Last Days in Old Europe

by Richard Bassett

  John Paul II had canonized St Agnes of Bohemia in Rome on 12 November. Unable to travel to Italy, Czechoslovaks were preparing for their own ceremony in Prague two weeks later. Thousands of pilgrims would be in attendance and the commemoration was now also set to become a demonstration of anti-Communist sentiment. My Slovak guardian angel told me that the Communist government had that morning summoned the Cardinal Archbishop of Prague, František Tomášek, and tried to bully him into postponing the St Agnes celebrations. He had apparently countered with the words, ‘The canonization of St Agnes is a celebration of God, not the Communist Party. I am not answerable to you for it.’

  The Slovak girl guided me through some back streets to Štěpánská and the dimly lit Alcron Hotel. I hauled myself up to my room on the fifth floor, past the stained glass and panelling of the dining room where the life-size 1930s statue of a silver naked beauty with outstretched arms permanently beckoned the hungry diner. I collapsed on to my bed and fell asleep, only to be woken at 11.30 p.m. by the telephone and the remote voice of the night editor on the Foreign Desk, commanding me to file 1,500 words by 2.00 a.m. This accomplished, I wandered early the following morning into Wenceslaus Square. It was full of young women, most of them apparently medical students, sweeping the streets with broomsticks. ‘We want to show that we are good citizens and will clean up after the mess of our demonstrations,’ one of them explained. She sported a badge on her tracksuit proclaiming membership of the International Women’s Lacrosse Association; her aquiline nose and square jaw suggested a formidable presence on the playing field. She told me that she was a member of the students’ committee and that I could come and see them in their nearby headquarters, borrowed from the grammar school just beyond the Alcron. In this room, a dozen Amazonian women (I assumed the rest of the lacrosse team) were busily engaged in what can only be described as enthusiastic anarchy. Some were typing and copying slogans. Banners were being painted with the words ‘Resign! Resign!’ On a classroom blackboard was written in giant chalk letters, ‘If not us, who? If not now, when?’

  A demonstration of musicians and artists was to take place later that afternoon. To find out more, I set off to visit a friend who had a studio near by in the former Dominican convent. On reaching his medieval quarters, I found everything shuttered and closed and was about to return up a side street to the hotel when a car beeped me and I saw another old Czech friend with whom I had spent the previous Easter in western Bohemia. ‘Get in,’ he shouted. ‘You need to see the tanks.’ We drove off towards the Janáček Embankment where forty-six armoured riot police vehicles were parked near three larger more heavily armoured trucks. Would this be another 1968 moment? But my friend was undismayed by the presence of all this ‘hardware’. ‘Everyone has been waiting for the authorities to make a mistake. When they attacked the students on Friday, they only showed how stupid they really are,’ he said. Back at the Alcron, there were unprecedented scenes of quasi-revolutionary activity. The normally sedate hotel staff were gathered around a television set volubly watching the 7 o’clock news. As the Communist Party chief of Prague, Štěpán, appeared on the screen, the staff, including the usually politically reliable receptionists and meek telephonists, suddenly began to boo. When Adamec, the Prime Minister, appeared, even the usually placid lobby porter shook his fist. ‘They are trying to make everyone believe it is just students, but that is not so,’ he insisted.

  Later, crowds began to queue outside the hotel for the evening newspapers. What had occurred to bring about this dramatic change in mood? Within a couple of days, the Czechs had thrown off their apathy and had become determined on upheaval. One of the catalysts was the widely disseminated news earlier that day that a young student, Martin Šmid, had been so badly beaten on the previous Friday that he had died. While the political authorities half-heartedly attempted to correct this rumour – a clever invention – the news of Šmid’s ‘brutal treatment and death’ spread across the city like wildfire. Another Czech student, Petr Payne, dressed in an English-looking Barbour, said in an interview that he had witnessed the murder. The ruling hard-line elite fell straight into the trap. They no longer had a monopoly of news and their lack of credibility meant that the rumours of their wrongdoing significantly overwhelmed their official denials. As it happened, Šmid was found a few days after the revolution, healthy and unharmed, but on that Monday the reports of his death had served their purpose. For the first time in decades, the Prague Czechs threw off their caution and became collectively incensed, openly venting their anger. They now began to swell the ranks of the student demonstrators and huge crowds began to gather in Wenceslaus Square.

