The New York Review Abroad

by Robert B. Silvers

  But the numbers grew, and the chants turned increasingly against the present dictators in the castle. The demonstrators decided—perhaps some had planned all along—to march to Wenceslas Square, the stage for all the historic moments of Czech history, whether in 1918, 1948, or 1968. Down the hill they wound, along the embankment of the River Vltava, and then, turning right at the National Theater, up Národní Street into Wenceslas Square. Here they were met by riot police, with white helmets, shields, and truncheons, and by special antiterrorist squads, in red berets. Large numbers of demonstrators were cut off and surrounded, both along Národní and in the square. They went on chanting “freedom” and singing the Czech version of “We Shall Overcome.” Those in the front line tried to hand flowers to the police. They placed lighted candles on the ground and raised their arms, chanting, “We have bare hands.” But the police, and especially the red berets, beat men, women, and children with their truncheons.

  This was the spark that set Czechoslovakia alight. During the night from Friday to Saturday—with reports of one dead and many certainly in hospital—some students determined to go on strike. On Saturday morning they managed to spread the word to most of the Charles University, and to several other institutions of higher learning, which immediately entered the occupation strike. (Patient research will be needed to reconstruct the precise details of this crucial moment.) On Saturday afternoon they were joined by actors, already politicized by earlier petitions in defense of Václav Havel, and drawn in directly by the very active students from the drama and film academies. They met in the Realistic Theater. Students described the “massacre,” as it was now called. The theater people responded with a declaration of support. This not only brought the theaters out on strike—that is, turned their auditoriums into political debating chambers—but also, and, as far as I could establish, for the first time, made the proposal for a general strike on Monday, November 27, between noon and 2 PM. The audience responded with a standing ovation.

  On Sunday morning the students of the film and drama academies came out with an appropriately dramatic declaration. Entitled “Don’t Wait—Act!” it began by saying that 1989 in Czechoslovakia might sadly be proclaimed the “year of the truncheon.” “That truncheon,” it continued, “on Friday, November 17 spilled the blood of students.” And then, after appealing “especially to European states in the year of the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution,” they went on to list demands which ranged from the legal registration of the underground monthly Lidové Noviny to removing the leading role of the Communist party from the constitution, but also crucially repeated the call for a general strike. (Incidentally, within a few days the students had all their proclamations neatly stored in personal computers, and many of the flysheets on the streets were actually computer printouts.)

  It was only at ten o’clock on Sunday evening (Day Three), after the students and actors had taken the lead, proclaiming both their own and the general strike, that the previously existing opposition groups, led by Charter 77, met in another Prague theater. The effective convener of this meeting was Václav Havel, who had hurried back from his farmhouse in Northern Bohemia when he heard the news of the “massacre.” The meeting included not only the very diverse opposition groups, such as the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS), the Movement for Civic Freedoms, and Obroda (Rebirth), the club of excommunicated Communists, but also individual members of the previously puppet People’s and Socialist parties. The latter was represented by its general secretary, one Jan Skoda, who was once a schoolmate and close friend of Havel’s, but who had carefully avoided him throughout the long, dark years of so-called normalization.

  This miscellaneous late-night gathering agreed to establish an Obcanské Forum, a Civic Forum, “as a spokesman on behalf of that part of the Czechoslovak public which is increasingly critical of the existing Czechoslovak leadership and which in recent days has been profoundly shaken by the brutal massacre of peacefully demonstrating students.” It made four demands: the immediate resignation of the Communist leaders responsible for preparing the Warsaw Pact intervention in 1968 and the subsequent devastation of the country’s life, starting with the President Gustav Husák and the Party leader Miloš Jakeš; the immediate resignation of the Federal interior minister, František Kincl, and the Prague first secretary, Miroslav Stepán, held responsible for violent repression of peaceful demonstrations; the establishment of a special commission to investigate these police actions; and the immediate release of all prisoners of conscience. The Civic Forum, it added, supports “with all its authority” the call for a general strike. From this time forward, the Forum assumed the leadership of the revolution in the Czech lands.

