1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  In theory, the operation involves two doomed patients. One gives up his heart and dies but would have died in any event; the other is saved. But some doctors and laymen wondered if doctors should be deciding who is doomed. Shouldn’t everyone hope for a miracle? And how is it decided who receives a new heart? Were doctors now making godlike decisions? The controversy was not helped by Barnard, who said in an interview in Paris Match, “Obviously, if I had to choose between two patients in the same need and one was a congenital idiot and one a mathematics genius, I would pick the latter.” Controversy was also fueled by the fact that Barnard came from South Africa, the increasingly stigmatized land of apartheid, and that he had saved a white man by removing a black man’s heart and implanting it in him. Such an irony was not likely to be overlooked in a year like this.

  Ever since Fidel Castro’s 1959 New Year’s victory, the beginning of every year has been marked in Havana on January 2 with an anniversary celebration in the broad, open space known as Plaza de la Revolución. In 1968, for the ninth anniversary of the revolution, something new was added—a sixty-foot-high mural of a beautiful young man in a beret. This young man was the thirty-eight-year-old Argentine Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who had been killed in Bolivia two months earlier while carrying out the new Cuban approach to revolution.

  This new approach had been described in a book called Revolution in the Revolution by Régis Debray, a young Frenchman who had become enamored of the Cuban revolution. The book, translated into English in 1967, was a favorite of students all over the world, with its premise certain to appeal to the impatience of youth. Debray wrote of tossing out the old Marxist-Leninist theories about slowly fomenting revolution. Instead, according to Debray, revolutions began by taking the initiative with an army raised from rural people. That was Castro’s strategy in the mountains of his native Oriente province. And it was what Che was doing in Bolivia. Only in Che’s case, it had not worked out well, and in November a photograph circulated of a Bolivian air force colonel displaying Che’s half-naked corpse. Debray, too, had been caught by the Bolivian army, but rather than killing him, the Bolivians kept him in a prison in a small town called Camiri. In the beginning of 1968 Debray was still there, though the Bolivians allowed his Venezuelan lover, Elizabeth Burgos, to come to the prison so the couple could be married.

  So in 1968 Fidel Castro’s close friend and co-revolutionary became a martyr, a canonized saint of the revolution—forever young, to borrow a phrase from Bob Dylan, bearded and bereted, with those smiling eyes, the pure revolutionary in deeds and clothing. At the José Martí International Airport in Havana, a poster of the martyr appeared with the message “Youth will intone the chants of mourning to the chatter of machine guns and cries of war. Until victory, forever.”

  All over Cuba the phrase was written, “Until Victory, Forever.” Sixty thousand students in gray high school uniforms marched past Castro’s reviewing stand, and as each group passed they declared, loudly and enthusiastically, “Our duty is to build men like Che.” “Como Che”—to be like Che, to have more men like Che, to work like Che—the phrase filled the island. The cult of Che had begun.

  Castro announced that this year the celebration would not include a display of Soviet weapons, explaining that such a parade was too expensive, in part because the tanks tore up the pavement on the Havana streets.

  There were other troubling signs for Moscow, which began the year with a shaky economy and an unpopular trial of four intellectuals accused of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda after they campaigned in favor of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, two writers in prison for the past two years because they had published their work in the West. The Six Day War in the Middle East had been a humiliation for the foreign policy of Leonid I. Brezhnev, chief of the Soviet Communist Party, at a time when collective farming was failing, attempts at economic reform had fizzled, youth and intelligentsia were growing restless, and nationalist movements such as that of the Tatars were becoming troublesome. The people of the Soviet bloc, especially young people, were increasingly rejecting the stances and language of the cold war. Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito had long annoyed Moscow with an air of independence, but now Romania’s Nicolae Ceaus¸escu had begun to exhibit the same tendency. Even in Czechoslovakia, where the Soviets had their most loyal and pliable leader, Antonín Novotny´, the population seemed restless. In April 1967 the Bratislava Pravda, the Slovak Party organ, had conducted a poll in Czechoslovakia and found a shocking general rejection of the Party line. Only half blamed the Western imperialists for international tension, and 28 percent said that both sides were responsible. Perhaps most shocking, only 41.5 percent blamed the United States for the Vietnam War, a stance with which even the populations of America’s closest allies would not have been in agreement. By the fall, Czech writers were openly demanding more freedom of expression, and students from Prague’s Charles University were demonstrating in the streets.

