ROSEMARY KAVAN
Love and Freedom
FOREWORD BY
ARTHUR MILLER
INTRODUCTION BY
WILLIAM SHAWCROSS
I would like to dedicate my mother’s book to the memory of my English grandmother and of those of her generation who rejected Munich and selflessly tried to help the Czechs and others who suffer from injustice; and to my daughter Caroline and her generation, who, I hope, will understand, as my mother did, that happiness, freedom and peace are indivisible, that the fate of any one individual or nation concerns us all and that the future depends on people being able to direct their governments as much in Prague or Warsaw as in London or Washington.
August 1988
J.K.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
Love and Freedom
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Copyright
Foreword
Rosemary Kavan’s book is a direct and unpretentious account of the Czechoslovakian tragedy, from the high idealism of the immediate postwar years to the Prague Spring of 1968 and its suppression by the Soviet invasion. She has written it all from the inside, as the British wife of a Czech Party official, sparing neither her own foibles nor those of others, and it makes a warm and human witness to what amounts to the surreal transformation of a Western people and civilization into something quite different — perhaps a colony of not Moscow exactly but Istanbul.
The Czech experience, as pure form, is the utter triumph of a particularly mindless bureaucracy — little different from what Kafka foretold two decades before, including executions for reasons no one can really put a finger on. Indeed, it is in many ways a system prepared for by the old Austrian bureaucracy, which had long since thrown its net over the Balkan and Central European nations of the Dual Monarchy. Marxism and the monolithic rule of the Party simply added yet another net to the first one, much as it did in China, where the Party’s regulations were in a profound way prepared for by systematic Confucian regulatory mores. What the Party added that was new, however, was a disconcerting pretension to rationalism and democratic legality. But this merely covered over a totally whimsical selection of victims, and indeed persecutors, too, who in so many cases were simply victims awaiting their turn. On top of it all was ladled the sweet fudge of the old anti-Semitism, perhaps the ultimate irony when so many Jews had yearned for the coming of socialism as the new enlightenment, which would end forever their ancient brainless persecutions.
Because Rosemary Kavan has kept so close to what she saw and felt, her account will introduce those who are unfamiliar with the Czechoslovakian situation to the individual Czechs and Slovaks who, like all people closely observed, escape simple uniform definitions. And this makes their fall all the worse. This is not some “Eastern” country with whose unfree habits of life we in the West are unfamiliar — Prague, after all, is farther West than Vienna — it is a nation which had possessed and cherished freedom before being forced to give it up. This may be why, until very recently, it has been all but impossible to talk about Czechoslovakia with even liberal Soviet individuals, for they knew that here was no backward fascism Russia had smashed but a democratic and technologically advanced society which had been thrust back into far more primitive forms of social discourse and government than it had already achieved through its history. And Czechoslovakia may just turn out to be yet another fork in the road ahead, for when Glasnost truly is permitted to work its liberating mission in Czechoslovakia, releasing people’s energies and hopes, regimes described in books like this will probably seem hallucinatory and hard to believe. But it all happened, weird as it is to contemplate, and it needs to be remembered, like an illness which leaves the body strong and healthy, except for the loss of its capacity to speak truthfully and to make its own choices in a candid and open rather than surreptitious and mostly illegal way.
Arthur Miller
Introduction
To my regret, I did not meet Rosemary Kavan till the early seventies. It was during the cruel repression which followed, slowly at first, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the destruction of ‘socialism with a human face’. Rosemary, who felt by now much more affinity with Czechoslovakia than with her native Britain, had remained in Prague as long as possible. But her association with the men, women and youths of 1968, and with their clandestine resistance afterwards, was too well known. She was allowing her flat to be used as a meeting-place, she was typing samizdat, and she participated in the distribution of the anti-election leaflet campaign, launched by the opposition in the autumn of 1971. The penalty was several years’ imprisonment, and interrogators from the fifties were back at work. Eventually, Rosemary decided that the time had come to go back to England — where both her sons now lived. She was refused a passport but managed, somehow, to escape through Eastern Europe to the West.
In London she started to work for Palach Press. This news agency, named after Jan Palach, the student who immolated himself in protest against the Soviet invasion, was founded by Rosemary’s son, Jan Kavan. Since its inception it has provided an extraordinarily full and accurate flow of news from Czechoslovakia, and recently as part of the newly-formed East European Cultural Foundation from Hungary and Poland as well. For anyone trying to learn or write about Eastern Europe, in particular the resistance and the groups striving for change, Palach Press has been quite invaluable.
Working for Palach Press was in some ways an easy metamorphosis for Rosemary since she had been so long involved in the Czech underground. She knew most of the people whose writing she was translating or whose arrest she was reporting. But if familiar, it was also very depressing work to do in London, for the information which seemed (and was) so vital in Prague excited little interest in Britain. By the early seventies Czechoslovakia was an old story, meriting only short paragraphs in the papers edited by people to whom it was once again a faraway place of which they knew little.