  Over the weekend there had been tens of thousands of people, mainly young people, milling around Wenceslas Square, waving flags and chanting slogans. Students had taken over the equestrian statue of the good king, at the top of his square, covering its base with improvised posters, photographs, and candles. But the popular breakthrough came on Monday afternoon. For now the square was not merely teeming; it was packed. Dense masses chanted “freedom,” “resignation,” and, most strikingly, a phrase that might be translated as “now’s the time” or “this is it.” And neither the white helmets nor the red berets moved in.

  As in East Germany, when the authorities woke up to what was happening, it was already too late. In East Central Europe today, with Gorbachev in the Kremlin, the kind of violence that would be needed to crush such masses of people just does not appear to be an available option. (But the then prime minister, Ladislav Adamec, went out of his way to emphasize that martial law would not be declared, thus implying that the option had been considered.)

  On Tuesday, Day Five, the demonstration—at 4 PM, after working hours—was still bigger. And the publishing house of the Socialist party, under Jan Skoda, made available its balcony, perfectly located halfway down the square. From here the veteran Catholic opposition activist, Radim Palouš, a dynamic banned priest, Václav Malý, and then Havel addressed the vast crowd, repeating the Forum’s demands. Next morning the first edition of the Communist party daily, Rudé Právo, had a headline referring to a demonstration of “200,000” in the square. The second edition said “100,000.” Someone made a collage of the two editions, xeroxed it, and stuck it up on shop windows next to the photographs of Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, the mimeographed or computer-printed flysheets, and the carefully typed declarations that this or that shop would join in the general strike, declarations signed by all the employees and often authenticated with a seal or rubber stamp.

  On Wednesday and Thursday, Days Six and Seven, there were yet larger demonstrations, while first talks were held between Prime Minister Adamec and a Forum delegation, which, however, at the prime minister’s earnest request, was not led by Václav Havel. The prime minister, Havel told me, sent word through an aide that he did not yet want to “play his trump card.” At the same time, however, Havel had direct communication with Adamec through a self-constituted group of mediators, calling itself “the bridge.” “The bridge” had two struts: Michal Horácek, a journalist on a youth paper, and Michael Kocáb, a rock singer.

  The revolution was thus well under way, indeed rocking around the clock. And its headquarters was just a hundred yards from the bottom of Wenceslas Square, in the theater called the Magic Lantern.

  2.

  Through the heavy metal-and-glass doors, past the second line of volunteer guards, you plunge down a broad flight of stairs into a curving, 1950s-style, mirror-lined foyer. People dart around importantly, or sit in little groups on benches, eating improvised canapés and discussing the future of the nation. Down another flight of stairs there is the actual theater. The set—for Dürrenmatt’s Minotaurus—is like a funnel, with a hole at the back of the stage just big enough for a small monster to come through. Here, instead of the Magic Lantern’s special combination of drama, music, pantomime, and audiovisuals, they hold the daily press con
ference: the speakers emerging from the hole instead of Dürrenmatt’s monster. Journalists instead of tourists are let in for the performance.

  At one end of the foyer there is a room with a glass wall on which it says, in several languages, “smoking room.” There is another guard at the door. Some are allowed in. Others are not. Flash your magic ticket. In. Familiar bearded faces, old friends from the underground, sit around on rickety chairs, in a crisis meeting. At one end, a television mounted high on the wall shows an operetta, without the sound. The room smells of cigarette smoke, sweat, damp coats, and revolution. I remember the same smell, precisely, in Poland in the autumn of 1980.

  This, you think, is the real headquarters. But after a few hours you discover a black door at the other end of the foyer. Through the door you plunge down a metal stairway into a narrow, desperately overheated corridor, as if in the bowels of an ocean liner. Here, in dressing rooms ten and eleven, is the very heart, the epicenter, of the revolution. For here sits Václav Havel, with his “private secretary” and the few key activists from the Forum who are thrashing out the texts of the latest communiqué, programmatic statement, or negotiating position.

