Last Days in Old Europe

by Richard Bassett

  That evening I dined with some Czechs celebrating the release from prison of our mutual friend Moriz, a devout Catholic who was overjoyed to be free in time to celebrate St Agnes’s canonization. Moriz had been thrown into prison after a demonstration a month earlier during which he had distributed some Catholic leaflets. His wife, an elegant woman in a crisp white-collared Black Watch tartan suit, said she had lost kilos worrying about him in prison. Moriz, however, insisted he had enjoyed it because it was the closest he had ever got to living in a monastic cell (monasteries being banned in Czechoslovakia). There was plenty of time to think and pray, a ‘real luxury’ in a Communist state. Also at the dinner were the musical Chargé d’Affaires and his wife who soon lost their chancery stiffness when I produced two bottles of champagne, courtesy of the head waiter at the Alcron. We sang our way through various Lieder until three in the morning.

  A few hours later, London woke me up with the usual barrage of questions (What’s happening now? Can you see any soldiers? etc. etc.). I promised to give them an update at midday and once again urged them not to believe the ‘rumours’ about an imminent military coup. Their confusion and anxiety were understandable. It required nerve to listen to your man on the spot when everyone else was giving a different story. The unhesitating confidence in the correspondent in the field which had been the hallmark of the Douglas-Home regime had undoubtedly been undermined by the relentless carousel of editorial appointments.

  Outside the temperature was now minus 12°C and it was snowing again. I walked to the Church of St Jakob where the announcements board at the main entrance provided a witty reminder that reform was not yet a ‘done deal’. It stated that the music for that morning was to be the Coronation Mass by Mozart but this had been hastily crossed out and replaced with Haydn, ‘Missa in tempore belli’ (Mass in time of war).

  The Haydn was performed vigorously to a packed church. When the music was not being performed, the old Latin ritual marked the liturgy of the Universal Church. After mass, I met some Czech friends who invited me to lunch, dispatching their six-year-old son to the nearest pub with a large jug to get some beer. On his return, three generations sat down to Sunday lunch. The eldest, a lady in her late seventies, told us, ‘Twenty-one years ago, it was just the same. We had ten days of euphoria and then … the Russians.’ She was right. Everything now depended on the Russians rather than the Czechs. To what extent were they prepared to support the reforms and how far would they allow those reforms to run?

  After lunch I again visited ‘Ottokar’ in his offices, which were now picketed by guards ‘to prevent provocations’. Despite all the optimism of the previous evening at the Czech Philharmonic, he now echoed the old lady’s words: ‘Twenty-one years ago in 1968 I was a young man and I stood here in this very room watching NBC make the first satellite broadcast about the Prague Spring. I told them that there was no chance of the Russians coming in! Now I am very cautious.’

  There were still many dangers. ‘The Party is split,’ he warned me. ‘Those who are passive at the moment may become active.’ The situation in Moravia was not very comforting. The workers there were reluctant to join the strikes. They were putting up posters in their factories saying, ‘We want to eat, not strike.’ It also had not helped that the crowds had shouted ‘Resign’ at the local Party leader, Adamec. He still had power and the hard-line Communists were still capable of regaining the ascendancy. If that happened, ‘Ottokar’ warned me, it would be immediately apparent on television because the studios, which had now resumed normal service, would be the first target of those wishing to organize a counter-revolution. Early that evening after filing another long story, I fell asleep only to be awoken by a telephone call from ‘Ottokar’ urging me to get to the International Press Centre, recently set up in the Intercontinental Hotel, to hear the ‘latest developments’.

  When I arrived at the hotel around 8.30 p.m. I found about 300 of my media colleagues milling around. Then just as I was resigning myself to yet another long and trying night, I spied ‘Ottokar’ in the corner of the room. With delightful skill, he wandered past the row of seats where all we British journalists were sitting and through the most fleeting of eye contacts indicated the queue for coffee where I gingerly strolled to join him. Although I tried to walk nonchalantly across the room, I felt the eyes of several colleagues following me. A few minutes later, once their attention had receded, we walked separately out of the room into the dark concrete foyer beyond.