On the few occasions I met her, Rosemary seemed an extraordinary creature with rare courage, humour and vivacity which were remarkable enough in themselves. I wished I had known her long ago, particularly in Prague when I first visited there in the summer of 1968, just before the invasion. I cannot think of anyone who would have been a better guide to the intricacies of the city, which she adored, and its politics, by which she had understandably become obsessed.
When I did finally meet her, I did not know the details of her life in Czechoslovakia over the past twenty-five years. Having read her book and learned about what she had gone through, her resilience I find all the more remarkable. Her book is both moving and an extraordinary, invaluable account of life under Stalinism.
I do not want to summarize the book — the reader should enjoy to the full Rosemary’s cocky and inimitable style — but perhaps I could just mention some of the highlights which seem perhaps best to symbolize both her own story and the torment that has been Czechoslovakia since 1945.
Rosemary Kavan was a middle-class English girl who married a Czech communist in Britain in 1945 and went home with him to witness at f
irst hand the misery that communism plunged the country into. Not that she would have put it like that; in those days she was, as she would later acknowledge, a naïve and over-enthusiastic supporter of the Party’s cause. Her husband, Pavel, was a hardline communist, not the sort of person she would like to have as an enemy. ‘He took no account of inner conflicts and psychological pressures and subtleties of motivation. He was interested only in political unambiguities: for or against.’ He changed later.
Pavel worked in the Foreign Ministry; they were posted to Britain, and in the Stalinist purges of the early fifties his British contacts proved very dangerous for him. Rosemary had applied for a job in heavy industry (‘the heavier the better’) in order to learn more about Czechoslovakia and communism. It enabled her to take her mind off the terror which was stalking the land. But not for long. The purges of the early fifties swept further and further through the ranks of the Party; for Pavel too came the 5 a.m. ring on the doorbell. She kissed him goodbye, and he was gone for years.
Pavel and others were accused of being part of a Titoist conspiracy to drag Czechoslovakia away from the Soviet Union. The arch villain was Konni Zilliacus MP who, through his contacts with Czech communists, had been ‘directly responsible for Yugoslavia’s defection to the warmongering West’.
Rosemary had the extraordinary experience of listening to the trial over the radio. She waited to hear him deny the charges and was horrified instead to hear him admit them. However, after he started answering one question before the prosecutor had finished asking it, she realised that he was making mechanical responses to a prepared script.
In order to bring up her two sons, Rosemary took a job in the railway design office. She has hilarious accounts of the frustrations and the fears of office life in Prague in the early fifties when the whole country seemed to be held together, just, by bits of wire, string, cardboard and scrap metal, everything supposedly done according to some ludicrous and ill-applied plan presided over by bureaucrats and policemen incompetent or malign. The more I knew the Czechs,’ she writes, ‘the more I understood the attraction of Švejk. Švejk is a symbol of the moral victory of the underdog over the tyrant. His very acceptance of fate becomes a form of passive resistance. Though outwardly submissive, he retains the inner right to consign his superior to hell. His loquaciousness breaks his opponent’s spirit; his imperturbability renders him impotent. In every encounter, Švejk makes authority look ridiculous, which removes the sting from subordination.’
Take the moment when Švejk is told that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand has been assassinated at Sarajevo. Mrs Müller says, ‘So they’ve killed our Ferdinand.’ ‘Ferdinand?’ he asks. ‘Really? But which one? The one who used to pick up dog turds? Or that apprentice hairdresser who once drank the hair lotion by mistake?’ This, says Milan Kundera, ‘is not ignorance or stupidity speaking, it is the refusal to concede History a value, to grant it seriousness’.
In 1956 Pavel was released but the Party would not rehabilitate him fully. He found a job and then lost it — for getting paralytically drunk and seducing an office colleague. When, shamefacedly, he told Rosemary about it, she laughed, invited him out to dinner and suggested he seduce her.
Pavel had a bad heart and he died in 1960. By this time Rosemary had become bewitched by Prague and passionately interested in the country’s slow de-Stalinization and reform. Moreover the boys regarded it as home, and Jan was becoming very active in the student-reform movement. She stayed on.
Jan became involved with one of the bravest of the student leaders to emerge even before 1968, Jiří Müller. Long before it was allowed, Müller urged some independence for the country’s youth organization from the Party line. Indeed, he suggested the Youth League should act as a ‘corrective’ to Party policy. He was expelled from university and forced to join the army. Jan asked Rosemary if fellow students pledged to Jiří’s readmission to university could meet in her flat. She knew it would likely be denounced as a ‘conspiracy’, but she agreed. The group formed an important part of the student revolt which coalesced in 1967 and preceded the revolt within the Party in ’68.