  In the fall of 1967 a series of meetings of the Czechoslovakian Central Committee had gone very badly for Novotny´. His slavish loyalty to Moscow had been rewarded by his appointment as first secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party in 1953. In 1958 he had become president of Czechoslovakia. Now, an increasing number of Central Committee members, reacting in part to Novotny´’s relentless hatred of the 4.5 million Slovaks who constituted a third of the nation’s population, felt he should give up one position or the other. The president barely managed to save himself in a December meeting of the ten-member presidium of the Communist Party by closing the session “because it was Christmas.” The committee had agreed to reconvene the first week of January.

  In the meantime, Novotny´ plotted. He tried to intimidate his opponents by spreading a rumor that the Soviet Union was poised to step in to preserve his position. But this backfired, turning key figures against him only further. He then plotted a military intervention that would affirm his positions and arrested his opponent, the Slovak Alexander Dubek, whom he despised. But a general informed Dubek of the plot and Novotny´ was outmaneuvered again.

  So President Novotny´ began the new year with a broadcast to the nation that was intended to be conciliatory. He promised that Slovakia, always at the end of Prague’s priorities, would suddenly be a leading concern in all economic planning. He also attempted to placate writers and students by promising that everything progressive, even if from the West, would be permitted. “I do not mean only in the economy, engineering, and science,” he added, “but also in progressive culture and art.”

  The Central Committee met again on January 3 and removed Novotny´ as first secretary of the Party, replacing him with Dubek. There was not enough consensus to remove him as president, but Novotny´ had suffered a major and bitter defeat. The people of Czechoslovakia were not told that their world was about to change until Friday, January 5, when Radio Prague announced the “resignation” of Novotny´ as first secretary and the election of Dubek. Czechs had not realized Novotny´ was in trouble, and most of them had no idea who this Alexander Dubek was. In a closed society, the most successful politicians operate out of the public eye.

  But while all this was happening, curiously little was heard from the ironfisted Soviet leader. Brezhnev had visited Prague in December, and it had been widely reported that he had made the trip to ensure the preservation of the beleaguered Czech leader. But in fact, when Novotny´, whom Brezhnev never liked in spite of the Czech leader’s vaunted loyalty, was removed, Brezhnev told Novotny´, “Eto vashe delo”—That’s your problem.

  In Washington, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara was preparing his annual report to Congress, in which he wrote, “In the 1960s the simple bipolar configuration which we knew in the earlier post–World War II period began to disintegrate. Solid friends and implacable foes are no longer so easy to label, and labels which did useful service in the past, such as ‘free world’ and ‘iron curtain,’ seem increasingly inadequate as descriptions of contending interests within and between blocs and of
new bonds of common interest being slowly built across what were thought to be impenetrable lines of demarcation.”

  On Friday, at the end of the first week of 1968, the weekly summary of Vietnam casualties showed that 185 Americans, 227 South Vietnamese, and 37 other allied servicemen had been killed in action. America and its allies reported killing a total of 1,438 enemy soldiers.

  That was the first week, and so 1968 began.

  CHAPTER 2

  HE WHO ARGUES WITH

  A MOSQUITO NET

  The people were dissatisfied with the party leadership. We couldn’t change the people, so we changed the leaders.

  —ALEXANDER DUBCEK, 1968

  ON JANUARY 5, 1968, the day Dubek took over as leader of the Czech Communist Party, while Czechs and Slovaks cheered, his wife and two sons could not help crying at the miserable fate that had befallen him.

  At the center of one of the most dramatic moments in the history of Soviet-dominated Central Europe stood a gray, ambiguous man. Despite being six feet four inches tall, all his life Alexander Dubek was always described as unobtrusive. But he was not as dispassionate as he appeared. By the time he had deposed Novotny´, whose nickname was Frozen Face, the animosity between the two men had a twenty-three-year history.

