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Jaroslav Bašta, dissident, minister of Zeman’s government, diplomat and SPD MP in recent years, has died. He was 75 years old.
The SPD informed about his death in a press release.
He entered public life in 1968, was one of the first political prisoners of the Husák regime, and after the revolution in 1989 he established himself in high politics. He was a minister, deputy for the ČSSD, and after 2000 a diplomat in Moscow and Kyiv.
After a scandal at his last diplomatic post, he withdrew from public life. It was an even bigger surprise when he appeared as the leader of the Pardubice SPD candidate Tomia Okamura.
His story, full of twists and turns, was also recorded by the oral history archive of events of the 20th century, Memory of the Nation.
An impressive start to his public life was replaced by disillusionment. Few people today combine such opposite personalities as Jaroslav Bašta and Petr Pithart. At the same time, it was the two of them who participated in the demonstrative trip to Israel in August 1968, which launched Bašta’s political career.
Student leader
The purpose of the journey of young journalists, intellectuals and students at the time was to show that they did not agree with the policy of Czechoslovakia at the time, which was aloof towards Israel, or that diplomatic ties were severed at the behest of Moscow.
In his memoirs for the Memory of the Nation, Jaroslav Bašta stated that he heard the first information about the occupation in Hebrew, or that subsequently the members of the expedition went around Israel lecturing about the Prague Spring.
“The expedition was initiated by Ladislav Mňačko as a gesture of goodwill towards Israel. The editors of Literární noviny created a group of 25 young people, including three students, who set up a table in front of the Faculty of Philosophy and collected signatures in support of Israel. One of them was Jaroslav Bašta,” Petr Pithart described for Seznam Zprávy.
The trio were about ten years younger than the rest of the expedition. “We were chosen for what I say publicly, what I think or write, is on merit. That’s how he got into public life,” he added.
According to his own words, at that time he considered him a brave and smart boy, from this perspective he therefore does not understand his later work for Zeman and in recent years for the SPD. “It was a surprise, and I’ll admit a disappointment,” he said.
Husák’s first prisoner
Jaroslav Bašta returned to Czechoslovakia at the beginning of September 1968. In a 2017 interview for the Memory of the Nation, he admitted that he had also considered emigration. “I had an offer for a scholarship in Holland,” he said.
In the fall, when classes began, he and other students began to organize various forms of protest within the student movement. This was inspired by the methods of Western left-wing radicals.
Photo: Memory of the nation / collector KK
Regional championship in chess, Jaroslav Bašta on the far left of the picture (undated)
“We had the last occupation student strike in April 1969, when Alexandr Dubček was deposed and Gustav Husák was elected. We also did a leaflet event on the anniversary of August. They gradually started arresting us, the first in December 1969,” Bašta recounted in the quoted interview.
According to his memories, he himself was detained on January 14, 1970, and after more than a year, a trial with a total of 16 defendants took place, the first “Husák trial”. Petr Uhl, as the leader of the group, left him with a sentence of 4 years in prison, Jaroslav Bašta with 2.5 years in prison. His defender was the later Minister of Justice Dagmar Burešová, other defenders of the co-defendants were, for example, the first Czech Ombudsman and, in 1998-2000, also the Minister of Justice Otakar Motejl.
Dissent as a “hobby”
After his release as a trained archaeologist, he briefly worked on archaeological research, then went to work as a laborer on bridge construction. “That fed me. I had dissent as a hobby,” said Bašta for the Memory of the Nation.
Bašta collaborated on samizdates, signed Charter 77 at Christmas in 1976. “Then I completed some interrogations, but it turned out quite well. But then it got complicated. The Estebacians came up with the Asanace event and forced the signatories to leave. They offered it to me as well, but I decided once and for all in 1968,” he described the events of the late seventies. And he remembered how people started disappearing around him, either in prison or abroad.
After marrying his second wife – an archaeologist – he began to devote himself more to his original profession.
“I had doubts about whether what I was doing was meaningful. That the only ones who read what we write and say are, first of all, the Estebans. That it has no response, that everyone takes care of cottages and the like,” he described his disillusionment from the days of normalization.
Photo: Memory of the nation / archive of Jaroslav Bašta
Picture from the wedding with archeologist Dara.
The way to the secret services
After the Velvet Revolution, he applied for the position of director of the Pilsen-North District Museum, which he won. Instead, he joined the Ministry of the Interior as head of the anti-terrorist department. According to Bašta’s recollections, he was approached by Ivan Dejmal, whom he knew from the dissident years and who was co-convicted in the trial with the Revolutionary Youth Movement, and subsequently by Jan Ruml.
Ivan Dejmal died in 2008, Jan Ruml – at that time the deputy federal minister of the interior – told Seznam Zprávám that he no longer remembers the circumstances of Basta’s arrival in the interior, i.e. to the leadership of the federal secret service.
However, a few years later it was Jaroslav Bašta in the ČSSD uniform who attacked Rumlo – already in the position of Minister of the Interior.