  ‘Ottokar’ had a fascinating tale to tell. An hour earlier, the new Central Committee had voted almost unanimously to send in the army the following morning to restore order. But they had no sooner taken this vote than a ‘gentleman from the Soviet embassy’ had appeared with a ‘personal message from Comrade Gorbachev’. This had read simply: ‘The Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Socialist Party is entitled to take whatever steps are necessary to restore public order in Prague but it may be helpful for you to know that as of midnight tonight I have ordered all Soviet military personnel stationed in Czechoslovakia to remain confined to their barracks and other installations.’ When asked for clarification, the Soviet diplomat had added, off the cuff, that the message was clear: the present crisis was not a situation which would be resolved by resorting to the old methods. He seemed to be telling them, my Czech friend said, that ‘the ship is sinking.’

  The implications of the ‘gentleman’s message’ were obvious. Any military or police crackdown in Prague and elsewhere in the country would be unsupported by the Soviet military. We both knew that the Czech authorities would never orchestrate a violent crackdown on their own population unsupported by the Soviets. What he had told me would in itself make a sensational story, but in true Czech style my friend saved the best until the end. ‘The interesting thing was’, he began almost absent-mindedly, ‘the Soviet diplomat who delivered this message was the son of the Soviet official in the Prague embassy who called Moscow in 1968 to advise Brezhnev to send in the tanks.’ My friend’s eye met mine. He was savouring the moment.

  Thanking him as discreetly as possible, I gently broke away to move towards the telephone booths to file an update to London, but to reach the telephone booths I had to pass again through the room where my colleagues were gathered. Two of the more alert among them began to follow me. I fell into a booth, got through to the copy-takers immediately and started to dictate a ‘new top’ to my earlier story, including the emergency meeting of the new Central Committee, and the outcome of its deliberations both before and after the Soviet démarche. I took a childish, arrogant delight in seeing one after another of my colleagues walk casually past my telephone booth and linger for a few seconds hoping to catch the gist of what I was saying sotto voce to London.

  Once I had dictated my piece, there was nothing else to do. After the long, intense days of the last few weeks, exhaustion was taking hold. I no longer cared whether the paper used my story or not. I had filed what I knew. If they decided it did not carry weight and preferred to follow the conventional narrative, so be it. It was time to set off back to the Alcron where, after more filing for later editions, I went to bed at around 3.00 a.m.

  Then, as now, foreign pieces for a newspaper always ran the risk of domestic events knocking them off the page, so it was with a philosophical attitude that I listened the following morning, Monday 27 November, when the desk woke me up at 8.30 a.m. to inform me that the paper was holding the piece. Two days later I was told that ‘unfortunately’ my old friend and mentor at Cambridge, Norman Stone, had pushed me off the page with a large feature about Lord Aldington’s victorious libel claim against Nikolai Tolstoy. Tolstoy had alleged that Aldington had been instrumental in the repatriation of thousands of Cossacks and non-Communist Yugoslavs to what he knew would be certain death in May 1945, an obvious war crime. Aldington’s victory, accompanied as it was by a successfully upheld award of millions of pounds in damages and legal fees and the unprecedented destruction of every copy of Tolstoy’s book in Briti
sh public libraries, was undoubtedly an exciting piece of news and I could hardly resent a former Cambridge mentor.

  In Prague meanwhile a general strike was called for the afternoon of the 27th. The staff of the Alcron made great efforts to keep our lines of communication with London flowing while putting on a strong demonstration of solidarity with their striking countrymen. Bells and car horns sounded at midday. The waiters at the hotel, immaculately turned out in their lunchtime uniform of white jacket and bow tie, gathered in the hotel foyer to shake hands with each other and congratulate the excellent pianist who normally accompanied our dinners, and who now struck up Czech national songs in place of his usual Cole Porter medley. Even the formidable manageress, Mrs Charvátová, whose opinion and ‘protection’ decided whether one got a room or not, appeared in rather smart Western clothes with a Czechoslovak tricolour flag pinned to her lapel. She had been a hard-line Communist of the old school just a few days earlier, so I congratulated her on her ‘conversion’ to a more enlightened cause. She affected not to notice my thinly veiled sarcasm and fixed me with a steely glare, snapping her fingers at an underling. ‘A flag for this gentleman! Mr Bassett is one of us!’

