1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  Before the Slansky trials, Novotny´ and his wife had once been invited to the home of Foreign Minister Vladimir Clementis, and Novotny´’s wife had admired the Clementises’ porcelain tea service. After Clementis was executed in the Slansky purges, with the help of Novotny´’s doctored evidence, Novotny´ bought the porcelain for his wife.

  Paper pulp for construction was made from millions of library books full of dangerous Western ideas. The people of Czechoslovakia were listened to and closely watched by a tight network of secret police agents and neighborhood snitches performing their patriotic duty for the revolution. The citizenry had almost no contact with the West and only limited connections with the rest of the Soviet bloc.

  Dubek’s job was developing the backward Slovak economy. He stood by patiently while the simplest of ideas were rejected. He and other leaders in his town of Banska Bystrica meekly approached Party leaders to suggest that a new cement factory be relocated to a spot that would not only avoid pollution in the town, but also had plentiful limestone deposits, since cement was made from limestone. The town had even offered to cover the expenses, which, he could demonstrate in his carefully detailed plans, would not be great. The proposal was rejected as the meddling of “narrow-minded bourgeoisie of Bystrica.” Industrialization was too important to be left to a bunch of backward Slovaks. The cement factory was built by the original plan, showering the town, like so many Slovak towns under the industrialization program, with dust, while the entrance to town was marred with an overhead cable railroad to transport limestone.

  Dubek said nothing. He seldom criticized the government or the Party, either, for incompetence or brutality. In 1955 he was rewarded with a place at the Higher Party School in Moscow. He seemed thrilled by the honor and the opportunity to improve on what he regarded as a poor education. He felt that he lacked “ideological training.” But his three years of advanced ideology in Moscow turned out to be a vague discipline, because Khrushchev had denounced Stalin, leaving the school uncertain about what it should be teaching. Dubek returned from a reforming Soviet Union to a still-Stalinist Czechoslovakia in which Novotny´ had now become president. Since Novotny´ still headed the Party, the country was, for the first time, under one-man rule.

  Students and young people were not afraid to show their displeasure. At cultural festivals in both Prague and Bratislava, they openly demanded more political parties, access to Western books and magazines, and an end to the annoying buzz, the jamming, that accompanied broadcasts of Radio Free Europe and the BBC World Service.

  Dubek’s new education was rewarded with the position of regional secretary of Bratislava. He was now one of the important Slovaks. He still believed in blind Party loyalty, but to whom? Coming from Moscow, he was very aware that Novotny´ and Khrushchev were not saying the same things. Dubek was careful not to express his animosity toward Novotny´, though Novotny´ made no effort to hide his animosity toward Slovakia. According to Dubek, Novotny´ was “particularly ignorant about almost everything that concerned Slovakia and Czecho-Slovak relations, which was, of course, depressing for me.” In 1959, changes in the constitution dismantled the few remaining vestiges of Slovak self-government. While the Slovak people were enraged, the Slovak leaders were anxious only to please Novotny´ and serve Prague.

  Dubek had disdain for the special recreation area Novotny´ had built for Party officials to spend their weekends. “The place itself was very nice, located in a charming part of the Vltava River Basin,” he recalled. “But I detested the whole idea of it—the isolated luxury enjoyed by the leadership under police protection.” His enduring image of Novotny´ was his passion for a card game called “marriage.” The bureaucrats looking for advancement were eager to be invited to play marriage with Novotny´, who dealt out the deck inside a huge beer barrel he had built in front of his house for the purpose of hosting these card games. Dubek did not play and instead spent the periodic obligatory weekends at the retreat playing with children or going for long walks in the forest.

  Occasionally he had open conflict with Novotny´. “These confrontations,” he later wrote, “arose when I dared to offer differing opinions first on investment priorities in Slovakia and later on the rehabilitation of victims of the 1950s repressions.” But as a second-rung figure, Dubek could do little to change government, and he said and did very little. He was a Communist Party careerist.

