused to compromise with evil. 

The reason was not that I loved you little; I love you just as purely and fervently as other mothers love their children. But I understood that my task here in the world was to do you good … by seeing to it that life becomes better, and that all children can live well. … Don’t be frightened and sad because I am not coming back any more. Learn, my child, to look at life early as a serious matter. Life is hard, it does not pamper anybody, and for every time it strokes you it gives you ten blows. Become accustomed to that soon, but don’t let it defeat you. Decide to fight.

Hours prior to her execution she reaffirmed her position to her family:

I go with my head held high. One also has to know how to lose. That is no disgrace. An enemy also does not lose honor if he is truthful and honorable. One falls in battle; what is life other than struggle?  

In 2007 her prosecutor Ludmila Brozova-Polednova who in 1950 had helped to condemn Horakova to death, then 86, was tried as an accomplice to murder.  She was found guilty and sentenced to six years in prison in 2008 but was given a presidential pardon by Vaclav Klaus on humanitarian grounds one year and six months into her sentence and released in 2010. 

The former prosecutor defended her actions claiming that what she did was legal and that she was "following orders." Brozova-Polednova tried to appeal her conviction at the Strasbourg Court in 2011 and lost. She died on January 15, 2015 at age 93.

Milada's life story was brought to the big screen in 2017, was available on Netflix, and can be purchased on Amazon. Below is an English trailer for this important film.