  I set off to visit ‘Ottokar’ who by now agreed that the battle was more or less won and that the danger of counter-revolution had probably passed, although he predicted that in Slovakia it would require another few days to ‘subdue’ the Communist leadership. In that struggle the detested President Husák might be able to play a role before he too departed the scene. In this way ‘one’s enemies could help one’s friends,’ he explained.

  The news of progress on all fronts tallied with that most eccentric of political barometers in Prague, one which always had struck me as quintessentially Czech: the modest art deco Modêva ladies’ hat shop on the right-hand side of Wenceslaus Square. This small shop, which boasted an unrestored 1920s interior, had long tailored its window to political events. When Gorbachev had visited Prague in 1988 its window had sported eighteen hats, all of them a bright Soviet red. During the weekend after the first November beatings of the demonstrators, all the hats in the window were stark black and white. A week later the window had borne hats of the three Czech national colours: blue, white and red. Today, on the eleventh day of the so-called Velvet Revolution, Modêva was displaying a window of exclusively blue hats. Communist red had been banished for good.

  There were other characteristically Czech signs of change. As I made my way to see a contact whose offices took me past the memorial to Egon Erwin Kisch, the greatest of the twentieth-century rasende (rushing) reporters in whose shadow all we latter-day correspondents worked, I noticed that invisible hands had scratched the rendering away from the corners of the Biedermeier buildings near by to reveal the old street names in German and Czech script. This was a powerful symbol of the city’s long overdue reconnection with its historical links with the rest of German-speaking Central Europe.

  A press conference on the castle hill given by the newly constituted dissident-led political group Civic Forum illuminated the lack of political experience of the men who had had greatness thrust upon them. Father Maly, a handsome Catholic priest and the Forum’s spokesman, asked us all to make the sign of the cross – a courageous gesture but one unlikely to win him friends among the atheist and Hussite men now taking over the levers of political power. One of these, Jiří Dienstbier, was clearly uncomfortable with any signs of overt Christianity. I had seen him, the ardent Communist of the 1950s, the dissident of the 1970s and the ‘we are not anti-Communists’ of the late 1980s, only a few weeks earlier, clad in pyjamas in his western Bohemian dacha, unshaven and with the long unwashed hair of a 1960s Central European beatnik. Through an act of stupendous self-improvement, his appearance had been transformed. His hair was cut, he had shaved and he was wearing a suit. I have often wondered at what point he decided to break the habits of a lifetime and join the well-groomed political elite. Whenever it was, I think future historians might date the success of the Velvet Revolution to that moment.

  Because he seemed keen to overshadow the more modest Fr Maly, I wondered whether he was manoeuvring to take over the priest’s position as Civic Forum spokesman. His demand that Husák, the Czech President, should resign by 10 December was imprudent as well as naive. Husák’s wide-ranging legal powers were intact, so it would be far better to force him to deploy them to dismantle as much of the Communist architecture as possible. And the news from Slovakia was still disquieting.

  At the same time, rumours about the army’s role a few days earlier were circulating among the more imaginative news agencies. Did the army mutiny? Was there a split in the General Staff? People forgot that although the Czechs have a martial tradition which runs deeper than the amusing superficialities of The Good Soldier Schweik, they are one of the least aggressive nations in the world. In 1939 and in 1968, Czechoslovak troops remained in their barracks at times of national crisis. Twenty-one years later, true to form, there was no appetite among their senior military men to become involved in the latest upheaval. Perhaps in similar situations in Poland or Serbia, the army would have played a more active role, but those who wanted to imagine there might be a Czech military component to the Velvet Revolution were disregarding history.

