It’s been 35 years since riot police in Prague suppressed a student demonstration, kicking off the extraordinary 12-day Velvet Revolution of 1989 that ended communist rule in Czechoslovakia.
How difficult it is now to convey the reverence that Czechs and Slovaks felt for democracy back then.
Not everyone was a fan, to be sure: The country was full of appalled apparatchiks and stunned spooks who had just been canceled overnight.
But for the crowds who massed in freezing Prague and Bratislava to hear speeches and jingle their keys — a gleeful, “time-to-go” signal to the comrades — the mere idea of democracy and of the liberal West moved people to sing with gratitude in their thousands.
More than a generation later, in 2025, those earnest hopes seem fustily quaint. Former Communist Party member Robert Fico is now in his fourth term as prime minister of independent Slovakia. Meanwhile, in Czechia, Andrej Babiš — who also served in the Communist Party and even with Czechoslovakia’s ŠtB state security — is on track to return to the premiership in fall 2025 elections, with his populist ANO party running above 35 percent in the polls.
It’s no longer enough to say, as democratic apologists once lamented, that voters feel nostalgic for communism. The problem is far more grave: A critical mass of people now believes that liberalism, the purported alternative, was always mere cynical performance art — allowing Washington and Brussels to grab power in Central and Eastern Europe after Moscow was forced to relinquish it, with corporations replacing collectives and hamburgers pushing out halušky (potato dumplings).
So, how did democracy go bankrupt? In Slovakia, at least, there may have been an actual moment.
The emperor loses his clothes
The West was frequently enlisted in support of Slovakia’s fledgling democracy in the 1990s when its pugnacious prime minister, Vladimír Mečiar, was busy getting his country dropped from NATO and European Union membership short lists and signing energy deals with Russia’s Gazprom. Then-United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright infuriated the Bratislava regime by calling Slovakia “a black hole in the heart of Europe” in 1997; in elections the following year, Mečiar was ousted by Christian Democrat Mikuláš Dzurinda and his pro-democracy coalition.
Dzurinda’s government brought Slovakia back from the dead in many ways — into NATO and the EU, and from corruption backwater to the region’s neoliberal poster child — but it also left thousands behind, mostly those who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) use a computer, learn yet another language, or trade their village home for a bunk in a Bratislava high-rise.
Dzurinda and his snooty reform guru, Ivan Mikloš, pushed a business-friendly agenda for years until the social pain it caused ended their stewardship of the country in 2006.
Which is where our story begins.
People who claim the moral high ground — whether as parent, politician or preacher — may find that hypocrisy is the one sin others find hard to forgive.
So when Dzurinda’s government, which lasted until 2006, became implicated in a multiyear political corruption scheme that became known as “Gorilla” — involving millions of euros in kickbacks and potentially billions in public assets — politicians weren’t the only casualties. The body count ultimately included the liberal democratic order they had fronted.
Gorilla was a surveillance operation run by Slovakia’s secret service (SIS) that purported to document multiple one-on-one meetings in 2005 and 2006 featuring an oligarch, a minister in the Dzurinda government, a senior privatization official and an opposition leader.
The meetings, held in a private apartment in Bratislava, were recorded by SIS officer Peter Holúbek, a counterintelligence analyst, using new eavesdropping tech code-named “Gorilla,” which couldn’t be detected in sweeps for bugs. Holúbek recorded his targets chatting freely about the coordinated bribery of state officials to approve sales of major state assets. Virtually every national political party was implicated, along with dozens of public officials.
I got hold of the Gorilla transcripts in the summer of 2008, which is when I first met Holúbek. That fall, with Fico in the middle of his first term as prime minister, the analyst showed me recent images taken by SIS operatives of the two of us sharing a beer on a Bratislava terrace. He told me he’d been suspended and threatened with criminal charges (treason) for leaking classified state secrets to a foreign national (me).
I was puzzled by the state’s drastic response, because Holúbek’s material was primarily lethal for Dzurinda’s camp, now in opposition. But I myself soon got a taste of it as well.