  In front of the dressing room door stands a wiry, bearded man in a combat jacket, with his thinning hair knotted at the back, hippie fashion. This is John Bok, a friend of Havel’s now in charge of the personal bodyguard, composed mainly of students. During the war, John Bok’s father was a Czech pilot in the Royal Air Force, and the spirit lives. Don’t try to mix it with John Bok. He and Havel’s other personal security chief, Stanislav Milota, a former cameraman married to a famous actress, are highly visible characters throughout the performance, surrounding Havel as he dashes around in clouds of nervous flurry, John Bok barking into his walkie-talkie, Milota forever saying “SHUSH, SHUSH!” in a stage whisper somewhat louder than the original interruption. In every hectic move, they confirm the playwright’s unique status.

  A political scientist would be hard pressed to find terms to describe the Forum’s structure of decision making, let alone the hierarchy of authority within it. Yet the structure and hierarchy certainly exist, like a chemist’s instant crystals. The “four-day-old baby,” as Havel calls it, is, at first glance, rather like a club. Individual membership is acquired by personal recommendation. You could draw a tree diagram starting from the founding meeting in the appropriately named Players’ Club theater: X introduced Y, who introduced Z. Most of those present have been active in opposition before, the biggest single group being signatories of Charter 77. Twenty years ago they were journalists, academics, politicians, lawyers, but now they come here from their jobs as stokers, window cleaners, clerks, or, at best, banned writers. Sometimes they have to leave a meeting to go and stoke up their boilers. A few of them come straight from prison, from which they have been released under the pressure of popular protest. Politically, they range from the neo-Trotskyist Petr Uhl to the deeply conservative Catholic Václav Benda.

  In addition, there are representatives of significant groups. There are The Students, brightly dressed, radical, and politely deferred to by their elders. For, after all, they started it. Occasionally there are The Actors—although we are all actors now. Then there are The Workers, mainly represented by Petr Miller, an athletic and decisive technician from Prague’s huge CKD heavy machinery conglomerate. All intellectual voices are stilled when The Worker rises to speak. Sometimes there are The Slovaks—demonstratively honored guests. And then there are those whom I christened The Prognostics, that is, members of the Institute for Forecasting (Prognostický Ustav) of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, one of the very few genuinely independent institutes in the whole country’s official academic life.

  The Prognostics are, in fact, economists. Their particular mystique comes from knowing, or believing they know, or, at least, being believed to know, what to do about the economy—a subject clearly high in the minds of the people on the streets, and one on which most of the philosophers, poets, actors, historians, assembled here have slightly less expertise than the ordinary worker on the Vysocany tram. The Prognostics are not, of course, unanimous. Dr. Václav Klaus, a silver-gray-haired man with glinting metal spectacles, as arrogant as he is clever, favors the solutions of Milton Friedman. His more modest colleague, Dr. Tomáš Jezek, by contrast, is a disciple (and translator) of Friedrich von Hayek. But you get the general drift.

  All these tendencies and groups are represented in the full meetings of the Forum, which move, as the numbers grow from tens to hundreds, out of the smoking room into the main auditorium. This “plenum”—like Solidarity in Poland, the Forum finds itself inadvertently adopting the Communist terminology of the last forty years—then appoints a series of “commissions.” By the time I arrive there are, so far as I can gather, four: Organizational, Technical, Informational, and Conceptional—the last “to handle the political science aspect,” as one Forum spokesperson-interpreter rather quaintly puts it. By the time I leave there seem to be about ten, each with its “in tray”—a white cardboard box lying on the foyer floor. For example, in addition to “Conceptional” there is also “Programmatic” and “Strategic.”

  As well as voting people onto these commissions, the plenum also sometimes selects ad hoc “crisis staffs,” and the groups or individuals to speak on television, negotiate with the government, or whatever. I say “voting,” but what actually happens is that the chairman chooses some names, and then others propose other names—or themselves. There is no vote. The lists are, so to speak, open, and therefore long. Thus “for the Conceptional commission I propose Ivan Klíma,” says Havel, adding: “Ivan, you don’t want to write any more novels, do you?” Generally the principle of selection is crudely representative: there must be The Student, The Worker, The Prognostic, etc. Sometimes this produces marvelous comments to a Western ear.

