Love and Freedom

by Rosemary Kavan

  Other faculties followed suit. By this time the ČSM leadership would have accepted federalization — as preferable to separatism — but the tide had swept ahead. The whole student movement decided to build up a new organization from the faculty parliaments. This was the climax to the long struggle inaugurated by ‘my’ students. This time the authorities dared not take revenge.

  To the West it might seem a matter of indifference whether students belonged to a national Youth Union or to a separate and independent student union. But in Czechoslovakia it had tremendous significance. In Jan’s words: ‘We students have proved that the power structure can be undermined and ineffectual leadership removed by pressure from below. In this sense it is important for the nation as a whole.’

  And, indeed, all sections of public opinion — consumer, worker, intellectual, economist, Slovak, and Party rank and file — were expressing dissatisfaction. The new economic model introduced half-heartedly in early 1967 was being throttled by political absolutism. Party reformers were demanding democracy within the Party and the public democracy within society. But under its present leadership the CP was as incapable of change as an arthritic octogenarian of swimming the Channel. Something — or someone — would have to give.

  1. This is a pun on the first line of The Good Soldier Švejk which opens with a charwoman, Mrs Müller, telling Švejk: ‘And so they’ve killed our Ferdinand’ (meaning Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassinated at Sarajevo).

  2. Vladimír Laštůvka (1943–) is a nuclear physicist who was arrested with Aleš Macháčhek in 1977 and then sentenced to two and a half years for distributing literature from abroad.

  3. Luboš Holeček was a well-known student leader in the late sixties, who was killed in 1976 in a hit and run accident.

  4. Vladimír Kadlec is an economist and was the Minister of Education in 1968. He is now a Charter 77 signatory and a regular contributor of economic analyses to samizdat periodicals.

  5. Miroslav Mamula was the chief of the CC CPCz department of security in the early fifties and a loyal supporter of Novotný.

  Chapter 21

  In the end it was Novotný who gave in. On 5 January 1968 the Slovak Alexander Dubček, unknown to the Czech public, was elected Party leader in his place. But we could not yet feel safe. Everything was still in the balance. Dubček took no decisive action. However, after two months of wavering and marking time he abolished censorship. The radicals had already stepped up their campaign to get Müller and Holeček reinstated. The editor of Universita Karlova asked Jan for an article on Müller, analysing the principles involved. Other stories on Holeček and student views followed. The public rallied to the support of Müller and Holeček. The new Minister of Education was open to reason; finally, even Zavadil, the chief ČSM apparatchik retracted his accusations, blaming the ‘general atmosphere of the time’.

  A few days after Novotný resigned the Presidency, Jiří Müller phoned to say he was being released from the army, discharged from the military hospital and re-enrolled at his faculty. Luboš had already been released and had moved into our flat. It was natural that Jiří too should spend his first days of freedom in the Kavan Commune.

  I was curious to meet the young man who had caused a major upheaval in the state. That evening I resolved to prepare a special meal. Unfortunately I was detained at the office. I caught a hare at five minutes to closing time and roped in some vegetables as the shutters were going down. I still had to call on Paula, a journalist friend, to collect some material on young people’s emotional problems. Paula ran an agony column in a Czech daily. I settled down to a last-minute translation while my precious dish cooked in the oven. The ringing of the door bell sometime later brought me down to earth with a jolt. My hare! I rushed into the kitchen. It was obliterated by blue smoke. The bell rang again, more insistently. Dazedly clutching the tin, I went to open the door.

  ‘Hello, Rosemary, we’ve brought you the notorious rebel!’ Karel Kovanda bent to kiss my cheek. ‘What on earth have you got there?’

  ‘Supper!’ I groaned. ‘Good God, how many are there of you?’

  ‘Only Luboš and me and Jiří. Jirka Holub and Jana are on their way.’

  ‘Oh well, come in, all of you,’ I gasped.

  ‘Delighted to meet you, Mrs Kavanová.’