  Despite his high profile among the Western media, Václav Havel, the dissident playwright, had never commanded a particularly wide following in Prague. Cardinal Tomášek probably attracted many more supporters through his sermons than Havel ever had, but in the new mood of resentment and anger gripping Prague, Havel now emerged as a focus for political change. He was ably supported by another prominent dissident, Jiří Dienstbier. Both were removed from the Czechoslovak mainstream, but if these avowedly atheist dissidents could link arms with the Czechoslovak Catholic Church over a sea of Communist outrages, the opposition movement would be immeasurably strengthened. Thanks to the happy coincidence of the canonization of St Agnes, Prague was more and more packed with anti-Communist Slovak Catholic pilgrims, who were also taking to the streets. The ‘revolution of students and playwrights’ had found some powerful allies.

  Crowds with a voracious appetite for news began to gather outside the Alcron. They struggled to see messages typed and pinned to windows and walls or even the windscreens of cars. This was the most news-hungry population I had ever seen; it was as if war had suddenly broken out. As in East Germany, the people had clearly lost their fear of the state apparatus. That night, I wrote in my diary that the government must have been terrified. The following morning, Wednesday 22 November, I was woken by a Czech friend who said she had important news but could not speak over the telephone. Could I come over and see her at 2.00 p.m.? After a breakfast of scrambled eggs with raw onions, a Bohemian speciality, I set off for the university where a student called Lucy was pinning a news bulletin to one of the walls. Lucy was bright and clear-eyed and I began to ask her the usual questions about where she thought events were leading. On hearing I was a journalist, she suggested I should meet her father, the editor of one of Prague’s most prestigious papers. He had just returned from Namibia. He was a Communist (‘He could not have got a job without being a member of the Party’), but Lucy thought he would be pleased to meet me.

  After a phone call, she walked me round the corner to a nineteenth-century building which housed the editorial offices of Mladá Fronta. A rather bemused secretary showed us into a small office where a jovial grey-haired man rose to his feet. After his daughter had effected the introductions, he smilingly asked me one simple question. Did I know Neal Ascherson, the Eastern Europe Correspondent for the Observer? When I replied that we had been friends for some years, he visibly relaxed and offered me a cigarette. His daughter left us alone and from that moment I was granted almost unlimited access to this intelligent editor’s time and thoughts. This was to prove of immense value in the days to come. ‘Ottokar’ was certainly part of the Communist reformist apparatus, a man well connected to the Communist nomenklatura and intelligence services. As the days wore on, it quickly became apparent that ‘Ottokar’ also had intimate links with Moscow.

  During my final architectural history supervisions at Cambridge, I had been introduced by Professor David Watkin to the idea that political revolutions were usually organized from above, not from below. (It was a sign of the intellectual breadth of a Cambridge education of those days that one did not need to be reading History or Politics to discuss such ideas with the dons of other faculties.) Theories which had lodged in the deepest recesses of the mind a dozen years earlier now sprang back as it suddenly dawned on me that a reformist wing of the Comm
unist Party was driving parts of this revolution, and was driving it with the conscious backing of Moscow. At this stage ‘Ottokar’ was cautious, pessimistic even. The Party chief of Prague, Štěpán, was ‘one of those people who would stop at nothing to hold on to power’, he explained. ‘Do not underestimate the support for the Party. The army, the militia, the police and all the factory workers are in favour of the status quo.’ He urged me to keep in touch. ‘The situation could change at any moment.’

  I reflected on his words and the pensive expression of a man whose world (and privileges) could be coming to an end. I returned to the hotel, filed a ‘holding’ piece and then went off in search of my Czech friend who had wanted to contact me so urgently first thing in the morning. Agnieska, a dark-haired medical student, was keen to take me to a hospital where those who were not Party members were treated and where some of those wounded during the demonstrations of the previous days were recovering. In contrast to Czechoslovak hospitals reserved for Party members (there was a gleaming example next door), this building was squalid. Cigarette butts were strewn all over the corridors. The wounded students were in a sorry state. Many of them had head injuries but they were adamant they would be back on the streets as soon as they had recovered: they were not giving up now ‘blood had been drawn’. The medical staff treating them appeared to be made up largely of volunteers. From here we descended to the suburb of Smíchov and back to Wenceslaus Square, where vast crowds were gathering again. Half an hour later I was making my way out of the Alcron when a woman with the femme-fatale features of an Alfons Mucha painting appeared.