  In the early 1960s, Dubek served on the Kolder Commission, which looked into redressing government abuse in the 1950s. This work made a lasting impression on him. “I was dumbfounded,” he later wrote, “by the revelations of what had been going on in Czechoslovak Party circles in Prague in the early 1950s.” It is still not certain if he really had not known of these abuses before. But he did seem deeply shaken by the revelations of the Kolder Commission, and so did many other officials. Novotny´ came under tremendous pressure to reorganize his government. In 1963, when because of the commission’s findings the Slovak Central Committee was able to remove the first secretary they regarded as a Novotny´ quisling, it was the quiet Alexander Dubek they chose to replace him. This was done over the shouting of Novotny´, who stormed out of the session and never again attended a meeting of the Slovak Central Committee.

  In the mid-sixties, life became more difficult for Novotny´. His friend Khrushchev was replaced in 1964 by his plotting protégé Brezhnev at the same time that the Czechoslovakian economy had taken disastrous turns. The economy had been catastrophic for years, but the Czech lands had started out at a level so far above those of everyone else in the Soviet bloc that it took years before the consequences of mismanagement became devastating. Slovakia, lacking the Czechs’ starting advantage, had been suffering for a long time. But now even the Czechs were experiencing food shortages, and the government had ordered “meatless Thursday.” With the combination of uncertain support in Moscow and unhappy people at home, Novotny´ eased up on the police state. Censorship became less severe, artists, writers, and filmmakers were allowed more freedom, and some travel to the West was allowed.

  It was still a very repressive state. The literary magazine Tvar was shut down. There were limits to what could be written, spoken, or done. But Czechoslovakians flourished with the small margin of freedom they had been finally allowed. With the West no longer completely cut off, Czech youth immediately tapped into the vibrant Western youth culture wearing Texasskis—blue jeans—and going to clubs to hear the big beat, as rock and roll was called. Prague had more young people with long hair, beards, and sandals than anywhere else in central Europe. Yes, in the heart of Novotny´’s Czechoslovakia, there were the unshorn rebel youth of the sixties—hippies—or were they the rebel youth of the fifties, beatniks? On May 1, 1965, May Day, when the rest of the communist world was celebrating the revolution, the youth of Prague had crowned the longhaired, bearded beatnik, visiting poet Allen Ginsberg, Kraj Majales, King of May. “Ommm,” chanted Ginsberg, the Jew turned Buddhist, who even while embracing Eastern religion was to many young Prague residents the embodiment of the exciting new world in the West. For his coronation speech he clanked tiny cymbals while chanting a Buddhist hymn. After a few days of following him through the dark, ornate back streets of the center city, the secret police had him deported. Or, as he wrote it in a poem,

  And I was sent from Prague by plane by detectives in Czechoslovakian business suits

  And I am the King of May, which is the power of sexual youth,

  And I am the King of May, which is industry in eloquence and action in amour,

  And I am the King of May, which is old Human poesy, and 100,000 people chose my name,

  And I am the King of May, and in a few minutes I will land at London Airport. . . .

  But as Stefan Dubek would have readily pointed out, one is not completely free in America, either. When Ginsberg returned to the United States, the FBI placed his name on a list of dangerous security risks.

  For all its repression, despite the mustached men in Czechoslovakian busin
ess suits, Prague was becoming popular. In 1966 three and a half million tourists visited the country, a fifth of them from the West. Czech movies such as Closely Watched Trains and The Shop on Main Street were being seen around the world. Milos Forman was one of several Czech directors sought internationally. Czech playwrights, including Václav Havel, were earning international reputations. Havel, perhaps not the most theatrical but the most politically stinging of the Prague playwrights, mounted plays of absurdist antitotalitarianism that would never have been seen in the Soviet Union. In The Memorandum, a bureaucracy prevents creative thinking by imposing a made-up language called Ptydepe. Havel often laughed at the language of communism. In another play, a character burlesques Khrushchev’s habit of concocting meaningless folkisms. The Havel character asserts, “He who argues with a mosquito net will never dance with a goat near Podmokly.”