Without the original recordings to back it up, the paper Gorilla file in my possession appeared worthless — writing about it would get me sued, while if I took it to the police they would just sweep it under the rug, as they did all political hot potatoes.
In time, a solution presented itself. If I submitted the transcripts as evidence in an ongoing police investigation, protocol would require that the police issue me a record of the file’s contents. In turn, I could write a lawsuit-proof article for the SME daily newspaper where I worked, stating: “Police are investigating a file named Gorilla detailing a sprawling political corruption network.”
But when I arrived at national police headquarters in 2009 to hand over the papers, it wasn’t to a lowly detective as agreed — I was instead questioned for two hours by a senior special prosecutor, Slovakia’s top dog on political and organized crime.
“You’re lying, Mr. Witness!” the prosecutor shouted at me, pacing the interrogation room as I protested that I couldn’t remember where I got the Gorilla file. “Lying!”
Nothing, of course, was done with the papers I gave him.
Determined that the story be told but unable to get it past my cautious editors, I decided to write a book about it. Before the book could be published, however, the file was released on the internet a few months ahead of Slovakia’s March 2012 parliamentary election.
The public response was at first tentative — and then dark, aggrieved, sullen. Three demonstrations were held on Bratislava’s main square, attracting several thousand spectators on freezing February evenings carrying banners and whistles. I spoke at the protests because I’d been reporting the story for years and could vouch for the file’s authenticity. But as I approached the podium, I noticed many of the “demonstrators” were actually shifty-eyed youths in bomber jackets, some holding cobblestones which they proceeded to hurl, later in the evening, at the parliament and government buildings.
Then-Prime Minister Iveta Radičová, a former sociology professor and a good egg, summoned me to her office on the eve of the third demonstration to scold me for the crowd’s behavior. “What do I have to do with Gorilla?” she demanded to know with some asperity, as police in body armor surrounded the building to protect it. “They attached a hangman’s noose to my front gate. Who put them up to this?”
Well, since you ask: Your hypocritical pro-West political allies, Dzurinda and Mikloš, who wagged censorious fingers under so many Slovak noses that when Gorilla surfaced in 2012, voters quit the liberal bandwagon en masse.
Due to the scandal, Dzurinda’s party ended up losing half its parliamentarians and tumbled to 6 percent support in the March 2012 vote. Former communist Fico, meanwhile, was returned with an absolute majority of 83 seats in the 150-member parliament for the first time in free Slovakia’s short history.
A curious lack of resolve
My book on Gorilla was published in summer 2012 after an emergency court injunction filed by the oligarch was lifted. For a time, it seemed as if the scandal might be properly investigated, with a dozen-member police team convened and the justice minister confirming Gorilla had been a legal SIS operation.
Which made sense. Fico was back in power, and presumably welcomed the attention the police were paying to his opponents. It was, after all, a rare opportunity for the leader to mock the Western narrative he so distrusted, and to claim that liberalism and democracy were just smoke screens for secret deals in Bratislava kitchens.
There also seemed to be a clear public mandate for justice. That spring, returning to Bratislava from Prague, I had pranged someone’s rear bumper at a stoplight. A passerby sent a photo to a local tabloid, depicting me wringing my hands in the middle of the road. An anti-corruption NGO started an online collection drive for the poor Canadian journalist, and within days people had sent me more than €30,000.
But I also remember being absolutely terrified. Early on in the protests, an ad appeared beside an interview I had given for a local broadsheet stating that the people I had named would be suing me for defamation. Ultimately, six Gorilla-related suits or charges were filed against me; I faced three to eight years in jail because my alleged slander was: a) highly public; and b) had cost the plaintiffs a ton of money. I won every case, but only with my now-abashed employer paying my defense costs.
And then … nothing. For years. Fico won reelection in 2016, while Gorilla faded, like a discarded snakeskin, into yet another Wikipedia entry.
Until, that is, the seismic February 2018 murders of Slovak journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová.