  It was a soft, low-pitched voice. I looked up to meet a round, guileless face lit by an angelic smile. Jiří had a slight squint that in no way detracted from his good looks. He had a sensuous mouth, a firm chin and a polite, modest manner. He did not look like the born leader. He merely appeared to be an agreeable, charming youth. His light grey eyes had the steadfast gaze of a high-principled, uncompromising nature. The clear, broad brow indicated a mind capable of profound analysis and original thought.

  Karel had taken the tin from my hand and was prodding its unrecognizable contents. ‘It was going to be jugged hare in honour of Jiří,’ I explained. ‘But I forgot it while I was working. We’ll have to fall back on spaghetti. I expect you’re all hungry.’

  ‘You bet,’ Karel said cheerfully and followed me into the kitchen.

  ‘Don’t get under my feet when I’m agitated,’ I begged him. ‘Make some Nescafé and take it into Jan’s room. Where is he by the way?’

  ‘Proof-reading at Mladá fronta. He’ll be along.’

  I discovered a tin of spam and some tomato juice and an old knob of cheese. I boiled a huge mound of spaghetti, added the tomato juice and chopped meat and sprinkled grated cheese over it. It was a far cry from the fatted calf but it disappeared in record time. Jan exploded with laughter when he saw the charred animal. ‘I’ve heard of a dish called blue hare,’1 he cried, ‘but not black. Mama, you’re the most eccentric cook in Prague!’

  In the morning when I went to dispose of the carcass, only a thin, ebony shell remained; it looked as though it had been cleaned out by vultures. Perhaps, though compared with army cooking, it would not have been so bad.

  Once back in circulation, Jiří was expected to lead the new students’ union. Unity in opposition had been easy to achieve. To combine the freedom of differing ideas with a positive programme was proving more difficult. The student body as a whole was as yet unused to independent political thinking. It counted on Müller and his friends presenting a ready-made programme.

  Jiří declined, explaining: ‘We radicals have not struggled for freedom from a programme dictated from above in order to impose our own. If our group were to stand for election in the present union, we should all be elected. As the politically most experienced students, our views would carry weight. We should, in fact, become a monopoly power group, and we should find ourselves representing even those who disagree with us. That would be at variance with our principles.’

  Jiří was nothing if not consistent.

  The radicals had achieved their initial aim — to rectify the injustice done to Müller. Jan turned his attention to another of his objectives — to write freely about the trials. Through long interviews with Heda Margolius, Marian Šling, and Lída, he was able to reveal the political background to these personal tragedies. He also quoted from the Central Committee’s memorandum of April 1963 on the trial commission’s findings. This document still had not been published in Czechoslovakia but extracts had appeared in Le Monde. Le Monde was inaccessible to the Czech public but my enterprising son had obtained a copy. From it my sons learned the identities of many who had been responsible for the death of their father and of other honourable men: Soviet advisers and their Czech and Slovak collaborators in the Ministries of the Interior and Justice, the Prosecutor-General’s Office and the Supreme Court.

  More and more was disclosed in the press. We learned that besides the main Prague trials, other phoney trials had been staged all over the country, that political prisoners had numbered tens of thousands, and that nearly two hundred death sentences had been carried out.

  *

  Emerging from a bookshop on Wenceslas Square I collided with Sláva whom I had not se
en since I left the Ministry of Transport. We went to a coffee bar to catch up on the intervening years. I was astounded to hear that in 1960 he and Mr Němec had been framed on a charge of over-pricing. The charge had been fabricated by an ambitious but incompetent subordinate — a confidant of the secret police. By an ironical twist of fate, during his three years in prison, Sláva had executed designs for the Škoda plant at inflated prices which, he said, had gone straight into the prison governor’s pocket.

  Jan brought the news that a student at the philosophical faculty had tried to commit suicide after learning of her father’s role in the fifties. In many homes young people were asking their parents: ‘Why did you do nothing, say nothing?’ My two sons had suffered, but they had been spared disillusionment in their father. We could not know how Pavel would have acted had he not been a victim. Would he have raised his hand in dissent? Or would Party loyalty have silenced him?