  Her name was Daniela. She was another member of the lacrosse team and had been instructed to bring me to the Laterna Magika Theatre in a warren of underground spaces constructed not far from the Alcron in the 1920s. There I listened to the student dissidents and their unknown mentors spell out their demands for the government’s resignation. When a representative of one of the biggest factories in Prague took to the stage and pledged support for the students, the applause was ecstatic. The constellation of anti-government forces was growing. Daniela sat next to me whispering an English translation; her soft melodic cadences reinforced the atmosphere of subterranean complicity.

  It snowed that afternoon and the demonstrators dispersed peacefully. The police had looked on but not intervened. However, their presence in nearby side streets suggested a build-up of force was being prepared. The following morning was icy but sunny. The momentum for change appeared to be stalling. Communist militia occupied the TV studios; the television crews had gone on strike in protest at not being allowed to broadcast events in Wenceslaus Square. ‘Ottokar’ appeared distracted by this turn of events but promised ‘full details tomorrow’ if I ‘remained silent’ today. ‘Today is the decisive day. The Politburo will meet at 5.30 p.m. and there will be an attempt by three of its members to unseat President Husák and General Secretary Jakeš. If this does not happen the situation will become critical.’ He had lunched with ‘two of the men in this drama and they are still hesitating to play their hand’.

  He gave a vivid description of the uncertainties plaguing the decision-making at the apex of the Communist power pyramid. ‘The moment may not be quite right, but if they do not move now, there will be no chance for Communism in this country. Then, because no one imagines how we can leave the Warsaw Pact, it could become very dangerous.’ It seemed that even among the best-informed elements of the Party, no one had the slightest inkling of how radical the imminent changes would be and how even ‘reformist’ Communism and the Warsaw Pact would be swept away. I was back at the Alcron and halfway through a bowl of pea soup when I was paged by the reception who said London was on the phone. The Foreign Desk had picked up a Reuters story predicting military intervention and quoting a senior Czech officer who said that the army would defend socialism ‘to the end’. But according to my source the Politburo was still meeting and the Central Committee would meet the following day so I did my best to calm my colleagues in London. I optimistically promised ‘sunshine and roses’ soon, imploring them to keep their nerve and to dismiss any rumours of a military coup for what they were: provocations.

  The afternoon and evening passed without event. The following day I awoke to find the sky white with snow. The rumours of military intervention had seized the BBC. Another Czech journalist contact, briefing me that morning on the night’s events, had to break off to take a call from his wife asking if the militia had occupied his office. But as ‘Ottokar’ had predicted, the last twenty-four hours had been decisive: matters were now slowly relaxing ahead of the Central Committee’s meeting. The militia had withdrawn from the TV studios and the crews had returned to beam images of the demonstrations across the world and, more importantly, into the hundreds of thousands of Slovak homes which had recently acquired colour television. As the provinces were being won over by these broadcasts it was suddenly announced that Alexander Dubček, the leader of the Prague Spring in 1968, would be making his first appearance in Prague in public since then on a balcony in Wenceslaus Square. I called an English friend who had lived in Prague since the 1970s and urged her to come to Wenceslaus Square at 3 p.m. for ‘an historic moment’. She was only persuaded with the greatest of difficulty because her mother had phoned her from London to tell her that the BBC had spent the day predicting another Tiananmen Square. She agreed to come but ordered her daughters to stay at home.

  By 3 p.m., the crowds in Wenceslaus Square had swelled to hundreds of thousands. Together my friend and I made our way out of the Alcron and down the crowded 50 yards into the square. Scores of chimneysweeps, with soot-covered faces and large coiled pipe cleaners around their shoulders, stood dressed in black and white, an old symbol of Enlightenment Prague. Some of them had clambered on to the art nouveau roof of the Hotel Europa. Thanks to the chimneysweeps, hundreds had accessed long-forgotten stairways and climbed through lanterns and domes to emerge watching silently from the roofs of nearby buildings. It was as if every fire escape, hidden ladder and roof passage had been reopened to allow as many people as possible to catch a glimpse of the man who had been forced into silence for twenty-one years. Then the old familiar voice rang out across the square. As Dubček spoke, his melancholy vowels seemed to turn the sky an extraordinary hue: white, grey, a hint of orange in the snow-filled clouds. The silhouettes of every building suddenly appeared sharper as if we were protagonists in a black and white pre-war postcard. When Dubček spoke of ‘Socialism with a human face’, the slogan of his 1968 reform programme, the crowd sensed the moment and as in Trieste in 1914 a silenzio assoluto reigned.