The crimes drew protesters back to the streets in their tens of thousands, this time with candles and hymns rather than cobblestones and scowls. Fico, then in his third term as prime minister, darted from office like a frightened hare, his resignation enabling the election of a more pro-EU government in 2020.
Police eventually charged a local oligarch with ordering the murders of Kuciak and Kušnírová. A search of the man’s residence unearthed the original Gorilla voice recordings — all 39 hours of them.
With this new evidence and fewer political constraints, police charged three individuals with Gorilla-related organized crime and money-laundering offenses in 2022. My former special prosecutor, meanwhile, was sentenced the same year to eight years for corruption by Slovakia’s Supreme Court. (“You’re lying, Mr. Prosecutor!” I hummed to myself as I read the news. “Lying!”)
Back to normal
But of course it couldn’t last.
Slovakia’s rickety 2020-2023 anti-corruption government proved a bug rather than a feature. With Dzurinda and his pro-Western allies still wholly discredited by Gorilla, the premiership fell to the erratic Igor Matovič, a neither-fish-nor-fowl politician who claimed to despise corruption, but was found to have plagiarized his university thesis. Matovič quit as prime minister after a year with a 15 percent approval rating, paving the way for Fico’s eventual return for a fourth term.
In the interim, the European Court for Human Rights ruled that the SIS surveillance operation had violated the apartment owner’s right to privacy, and Slovak General Prosecutor Maroš Žilinka ordered the recordings be destroyed and not used in court.
Charges against the oligarch in the Gorilla case were dropped in February 2024.
In August, Fico’s justice minister, Boris Susko, had the special prosecutor summarily released from jail based on an extraordinary appeal of his sentence.
In September, a prosecutor announced that the crimes in the Gorilla corruption scandal now fell under the country’s new statute of limitations, and dropped all remaining charges.
And there it was: The moment democracy was made to look ridiculous. Hours of legally recorded and incriminating conversations; a key witness — the SIS analyst — anxious to testify; a nation willing justice to be done.
Instead, we witnessed Slovakia’s liberal order implode on its hollow foundations.
“All the things Fico has done since he returned to power — abolishing the Office of the Special Prosecutor, amending the criminal code to reduce jail terms and the statute of limitations, abolishing NAKA [the elite national police unit] — all of it has had one effect,” Bratislava political analyst Grigorij Mesežnikov told POLITICO.
“Lifelong immunity from criminal prosecution for Fico and his political allies.”
Exhausting and morally corrosive
Holúbek of the SIS warned me more than a decade ago not to waste my time trying to pull back the veil on entrenched corruption in Slovakia.
“It usually gets presented as: These corruption guys are the bad ones, and we, the good Slovak nation, were deceived. But that’s not the way it is,” he told me in 2013.
“[Gorilla] didn’t actually bother people too much, because I think everyone already knew this is how society works. Most would actually behave the same way. People are crazy about money, and believe it’s more important than anything else, which is why our society looks the way it does.”
I admit, at the time Holúbek’s “the enemy is us” cynicism grated. Blaming such villainy on the average Slovak sedlák (schlub) seemed bitter, a product of disappointment.
But there was undeniably some truth in it.
Over my 15 years of teaching Slovak university students, they would sometimes call me out on my whole anti-corruption schtick. Which they suspected was a pose.
One student, a young banker doing a postgraduate course in international relations, grew impatient. “Come on!” he cajoled. “If they offered you a house just for signing a contract, don’t tell me you wouldn’t do it.”
Not sentiments you would have heard in 1989, perhaps.
But living with irremediable corruption, on the scale that exists in Bratislava or Moscow, is exhausting and morally corrosive. Even people who would never think of taking a bribe start to doubt themselves if everyone else appears to be doing it — and getting away with it.
Even worse, if the state has no answer to massive corruption — if neither the opposition, the government nor even the justice system wants a Gorilla investigated — then voters are left to conclude that democracy is a sham.
The post How a Gorilla devoured democracy in Slovakia appeared first on Politico.