1968 was the year of Alexander Dubček, the unknown, engaging and hesitant leader of the Slovak party, who was suddenly and unexpectedly made leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. In an extraordinary torrent, the past began to be re-examined and the future replanned, in an infectious atmosphere of hope and goodwill that was too good, too revolutionary to last.
‘For me, Prague Spring was a justification for sticking out the years of disillusion … intoxicated with the new freedom, I attended every public meeting.’ It was indeed an exhilarating time. She quotes workers who said how wonderful it was to get the truth from the Party at last. But many others believed that it proved the Party could never be trusted.
The trials were investigated. Pavel was publicly cleared. But the full enquiry was never published in Prague because of the Soviet invasion. It was smuggled to the West and published there; ironically, Rosemary helped translate it into English after she too had had to be smuggled out. She married again and was very happy until, in 1981, she died of cancer, mourned by many people, especially in Prague.
In Czechoslovakia there has since been scant improvement, as a glance at any of the Palach Press bulletins will show. The government still persecutes and harries the ideas as well as the people of 1968. Those who were brave enough to sign the human rights protest document known as Charter 77 have all been harassed, some have lost their jobs, and others have even been imprisoned. There is a constant war on ideas and on any concept of Czech independence. The battle against words and literature is especially severe — hence the continued need for the samizdat which Rosemary helped produce. Milan Kundera has pointed out that persecution of writers and literature now ‘aims at nothing less in the long run than the death of Czech culture, to which … the existence of the nation itself is inseparably bound. Russian totalitarianism’s cultural concept is absolutely incompatible with the spirit, the wager, of Czech literature.’
One must certainly include in Czech literature all the manifestos, statements, appeals and protests that Czechs and Slovaks have made against their predicament in recent years. And in that brave list Rosemary’s name figures prominently as one who has done much more than most people’s best to make sure the struggle eventually succeeds, despite all oppression. And certainly her Czech friends would agree that she embodied its extraordinarily resilient, independent spirit. Her story is a restatement of that spirit.
William Shawcross
Love and Freedom
Chapter 1
A people with such a genius for creating chaos should go far, I thought. Subsequent events were to confirm this impression.
At the beginning of July, two months after the end of the war, Pavel had written to me in Leicester from Prague: ‘Get repatriated. I am leaving for Yugoslavia …’ He had been assigned to the diplomatic service and Belgrade was to be his first post. The prospect of chasing him across Central Europe with an assortment of dictionaries and without any orientation goaded me into activity. I gave in my notice, sold most of my belongings, and was informed that my first step towards Prague was to undergo a formidable list of injections – against smallpox, typhus, tetanus, cholera, malaria and goodness knew what else. The Czech doctor queried the wisdom of administering them all at once and then the difficulty of selecting the one that would be the most useful and least upsetting. In the end he solved the dilemma by issuing me with a sheet listing the whole galaxy, and implanted upon it a huge rubber stamp. The deed was done. This was my introduction to the Czech bureaucratic magic wand, without which you can neither be born nor die.
A few days later, I reported at 6 a.m. to the Czech office in London to be transported to my new country. There was no sign of any official. Scores of women with children crowded the corridor, clutching their cases and their fortitude. We waited. For a long time nothing happened. At length an official emerged and announced that the flight had b
een cancelled owing to fog over Prague. We were asked to re-appear the following morning. The same performance was repeated, and went on to enjoy a long run. The officials stuck to their original story with admirable tenacity against appalling odds. A fog over Prague in the middle of a blazing summer! I was impressed by their audacity, compared with officialdom’s usual colourless excuses: technical hitches, unforeseen circumstances. Having been told on the ninth day that we should definitely not be flying for several days, we were contacted on the tenth day and told to assemble on the following morning.
We took off in a Dakota that had been hurriedly converted for our use.
Many questions whirled through my mind as the plane left England behind. What would Pavel, my husband of four months, look like in civilian clothes? What changes had he found in his homeland after a six-year absence? How would I adapt to his country?
Our paths had crossed in August 1943. I had just gained my teaching diploma and after two years of educational text-books, I had felt a need to broaden my horizons. A conference on the post-war world offered a good starting point. Many nationalities and a wide range of political convictions would be represented there. Pavel happened to be the leader of the discussion group I found myself in. He was an ardent and articulate communist.
Since my early teens I had considered myself a socialist. I had been influenced partly by my parents who were armchair socialists, and partly by books. At the age of ten, The Last of the Mohicans, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a story about Wat Tyler aroused my sympathy for the underdog. A few years later, Dickens, Upton Sinclair, Zola, Howard Fast, Leon Feuchtwänger, Walter Greenwood and John Steinbeck fanned my interest in social conditions. I wanted passionately to improve the human lot.
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