  This was a time of good will and optimism. Neither the afflicted nor the public called for vengeance; they demanded only rehabilitation and recompense, and removal of the guilty from office.

  At last, twelve years after his release, Pavel’s name was publicly cleared and I received the residue of his compensation. Sixteen years after Rudolf’s death, he too was unequivocally rehabilitated and the authorities settled their debt with Heda, in so far as a debt of that nature can be settled.

  Dubček appointed a commission to uncover the full extent of responsibility for the trials and the subsequent cover-ups. The trail led right up to the Politburo and the inner Political Secretariat and included Presidents Gottwald, Zápotocký and Novotný. The publication of the Commission’s report was prevented by the Russian invasion. It was subsequently smuggled to the West where we finally caught up with it, and ended our twenty-year-old quest for the whole truth: it was only poetic justice that I should be one of the translators of the English version.2

  Meanwhile Pandora’s box, opened by Dubček, was revealing other long-hidden truths about chicanery, inefficiency and indifference at all levels of the power pyramid; about factories that had gone on producing obsolete goods that went straight into salvage; about Czechoslovakia’s economic exploitation by the Soviet Union; about stifled research and shelved innovations. Nothing was sacred, not even Czechoslovakia’s membership in the Warsaw Pact and Comecon.3. No stone was left unturned; from underneath crawled out monstrous scandals. Journalists were having a ball; censors were playing mariáš. So eager was the public for news that the once despised dailies were sold out by eight o’clock. But people were confused by the explosions of truth in the press. Meetings with activists, writers and journalists cleared up much of what had been unsaid. The public turned up hours beforehand and fought to get in. Hundreds had to be turned away. After years of generalities and anonymity of views, public figures voiced their true opinions. For the first time the population was in position to decide whom to trust and whom not. Every citizen had become a politician.

  Jan was often among the speakers, representing youth. In March 1968 he shared a platform with Pavel’s old friend, Eda Goldstücker. If Pavel had been alive, he would have been there, next to his son, elaborating with Eda the Party’s new aims which were published the following month in a best-selling Action Programme. This remarkable document brought pie down from the sky and offered it as daily fare. It pledged to restore and guarantee basic human rights and freedoms. It promised the people a genuine voice in public affairs. Decision-making would be shared with freely elected trade unions and social organizations. Workers ‘councils would be established. The Party would cease to control every aspect of life but would strive to win public support by persuasion and example. (The Programme explicitly admitted the ‘incorrect policy of direct Party control of the CSM’. This was the final blessing to the rehabilitation of the student radicals.) The Party itself was to be more democratic: votes would be secret and every member would have the right to act according to their conscience. By removing political restrictions, the Programme gave grounds for hope that the new economic system based on flexible planning, market relations, profit-sharing and a degree of competition would function efficiently. The programme reinstated the intelligentsia: it recognized science and technology as essential to progress, and culture to human relations.

  Ideas similar to those for which Jiří Müller and others had been persecuted were now accepted Party policy. The younger generation had their own ideas. At this meeting Jan, and particularly Holeček, made it clear that youth’s support for the new leadership was conditional. Youth rejected the leading role of the Party and insisted it gave up its monopoly on information, concepts, etc. Holeček called upon young people to form their own interest groups and through them to formulate a political programme more radical than the reform communists’

  Holeček stressed that youth was sceptical toward all political parties and believed in democracy rather than democratization.

  Later he affirmed: ‘The Czechoslovak crisis was part of the system of universal manipulation. That is why we young people wish all concepts to remain open. Ours is an anti-programme programme — an antidote to manipulation. We are anxious to avoid the mistakes of our fathers. We shall continue to probe. We shall return to the classics and seek the cultural values created by our nation in the past, regardless of the praise or censure of present-day politicians. There must be no closed doors, either on to the past, present or future.’

