One of the greatest enemies of communist ideologues was the classical division of property ownership into private and public with transparent rules for its disposal. The concept of “ownership” was the subject of all sorts of communist distortions and bending. If anyone thought that this word had a clear meaning and there was nothing to bend about it, they would be terribly mistaken. The comrades have managed to twist the term to such an extent that the owner, as we understand it today or before the communists, is left with virtually nothing.
For those who did not have the opportunity to know the law at that time, the name Anatoly Venediktov and his book State Socialist Property will mean nothing today. In it, he depicted the foundations of all the chaos that the protagonists of the communist regime sowed and with which we are still struggling.
Marxism-Leninism in Czechoslovakia, following the example of the Soviet ideologues of law, denied natural rights and had a particular fetish for the freedoms of property and freedom of contract.
Marxists interpreted the emphasis on the exercise of property rights as an expedient by which the bourgeoisie sought to justify the unlimited accumulation of wealth. The result was an alternative division of property and property rights.
Although the law in Czechoslovakia provided for a certain limited possibility of owning something, each of us could lose it very quickly. In addition to the classic nationalisation on the basis of dozens of nationalisation regulations, by which everything that was used for any kind of profitable activity was transferred to the state or cooperatives, every citizen (i.e. natural person) could lose his or her property, so to speak, by stealth. To illustrate this, we take the liberty of describing one of the ways of transferring private property to state ownership, using “progressive” legality.
Consider, for example, Act No. 71/1959 Coll., on measures relating to certain private domestic property, which came into force on 14 December 1959. This law, in the interests of its stated objective, i.e. the continuous improvement of the standard of housing for workers, came up with a series of typically vicious measures, at the end of which it could be decided that the property of a natural person or a private legal entity would become State property. In fact, the officials of the relevant housing authority could decide that, in order to achieve the above objective, the extension of a particular privately owned house could be used to increase its accommodation capacity for workers. However, after the alteration had been carried out, which, worlds ago, could be carried out even without the owner’s consent, the owner of the tenement house was obliged to pay compensation to the local national committee for the alteration carried out and the local national committee was entitled to create a lien to secure that claim. If the claim for compensation, together with other claims of State socialist organisations secured by a lien on the tenement house, exceeded two-thirds of the value of the house before its alteration, the executive body of the district national committee could decide that the tenement house, together with the building plot on which it was built and the garden bordering on that plot, if it belonged to the owner of the tenement house, should pass into State socialist ownership. So, to summarise: someone has a family house, some bimbo on the national committee has decided that she can deprive the owner of the house, so she comes up with the idea that an apartment can be built into the attic; this will make the house so valuable, without the owner’s consent and at his expense, that the bimbo decides that it will belong to the state.
In addition, there was a broadly defined category of socialist property. This was then further divided into state ownership and cooperative ownership.
We have discussed above how the state of affairs was achieved, in which the volume of state ownership was multiplied many times over. The state, with the help of dozens of regulations, became the owner of virtually everything that could be used for production, supplying trade or providing services. Another chapter was the process of collectivisation, i.e. the voluntary but more often violent achievement of the goal of having tens of thousands of private farmers join unified agricultural cooperatives (the name applies only to the territory of the present-day Czech Republic). At this point, it is necessary to recall, for the sake of illustrating the communist means, that in connection with collectivisation tens of thousands of people were sentenced, thousands of families were resettled, and dozens of former peasants were murdered in fabricated trials.
If we summarize the above and place it in a certain time-space, we have 12 years of communist regime around 1960. President Novotny boasts that socialism has been achieved, which at that time was confirmed by the new constitution. The ideas of socialist ownership are further elaborated in the Civil Code, that is, Act No 40/1964 Coll.
Fortunately, the ideal of “all-people common ownership” was not achieved, but the communists said that a certain intermediate stage had been reached.
This brings us to a very fundamental question. What attitude could a peasant have towards the JZD when a local comrade forced him to join the cooperative and his neighbour, when he did not join, was tortured in the camp? What attitude could a janitor, a former tradesman, whose business, built by three generations of his ancestors, was nationalized by the Communists, possibly have towards the guarded socialist property? What was the relationship of the storekeeper to the property entrusted to her when her communist boss regularly stole from the stored goods and forced the nice storekeeper to report that the missing material was eaten by rats? The answer is pretty much as follows: the relationship of any citizen to the property that the communists stole from decent people was lousy. At this time a slogan took hold that illustrates everything: “He who does not steal, steals from his family.” It took hold in all sectors, throughout the territory and among all social classes. And when a greengrocer makes a “private” profit by selling his best produce, when a cowherd’s aunt feeds her own pig at home from the milk she milks, when a bricklayer “borrows” cement to repair his sister’s cottage, or when a soldier sells off the diesel for his tank, secondary crime logically arises. The night watchman at the meat factory also had to be given a stint so that he wouldn’t peek, the master mason had to be helped again to remove the sand he had stolen, and the regional secretary and his friends had to organize a hunt so that he wouldn’t wonder about the origin of the mysterious disease that had caused half the game to disappear in the game preserve.
The comrades were well aware that if they didn’t do something about it quickly, the socialist economy might collapse under their hands. For this reason, the criminal offence of theft of socialist property had already entered the 1950 Criminal Code. It was also taken over in the later Criminal Code No. 140/1961 Coll.
This offence is committed, according to section 132, by one who steals property which is in socialist ownership in such a way that
(a) appropriates a thing from such property by taking possession of it,
(b) appropriates a thing from such property entrusted to him, or
(c) to the detriment of such property, enriches himself or another by misleading someone or taking advantage of his mistake.
In effect, this defined the crimes of theft, embezzlement and fraud committed on fetishized socialist property. But the difference was in something else, in the criminal rate. While a thief could get away with probation for stealing privately owned property, if he took a brick from a building he could get five years. However, if someone wanted revenge on the real or perceived perpetrator, the prosecutor could come up with the fact that there were three of them stealing, and the janitor was bribed, and the president of the co-op was in on it, so the crime was committed in an organized manner and with the participation of a public official, and the group of thieves could end up in prison for up to 15 years. The upper limit of 15 years, by the way, was the same as for simple murder without aggravating circumstances.
The paradox of the introduced criminal offence of theft was that it rarely fell on the actual perpetrators of organised and systematic theft. Very often, the hand of the law fell on some poor person who did not notice that he was taking beer from the shop without paying, or who agreed with the innkeeper that he would not pay the bill this time in exchange for another service. Again, we must stress that both the convenience store and the pub were socialist-owned enterprises, so the theft of the income of these enterprises was an attack on socialist property, so brutal punishment followed.
Summary: If there is one thing that the communists did have a profound impact on, and that had a major influence on the post-Soviet corruption, it is the relationship of the people of the Czech Republic and, ultimately, Slovakia to public property. The idea that it is a pity to leave something somewhere if no one is watching it and therefore no one can prevent it, if I take it, has settled in the minds of a large part of our fellow citizens born during the communist regime, but unfortunately also much later. If we differ in anything from Western countries, which did not experience this stage of history with its specific relationship to public property, it is the difference in perception of private and public property. Each of us has been coded not to take the neighbour’s lawnmower out of the garden, and if someone does, we call the police because thieves are bad. Of course, if a neighbor stuffs a park bench into his car or a teacher takes a box of chalk to the grandkids’ play area, more than one willing hand will help him with the burden.