Bašta did not stay long in the secret services, he was fired after he informed President Václav Havel about their internal problems without the knowledge of his superior. Instead, he moved to the head of the so-called lustration commission, which vetted candidates for the House of Representatives. He thus gained an overview of the lives of several hundred people who applied for public office.
And with the stamp of an expert on the secret services, he first became an adviser to the ČSSD and later a member of it. In 1996, he successfully ran for the House of Representatives. At the time, he shared the office with Petra Buzková.
Work for Miloš Zeman
According to witnesses, it was Miroslav Šlouf who brought Jaroslav Bašta to the ČSSD. At the time when Bašta was the chairman of the Prague Social Democracy, Šlouf acted as party secretary. Both later appeared in Miloš Zeman’s closest team – Šlouf as his chief adviser, Bašta as an expert on the secret services, later a minister without portfolio who was in charge of the “clean hands” campaign and the coordination of the secret services.
But he already earned his spurs when Zeman headed the Chamber of Deputies. Back in 1996, the leader of the People’s Party, Josef Lux, accused the BIS of following him. Jaroslav Bašta, who at the time chaired the parliamentary committee for BIS control, was supposed to provide him with the materials.
A few years later, he again echoed Zeman in the “suitcase” affair, when the head of the People’s House accused Interior Minister Jan Ruml (ODS) of trying to turn the Czech Republic into a police state. In the end, it turned out that “Zeman’s briefcase” contained only forgeries or files that related to the regular activities of the secret service.
Photo: CTK
On March 24, 2000, Prime Minister Miloš Zeman appointed Karel Březina (right) to the post of minister without portfolio at the Government Office. On the left, dismissed minister Jaroslav Bašta.
In 2000, his government engagement ended prematurely due to the fiasco of the “clean hands” campaign, which had no results, and Zeman dismissed him.
Zeman’s envoy to Russia
But Bašta did not stay out of work for long, Zeman’s government sent him to the embassy in Moscow in 2000, after prematurely withdrawing Luboš Dobrovský after a rift with Foreign Minister Jan Kavan.
Jaroslav Bašta then recalled for the Memory of the Nation that Václav Havel set the conditions that the new ambassador after Dobrovský should be a dissident, a former political prisoner and a minister just like the outgoing ambassador. “He had someone other than me in mind, but I fulfilled it,” he commented on his appointment in 2017. He has already handed over the mandate to Vladimir Putin.
Photo: CTK
On November 9, 2000, the new ambassador of the Czech Republic to Russia, Jaroslav Bašta, handed over his credentials to Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Moscow Kremlin. In the middle is the then Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov.
The fact is that in the diplomatic community, he was understood as a political nomination of Miloš Zeman, who went to Russia to implement Zeman’s style of foreign policy – that is, no longer Havel’s human rights policy, but economic diplomacy.
“He was not a very prominent ambassador. He always had a slightly confused impression, but somehow I perceived him as a quite decent person,” Petr Kolář, another of the Czech ambassadors in Moscow, today’s advisor to President Petr Pavel, recently described Baštu for Seznam Zprávy.
“His greatest asset was his friendship with Miloš Zeman and Jan Kavan. We took it somewhat as a necessity that Czech diplomacy must endure. She endured,” he added.
In his memoirs, Bašta states that as an ambassador he helped unblock Russian debt from the socialist era. The fact is that it was actually unblocked during Zeman’s government, in that the Czech Republic sold most of the Russian debt to the private company Falkon Capital. The Russian Federation owed 3.7 billion dollars from the time of the Soviet Union, Zeman’s cabinet sold two-thirds of the debt for about 750 million dollars. The company was then “chosen” by Russia itself.
The affair in Kiev
Jaroslav Bašta returned to the Czech Republic in 2005, and both Cyril Svoboda and Karel Schwarzenberg retained him at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2007, Schwarzenberg sent him on another diplomatic mission – this time to Kyiv.
In 2009, he found himself at the center of a scandal surrounding the issuance of visas at the Lviv consulate. The Ukrainian news website Korrespondent.net wrote at the time that Bašta directed the machinations surrounding the issuance of visas at the Lviv consulate. It all consisted of visa applicants having to register through the call center of a private company. Visa applicants then paid 310 crowns for mandatory registration through the call center, all the money was collected by the private company Jihomoravská opáční, which won the contract without a tender.
It was only in January 2010 that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs withdrew the bastion from the embassy. Officially for health reasons.
Photo: Michal Šula, Seznam Zpravy
Jaroslav Bašta, as a presidential candidate, distributes signatures to his supporters.
In 2019, he resigned from the ČSSD (now SOCDEM) and ran for the European Parliament for the marginal party BOS. In 2021, he appeared on the Pardubice SPD candidate list, thanks to which he returned to the Chamber of Deputies after years.
In 2023, he ran for president for the SPD. Although Tomio Okamura and Jaroslav Bašta said that they were thinking about advancing to the second round, the favorites were Petr Pavel, Andrej Babiš and Danuše Nerudová. Bašta was eventually eliminated in the first round with a gain of 4.45 percent. However, thanks to its own candidate, the SPD gained media space for brand building and space for negotiations with Andrej Babiš, who targeted Bašt’s voters.