  When Dubek took office at age forty-six, he did not seem youthful. Tall, enigmatic, often a dull speaker, but the inspiration for millions of energized youth, Dubek in some ways resembled Senator Eugene McCarthy. In fact, he had come very close to being born in the Midwest.

  “I was conceived by a pair of Slovak socialist dreamers, who happened to immigrate to Chicago,” Dubek wrote. In 1910, Stefan Dubek, an uneducated Slovak carpenter, weary of a Slovakia repressed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and without opportunities, walked out of his mountain home along a curving bank of the Danube until he had reached Budapest, the domed and tree-lined capital of his oppressors. There he organized a socialist cell in a furniture factory and dreamed of overthrowing the monarchy. The factory management quickly realized what he was doing and fired him. Soon after, he immigrated to America, which he had been told was a land of democracy and social justice. He settled into a Slovak community on Chicago’s North Side.

  American capitalism seemed a harsh system, neither as free nor as just as he had been told, but at least he could speak his political beliefs without being arrested, and he would not get drafted into World War I to fight for the monarchy he hated. The entry of the United States into the war was a blow to American socialists, who were generally opposed to war—and had believed Wilson’s promise that he would keep the United States out of war. Stefan, a pacifist—a belief that would reemerge in his son, Alexander, at a critical moment in history—went to Laredo, Texas, to meet up with Quakers and other pacifists who could help him get across the border to sit out the war in Mexico. But he was caught, arrested, fined, and imprisoned for a year and a half. When he was released, he returned to Chicago and met and married a young Slovak, Pavlina, who, unlike Stefan, was a devout communist. At Pavlina’s urging, Stefan studied Marx. When his sister in Slovakia wrote that she was getting married, he sent her a lengthy political questionnaire with which to screen the prospective groom. Stefan became very excited about the revolution in Russia, and in a letter to Slovakia in 1919 he wrote, “In America you can have most things but you certainly can’t have freedom. The only free country in the world is the Soviet Union.”

  After nearly a decade of struggle for socialism, Stefan was disappointed with the United States and Pavlina missed her country, so in 1921 they took their baby and, with Pavlina pregnant, moved back to Slovakia to a newly created Czechoslovakia, and that is how Alexander Dubek, born a few months later, came to be a Czechoslovakian. He had many relatives on both sides in America, though he had no contact with them until near the end of his life when they started writing him letters after the fall of communism.

  The new country where Stefan vowed to build socialism at first seemed exciting. Czechoslovakia had been thought up by a Prague professor, Tomás Garrigue Masaryk. At first the country seemed as though it would be an equal union among Bohemians, Moravians, and Slovaks. To Slovaks this was an enormous reversal of history, because since the tenth century they had always been the downtrodden and abused fiefdom of some powerful state. The Czech lands, Bohemia and Moravia, had had a late-nineteenth-century industrial revolution that had produced a literate middle class, including bureaucrats and technocrats with which to staff a new government. But after one thousand years of rule by the Magyars of Hungary, Slovakia was an impoverished agricultural region much like the neighboring part of Poland. Few Slovaks could read or write even in their native Slovak language. Most were peasants on very poor land. They had first expressed their nationalism in 1848, a year of rebellion not unlike 1968 except that the events were limited to Europe. In 1848 the Slovaks rose up against the Hungarians and demanded equal rights in a document known as Demands of the Slovak Nation. This became the model for Slovak nationalism, and its author, Ludovit Stur, became the Slovak national hero long before and after Masaryk. By a strange coincidence, when Stefan and Pavlina Dubek moved back to Slovakia, they settled into a cottage where Stur had been born in 1815, and it was there that Alexander Dubek was born.

  The Slovaks’ Hungarian masters and Czech neighbors had always regarded them with condescension. If Slovaks had listened closely to Masaryk, they would have realized that he harbored that same contempt. He tended to characterize Slovaks as backward, lacking political maturity, and being “priest-ridden”—all familiar, pejorative Czech stereotypes of Slovaks.