  In November 1967 a small group of Prague students decided to do what they were now hearing of students doing in the West. They held a demonstration. The issue was poor heat and lighting in the dormitories—neither the first nor the last student movement to start on a seemingly banal issue. They discovered, as many students in the West were also beginning to find, that it was fun to demonstrate. They marched in the dark of early evening, carrying candles to symbolize the dim light by which they said they were forced to study. It looked as merry as a Christmas procession when they headed up the narrow stone streets to Hradcany Castle, which housed the government. Suddenly they found their way blocked by police, who clubbed the few demonstrators to the cobblestone pavement and then dragged them off. About fifty needed hospitalization. The press reported simply on “hooligans” attacking the police. But by then people could decipher the code, and word spread quickly of the beatings, creating an even larger protest movement. By the end of 1967 students were handing out flyers and debating with anyone who would engage them on the street, and they looked very much like students in Berlin, Rome, or Berkeley. True, they were being watched by secret police, but so were American and Western European student demonstrators.

  During the 1960s both Slovak nationalism and Novotny´’s animosity toward Slovaks grew. In 1967 the Slovaks defied the government and the Soviets by cheering Israel’s victory in the Six Day War. By 1968 the Middle East had become a favorite political metaphor in the Soviet bloc. It was a sign of trouble in Poland that the Poles, instead of showing their loyalty to Soviet interests, thrilled to the spectacle of the Jews defeating Soviet-trained troops. In March 1968, when Romania wanted to assert its independence, it strengthened its ties to Israel.

  After January 5, the removal of Novotny´ as Party chief filled Czechoslovakia with hope, excitement, and gossip. One of the favorite stories concerned why Brezhnev had not come to Novotny´’s defense. When Khrushchev was replaced by Brezhnev, Novotny´ had been so upset by the undoing of his Soviet friend—they had even spent vacations together—that he had actually called the Kremlin. Whatever Brezhnev’s explanation, Novotny´ was not satisfied and he angrily threw down the phone, hanging up on the new Soviet leader. Brezhnev had a very long memory.

  In 1968 both the Soviet Union and the people of Czechoslovakia put their hopes and trust in a tall, mournful-looking man with a faint smile, a man who had never shown great flair or imagination, which in any event were not qualities the Soviets encouraged. Dubek had no foreign experience. Except for the Soviet Union, he had been abroad only twice, both times in 1960, when he had spent two days in Helsinki and had gone to a Party conference in Hanoi.

  But Dubek and many of his colleagues in the new government were of a unique generation, people who grew up with Nazi occupation, who saw a world of good and evil in which the Soviet Union was the force for good, the hope for the future. Zdenk Mlyná, who became part of the Dubek government, wrote, “The Soviet Union was, in that sense, a land of hope for those who desired a radical departure from the past after the war and who also, of course, knew nothing of the real conditions in the Soviet Union.”

  The real question of the time was not why the Soviets accepted Dubek, but why the Czechoslovakians did. After twenty years of Stalinism, the nation was hungry for change, and they decided that Dubek might deliver it. As Mlyná pointed out, before 1968 the people of Czechoslovakia never learned very much about the character of their leaders, and so if this new one seemed difficult to read, they were accustomed to that. And by chance he was well suited for the youth of 1968. He was nonauthoritarian, a fact that seemed to be confirmed by his uneasiness in public and his dull speaking style. Young Czechoslovakians liked this awkwardness. In the end it would translate into a fatal tendency to make decisions too slowly, always the weak point of antiauthoritarianism. But in a small group he could be extremely persuasive. Most exciting of all, he was a leader with a habit of listening to others. Perhaps what had been true of Ludovit Stur, the officially outcast Slovak nationalist in whose house he was born, was also true of Dubek, as Dubek had said in an unorthodox speech three years earlier defending Stur: “He understood all the principal social and economic problems and the tendencies of his period, and he understood that everything must change.”