  After Dubček came the equally familiar if more grating voice of Havel, ripping the air and promising a new era for Czechoslovakia, but I could listen to barely five minutes of this. Looking at my watch I realized that the deadline for the first edition meant I would have to file within the next twenty-five minutes. Hastily scribbling some notes, literally on the back of an envelope, I left my friend and squeezed my way slowly through the crowds to the Alcron. So crammed with people was the road back to the hotel that the 50-yard journey took almost fifteen minutes. On entering the hotel I found beaming smiles on all the faces of the usually melancholy receptionists. They immediately set about connecting me with London and while I sat in a corner to file my report, the wing-collared head waiter approached to ask whether he should keep me some food if I were working late again and missing dinner. Bowing with a formal but sincere courtesy, he promised to keep the kitchen open until 2.00 a.m., an unprecedented favour.

  Fifteen minutes later, just as I had put the phone down to London, my English friend burst into the hotel, this time with a ticket for the Czech Philharmonic at the nearby Smetana Hall. ‘You have to hear this!’ she insisted. We headed off, arriving just in time for the concert which was to begin at 6.30. To my surprise I saw ‘Ottokar’ in the front row. He waved me to my seat with a look that said, ‘Things are moving.’

  The orchestra had sat down and was about to
play when the leader stood up unexpectedly. Taking a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket, he read out what amounted to a manifesto, pledging the orchestra’s support ‘to the cause of democracy’. After he had sat down, the conductor turned to the crowd and gave the ‘V for Victory’ sign which sent the audience into a paroxysm of cheering. Without waiting for this near-hysteria to die down, the conductor raised his baton and brought the orchestra in for a rousing performance of Smetana’s ‘Ma Vlast’ (My Homeland), the unofficial Czech national anthem. The musicians played with visible passion. When it ended and the ecstatic applause had died away, the leader stood up and was again handed a piece of paper by one of his colleagues. He read out a text that said the entire Central Committee had resigned, and once again the audience burst into delirious cheering. I immediately went to find a telephone in the nearby Hotel Paris, but the telephonists were adamant that every line was ‘taken’, so I made my way quickly back to the Alcron where the staff immediately connected me to London.

  The new Central Committee leader was Karel Urbánek, but ‘Ottokar’, whom I found a little later that evening, thought this was unlikely to last. Urbánek was ‘the worst possible solution’. Another 1,500 words made their way to London just before 2.00 a.m., courtesy of the Alcron telephonists. Ten minutes later I demolished the spinach soup and beer which the loyal head waiter had kept for me at a table in the deserted stained-glass-decorated dining room.

  The following day the thermometer outside the window of my fifth-floor balcony read minus 5 °C, but it was a bright morning. The canonization of St Agnes was set to be celebrated in St Vitus’ Cathedral so I made my way across the Charles Bridge and joined the thousands of Slovaks, many of them in national costume and their women in bright-red headscarves, walking up to the castle. As I neared the castle entrance, I saw thousands of the pilgrims gather outside Cardinal Tomášek’s palace, where they awaited a glimpse of the only Czech they unequivocally loved and admired. To tremendous cheers he appeared on the balcony with a broad smile. After the service, the crowds milled around singing hymns and Marian anthems. It was a scene of Catholic fervour such as I had previously witnessed only in Warsaw. In the Černý Orel (Black Eagle) pub opposite the Palais Czernin (Foreign Ministry), I joined some of the pilgrims sitting next to Czechoslovak conscript soldiers, now sporting the Czech tricolour on their drab uniforms. The beer here was the finest in Prague. Long years of slaking the thirst of exhausted bureaucrats, whether under the rule of Maria Theresa or the Communists, had given the Black Eagle a reputation unequalled anywhere in Prague.