  But Masaryk enjoyed great popularity among not only the Czechs but the Slovaks. At the end of World War I, he traveled to America and gained the support of Woodrow Wilson; then he moved to Paris, where in October 1918 he formed a united Czechoslovakian government, managed to get it recognized by the allies, and returned two months later to a newly created nation in which he was the national hero.

  From the beginning there was the “Slovak problem.” The Slovaks demanded that the new nation be called Czecho-Slovak and not Czechoslovakia, but the Czechs refused to grant that small hyphen of separation. This was the first of many arguments the Slovaks lost.

  Little Alexander had almost no memory of childhood in Slovakia except a tame deer that lived behind the church and a St. Bernard dog that it grieved him to give up. He would be seventeen the next time he saw Slovakia. If Slovakia was backward, it was not nearly as underdeveloped as Kirghizia in the Soviet Union, where the Dubeks moved voluntarily in 1925 to raise their children on an agricultural cooperative.

  Soviet Kirghizia, now called Kyrgyzstan, was four thousand miles from Slovakia, near China. It was not enough in the Iron Age to have metal for plowshares, and nearly the entire population was illiterate, since Kirghiz was not a written language. The Dubeks never reached their original destination. After traveling twenty-seven days, the rail line ended in a barren place called Pishpek and there they stayed, living in decrepit, abandoned military barracks. They helped build a farming cooperative, bringing in tractors. The local people, who had never seen one, ran after them, shouting, “Satan!” In the early years, there was so little food that Dubek remembered eating raw sparrow eggs in the shell. From there they went to the Russian industrial center of Gorkiy. Stefan did not bring Alexander back to Slovakia until 1938, when Stalin decreed that foreigners had to take Soviet citizenship or leave.

  Alexander was now seventeen, and the exciting new Czechoslovakia was twenty years old and full of disorder and disillusionment. He had inherited his parents’ ideology but for a long time, it seemed, not their rebellious natures. He was an orthodox, Soviet-educated communist. During World War II he was a partisan in a band of guerrilla fighters known as the Jan Ziska Brigade, named after a fifteenth-century fighter. They fought a rear guard action against the Germans. Years later his official Party biography made much of this wartime experience. He was wounded twice in the leg. His older brother was killed. In 1945 his father, S
tefan, was deported by the Germans as a communist to Mauthausen concentration camp. There he found one Antonín Novotny´, a prominent Czech communist who had also been deported. Novotny´ vociferously vowed that if he survived, he would never again have anything to do with politics.

  In 1940, in a house where his father was being hidden, Alexander met Anna Ondrisova, about whom he said, “I think I was in love at first sight.” In 1945 Dubek married her and remained in love with her until she died in 1991. Rare for such an orthodox communist, Dubek married her in a church. When in 1968 Dubek became leader of Czechoslovakia, he was the only chief of a European communist country who had been married in a church.

  Czechoslovakia is the one country that became communist by a democratic vote. Unfortunately, as often happens in a democracy, the politicians were lying. In 1946 Czechoslovakia, newly liberated by the Soviet Red Army, voted for a communist government that promised there would be no collectives established and that small businesses would not be nationalized. By 1948 the communists had complete control of the country, and in 1949 the government began taking over the economy, nationalizing all enterprises, turning farms into state collectives.

  Alexander Dubek was a hardworking, serious-minded Slovak Party official carefully sidestepping the issue of Slovak nationalism. He was Slovak enough to be acceptable at home, but not so much that it would be of concern to the Party leadership in Prague. In 1953 he became regional secretary for an area of central Slovakia. That year Stalin died and Khrushchev began dismantling the most rigid excesses of Stalinism—everywhere but in Czechoslovakia. That same year Frozen Face Novotny´ was appointed first secretary of the Communist Party. Novotny´ was poorly educated and his career had shown little promise until he displayed a flair for fabricating evidence in Stalinist purges such as the campaign against the number two government figure, Party secretary-general Rudolph Slansky. Slansky was a brutal member of the dictatorship, probably guilty of many crimes, but he was tried and executed for Zionism. It did not matter that Slansky, far from being a Zionist, had disagreed with the Soviet Union’s early support of Israel. The word Zionist was being used not to designate supporters of Israel but to refer to people of Jewish origin, which Slansky was.