  Jiří Müller had specific doubts about the Party’s intentions toward workers’ councils. The Action Programme’s wording was ambiguous, he said, and would permit the authority of the technocrats to outweigh the power of the workers.

  While Jana concentrated on the student union, Jiří, Jan and Karel Kovanda visited factories to discuss the setting up of workers’ councils, for as Jiří said: Only when the immediate producer enjoys full and democratic rights will the intelligentsia have the right to speak about their own freedom.

  For the first time students had access to workers. They were listened to politely; but the workers’ attitude to their ideas, as well as to Dubček’s Spring, was one of wait and see.

  The atmosphere reminded me of 1945. People allowed themselves once more the luxury of enthusiasm. They were willing to tighten their belts and pull their weight. They contributed some of their hard-earned pay to a Fund for the Republic.

  *

  There is a saying in Prague: ‘If you walk the length of Wenceslas Square, you are bound to meet someone you know.’ I can vouch for the truth of that. Shortly after my encounter with Sláva, I was hailed by Mirek in the main thoroughfare: ‘Ježíšmarjá! Rozmarýnka! This calls for a glass! There’s a small place over a delicatessen store near here. Come on.’

  Mirek, who had always been a slow walker, plunged energetically through the crowd, dashed across the shop and dragged me up a narrow staircase. He ordered two glasses of wine and made his way to an empty table. ‘We’ll make a date for a proper celebration. Saturday okay? Fine! I’ve only got time for a quick one now.’

  Mirek, who always had unlimited leisure for booze!

  ‘You’re not married are you?’ I asked.

  Mirek laughed. ‘Sakra, no!’ He patted his briefcase self-consciously. ‘I’ve got some figures to work out for the Works Committee by tomorrow morning. I’m a member now, you know.’

  I spluttered helplessly on my wine. Mirek had never entertained a political notion in his life except in derision! I couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d converted to Buddhism.

  When I had recovered my breath, Mirek explained: ‘We elected an entirely new trade union committee — by secret ballot — and I got on. Formerly I would have turned it down as a bloody waste of time. But now the committee can really get things done for the ordinary people, it seemed worth having a bash. Gives you a different angle on work, you know. You’d never credit, Rozmarýnka, the time I spend thinking up ways of saving money on bloody projects!’ He tapped his forehead and grinned sheepishly.

  Mirek
politically activated! That was all I needed to prove the viability of the new democratic course!

  A poster greeted my eye in the tram. ‘Don’t be inconsiderate!’ read the caption over a drawing of a man pushing past a female passenger and catching her stocking on a sharp object in his string bag. Opposite was a drawing under the caption: ‘Be considerate!’ This time a young man was offering his seat to a middle-aged woman laden with shopping. Here was concrete evidence of socialism with a human face. The living payload was also showing its human face. There were no snarls as corns were trodden on in the packed vehicle. Instead of browbeating her hapless cargo, the conductor coaxed them sweetly to squeeze into yet smaller spaces. Twenty-year-old complaints about Prague transport were no longer uttered. The nation of grumblers had ceased to grumble!

  The new face shone in the shops. Polite requests for a specific piece of merchandise until now had been greeted with a surly, unadorned No! Now the smiling assistant either produced the item or informed the customer regretfully that it was not in stock but would certainly appear shortly. In the meanwhile was there anything else he …?

  Giorgio, our Italian editor, feigned a state of shock.

  ‘I’ve just come from the shoe shop. You’d never believe it: the assistant didn’t expect me to buy the first pair she stuck under my nose! She brought several pairs but none of them was really comfortable. In the old days I wouldn’t have had the guts to walk out without buying anything. Can you imagine: this girl didn’t try to convince me that half a size too small is a perfect fit! She said: “No good taking them if they aren’t comfy. We’re getting some more stock next week. Why don’t you come back then?” What’s the world coming to?’ He shook his head in mock dismay, adding: ‘I was so amazed, I nearly invited her for a coffee on the spot.’