  The next day brought confirmation that some Communist elements were still resisting. ‘The conservatives are mobilizing,’ a Czech friend said as we strolled past the printing works which housed the insurance office where Kafka had worked. But Moscow was still involved, facilitating the reinsertion of one of the major figures of 1968, Zdeněk Mlynář, who now, at their bidding, after long years in Vienna, moved to Prague. The key to Mlynář’s reappearance was Gorbachev’s desire to re-evaluate publicly the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968. He was expected to do so the following day at a press conference in Rome, but to prepare the ground Czech television was to interview Mlynář about 1968 that very evening.

  This intimacy between Moscow and the reformist elements in the Communist apparatus had long ceased to surprise me, but when we met later that day I was unprepared for ‘Ottokar’s’ next revelation: he had been summoned to Moscow the following morning to meet the Soviet Foreign Minister, Shevardnadze, and to give him a detailed briefing on the situation in Prague. ‘The Russians think we are bunglers!’ he said, describing the apparent verdict of the Gorbachev circle. My friend was confident that Mlynář would eventually appear on television at 10.30 that night. If he did not appear, it would show that the ‘conservatives’ were making progress.

  That evening, a farewell concert for John Macgregor, the outgoing Chargé d’Affaires, in the British embassy included a poignant performance of Schubert’s Quintet in which he gamely took the cello part. The able Chargé had held the embassy together for three years, coping with one ambassador being in hospital for weeks, another being en poste in Vienna for half the year and a clutch of expulsions which had left him often running things single-handedly. This he had done with great humour, sangfroid and bonhomie. The newly arrived Consul and Chargé replacements had pitched up the week before and were both running to catch their breath. In the course of the first forty-eight hours they had had to discard everything they had been told for months in briefings in London, notably the idea, current in Whitehall, that Communist reforms were ‘running into the sands’.

  The following day, 1 December, was, appropriately enough, Campion Day, the Jesuit feast dedicated to the martyr Edmund Campion, who after studying at Oxford had taught in Prague during the 1570s. Along with John Dee and Philip Sidney, Campion had been one of the great English figures to visit the city in its most glorious period. But if Campion’s spirit glided along the frosty ice of the Malá Strana squares that morning it was becoming clearer by the hour that the new order in Prague was taking a secular direction. The Civic Forum held another press conference where it was immediately apparent that Dienstbier had replaced Fr Maly as spokesman.

  Mlynář meanwhile, a day later than expected, had finally given his intervie
w, enabling Gorbachev to pay lip-service to the fiction of Czechoslovak ‘independence’ and revisit in turn the subject of 1968 in his press conference in Rome later the same day. Mlynář had been cautious in talking about 1968, preferring to dwell on the ‘dreadful consequences’ that might arise should the ‘current experiments’ fail. That night, alarm sirens sounded in the city. Although they were only to warn of smog so that the elderly and children could stay at home, they gave everyone an uneasy feeling. Sleep in any case was becoming an increasingly rare luxury. For several weeks I had been living on my nerves and painful stomach cramps implied imminent exhaustion.

  On 3 December, the government announced that it would be holding an extraordinary press conference which was expected to include a formal request to the Soviet Union to withdraw its military infrastructure from the Czechoslovak Republic.

  Meanwhile at a summit in Malta Gorbachev and President George H. W. Bush of the United States were discussing the possibility of recasting Central Europe as a demilitarized buffer zone between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The Czechoslovak Republic, together with Hungary and Austria, might constitute this neutralized zone. Soviet troops might even leave Czechoslovakia within two years. My Czech friends wondered what quid pro quo the West might make for this concession. The press conference in the Foreign Ministry building along the river duly announced a new government, but only six of its members were non-Communists. The ‘conservatives’ were ceding power reluctantly. The large conference room was packed with scores of journalists listening with interest to the new government’s agenda and its comments on the continued presence of Soviet troops on Czechoslovak soil.