What Communism left behind

TOXIC LEGACY

May 29.- TWICE a symbol of foreign oppression, the disused Czech airfield of Hradcany, a couple of hours’ drive from Prague, is now a happily disorganised sort of place. On a recent spring afternoon its concrete expanses, first built by Nazi invaders, attracted a learner-driver bunny-hopping past deserted bunkers that used to hold Soviet fighter jets. On another taxiway a woman on rollerskates led two small girls on bicycles. At weekends, cyclists mingle with kite-flyers and microlight pilots.

The air of subversive freedom is fitting. Since the Velvet Revolution, the image of the Czech Republic’s governments has been set by ex-dissidents, not the sleek reformed communists who clung to power in some neighbouring states. The Czechs made a better job than most of opening the archives of their communist-era secret police and trying to keep ex-spooks away from high office (see article). Prague does not just look as rich as any Western city, it is rich: in terms of GDP per person, it is wealthier than any region of France outside Paris.

And yet here in Hradcany the toxic legacy of communism persists. Under the birch and pine trees of the airfield, black pipes and hoses snake across the sandy soil before disappearing into small well-heads. An oily tang in the air offers a clue: this cheerful place is the site of an environmental disaster caused by Soviet forces.

The occupiers left some 7,000 tonnes of kerosene in the soil around the airbase from where it began draining into a nearby river. Some jet-fuel leaked from shoddy pipework and storage tanks. Other spills were deliberate. Czech workers from the airfield have said that sometimes fuel-supply trains would arrive before the base had room to store more kerosene. When that happened, the newly arrived fuel was poured on the ground.

When the cleanup first began, a well dug anywhere within an area of a dozen hectares (30 acres) around the airstrip would reveal several centimetres of kerosene on top of the natural groundwater
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The twin environmental catastrophes of Hradcany and Straz are a fair metaphor for the legacy of communism. To a tourist or a business traveller, the Czech Republic, Hungary or Latvia, and especially their smart capital cities, may look like any corner of the Western world. But decades of communism left poisons that linger on ...

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