  “Shouldn’t we have a liberal?” says someone, in discussing the Conceptional. “But we’ve already got two Catholics!” comes the reply. Thus Catholic means liberal—which here actually means conservative.

  To watch all this was to watch politics in a primary, spontaneous, I almost said “pure” form. All men (and women) may be political animals, but some are more political than others. It was fascinating to see people responding instantly to the scent that wafted down into the Magic Lantern as the days went by. The scent of power. Some who had never before been politically active suddenly sat up, edged their way on stage, proposed themselves for a television slot; and you could already see them in a government minister’s chair. Others, long active in the democratic opposition, remain seated in the audience. Not for them the real politics of power.

  Like Solidarity, the Forum was racked from the very outset by a conflict between the political imperative of rapid, decisive, united action, and the moral imperative of internal democracy. Should they start as they intended to go on, that is, democratically? Or did the conditions of struggle with a still totalitarian power demand that they should say, to adapt Brecht, We who fight for democracy cannot ourselves be democratic?

  On the face of it, the Forum was, after all, hardly democratic. Who chose them? They themselves did. Yet already on the second day of their existence they wrote, in a letter addressed to Presidents Bush and Gorbachev, that the Civic Forum “feels capable of acting as a spokesman for the Czechoslovak public.” By what right? Why, by right of acclamation. For the people were going on the streets every day and chanting, “Long live the Forum!” In Prague at least, the people—the demos—were obviously, unmistakably behind them. In this original sense, the Forum was profoundly, elementally democratic. The demos spoke, in demos, and declared the Forum to be its mouthpiece.

  If one had to describe Havel’s leadership, Max Weber’s often misused term “charismatic” would for once be apt. It was extraordinary the degree to which everything ultimately revolved around this one man. In almost all the Forum’s major decisions and statements he was the final arbiter, the one person who could somehow balance the ve
ry different tendencies and interests in the movement. In this sense, as in Solidarity, many decisions were not made democratically. Yet a less authoritarian personality than Havel it would be hard to imagine. (The contrast with Lech Walesa is striking.) And the meetings of the plenum were almost absurdly democratic. The avuncular Radim Palouš was an exemplary chairman. Everyone had his or her say. Important issues were decided by vote. At one point, an assembly of perhaps two hundred people was editing the latest Forum communiqué, line by line.

  So all this—the plenums, the commissions, the ad hoc groups, Havel, John Bok, the Minotaurus set, the smoking room, the dressing rooms, the hasty conversations in the corridors, the heat, the smoke, the laughter, and the exhaustion—made up that unique political thing, “the Magic Lantern.” The story of the revolution, in the days I witnessed it, is that of the interaction of “the Magic Lantern” with three other compound forces, or theaters. These may be called, with similar poetic license, “the people,” “the powers that be,” and “the world.”

  3.

  For those in the Magic Lantern, “the people” meant first of all Prague. In a sense, all of Prague became a Magic Lantern. It was not just the great crowds on Wenceslas Square. It was the improvised posters all over the city, the strike committees in the factories, the Civic Forum committees that were founded in hospitals, schools, and offices. It was the packed theaters every evening, debating with the guest speakers on stage: a Forum spokesman, or perhaps an exiled writer, back for the first time in years. It was the crowds standing in front of the television sets in shop or office windows at all hours of the day and night, watching the Videojournál tape of the events of November 17 played over and over again. It was ordinary people on the streets. As you walked down to the Old Town you overheard snippets of excited conversation: “free elections!” “human face!” and (darkly) “demagogic tendencies!” At six o’clock in the morning on Wenceslas Square you saw a queue of hundreds of people waiting patiently in the freezing mist. They were waiting to buy a copy of the Socialist party newspaper, Svobodné Slovo (The Free Word), which was the first to carry accurate reports of the demonstrations and Forum statements. Lining up for the free word.