  Dubek’s weeping family could see the spot he was in. He had to convince the energized people that he was a reformer, show the old-line figures in the Party and government, the Novotny´ men, that he could be trusted, and demonstrate to the satisfaction of Moscow that he was in control of this uncontrollable situation.

  Dubek never mastered the situation. He simply tried to steer it, balancing the opposing forces, using the skills he had hewn as a Party man. He made no attempt to purge Novotny´ supporters. Years later he would speculate that this may have been his greatest mistake. There had been a 5 to 5 split in the presidium, what the Soviets had started calling a Politburo, that forced the vote to the Central Committee. And so these powerful bodies, normally packed with the chief’s men, were full of old-time communists who had been loyal to Novotny´ and did not really like Dubek. Even his chauffeur and the secretarial staff in his office were Novotny´ people.

  Being a Slovak further complicated his position because Slovaks expected him to now strike a blow for Slovak nationalism, whereas the Czechs muttered about “a Slovak dictatorship.”

  Meanwhile the country was full of factions with demands and expectations. The journalists wanted to know what to expect from censors under the new regime. Dubek offered no guidance on this or many other urgent issues. Later, historians spoke of the “January silence.” Dubek seemed to have come to power completely unprepared, with only a few vague notions: He wanted to help the Slovaks, improve the economy, respond to the demand for more freedom. But he had no programs, and he had the Novotny´ loyalists and the Kremlin to watch at his back.

  He did not seem comfortable in Prague, a large and grandiose capital for a man who had fit in in Bratislava, with its few streets along the Danube, an occasional dilapidated ornate building from the old empire, filled in with blocks of low-ceilinged Stalinist housing for the people and a lone castle on a weedy hill. What few relics there were in Bratislava were crumbling, as were the new buildings. But now at age forty-six, Dubek suddenly was working in palaces, being driven by Novotny´’s man through a town of European grandeur.

  The silence of Dubek created a vacuum in which many things could grow. On January 27 a newsstand appeared in the historic center of the city selling newspapers from around the world from both socialist and capitalist countries. The shop provided a reading room where coffee was served. In the evening people would fill the little room and sit and read Russian, West German, French, and British newspapers. Without censorship, the national press flourished, with newspapers vastly increasing their press runs and still being sold out early in the morning. There had never been unfettered press like this anywhere in the Soviet bloc. The papers were filled with stories of government corruption. They also attacked, exposed, and ridiculed Soviet government. They would fight one another for circulation by running bigger and better exposés of Soviet purges or Czech v
enality. Novotny´, never before scrutinized by the press, was exposed. He and his son, it was revealed, used a government import license to obtain Mercedeses, Alfa Romeos, Jaguars, and other Western cars with which to amuse women. When they got tired of a particular car, they could always sell it to friends at an enormous profit. Novotny´ could not survive the scandal, and without Dubek ever seeking it, on March 22 Novotny´ was forced to resign from the presidency.

  The following day Dubek and his leaders were summoned to a Warsaw Pact meeting in the East German city of Dresden with its still burned and bombed out center. Significantly, Romania was not invited. In the winter of 1968 Moscow was far more troubled by Romania than by Czechoslovakia. While Dubek was trying to be the good disciplined communist, Romania’s Nicolae Ceaus¸escu had been showing increasing independence since the aftermath of the Six Day War, when Romania became the only Soviet bloc country not to sever diplomatic ties with Israel. Czechoslovakia had been the first to follow the Soviets and cut ties, which in the eyes of many Czechs had made Novotny´ look too subservient. In late February the Romanians walked out of a Communist Party International Conference in Budapest. Even worse, two weeks later, at a meeting of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet military alliance, in Sofia, Bulgaria, Romania refused to sign a communiqué endorsing Soviet and American nuclear weapon reduction. Romania said it was protesting the way the two superpowers dominated the dialogue without conferring with smaller countries.

  So if the Soviets were upset with someone in the bloc, Dubek did not expect it to be him. Only weeks before he had written an article in Moscow’s Pravda in which he said, “Friendship with the USSR is the foundation of our foreign policy.”