by Tony Judt
Moreover, the record of collectively-asserted rights was an unhappy one. Where the rights of more than one ethnic or religious community had clashed, usually over a conflicting territorial claim, it had been depressingly obvious that force, not law, was the only effective way to establish precedence. Minority rights could not be protected within states, nor the rights of weak states secured against the claims of their more powerful neighbors. The victors of 1945, looking back on the dashed hopes of Versailles, concluded as we have seen that collective interests were better served by the painful but effective solution of territorial regrouping (ethnic cleansing as it would later be known). As for stateless persons, they would no longer be treated as a judicial anomaly in a world of states and nations, but as individual victims of persecution or injustice.
Post-1945 rights talk thus concentrated on individuals. This too was a lesson of war. Even though men and women were persecuted in the name of their common identity (Jews, gypsies, Poles, etc) they suffered as individuals; and it was as individuals with individual rights that the new United Nations sought to protect them. The various Conventions on Human Rights, Genocide or Social and Economic Rights that were incorporated into international law and treaties had a cumulative impact upon public sensibilities: they combined an eighteenth-century, Anglo-American concern for individual liberties with a very mid-twentieth-century emphasis upon the obligations of the state to ensure that a growing spectrum of greater and lesser claims were met—from the right to life to the ‘right’ to ‘truth in advertising’ and beyond.
What propelled this legal rhetoric of individual rights into the realm of real politics was the coincidence of the retreat of Marxism with the international Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which had opened in Helsinki the same year that The Gulag Archipelago was published in Paris. Until then, talk of ‘rights’ had long been disfavored among left-leaning European intellectuals, echoing Marx’s famous dismissal of ‘the so-called rights of man’ as egoistic and ‘bourgeois’. In progressive circles, terms such as ‘Freedoms’ or ‘Liberty or ‘Rights’, and other abstractions associated with ‘man in general’, were taken seriously only when preceded by an adjectival modifier: ‘bourgeois’, or ‘proletarian’ or ‘Socialist’.
Thus in 1969 a group of intellectuals on the left of the French Parti Socialiste Unifié criticized their own party (led at the time by Michel Rocard and Pierre Mendès-France) for supporting the reformers in Prague. The latter, they declared, had been ‘the willing victims of petty-bourgeois ideologies (humanism, freedom, justice, progress, universal secret suffrage, etc).’ This was no isolated instance. In the course of the 1960s many left-leaning Western commentators whose politics were otherwise quite moderate avoided mention of ‘rights’ or ‘liberties’ for fear of appearing naïve. In Eastern Europe reform Communists and their supporters had also avoided such language: in their case because of its defilement and devaluation in official rhetoric.
But from the mid-seventies it became increasingly common to find speeches and writings from all across the political spectrum in Western Europe unrestrainedly invoking ‘human rights’ and ‘personal liberties’. As one Italian observer remarked in 1977, the idea and ideal of ‘undivided’ freedom was being openly discussed on the Left ‘without mystification or demagogy’ for the first time since the war.260 This did not necessarily translate immediately into politics—for much of the Eighties West European Labour and Socialist parties floundered quite helplessly, resorting in many cases to the illicit appropriation of their opponents’ programmes to cover their own nakedness. But their new openness to the vocabulary of rights and liberties did give Western European scholars and intellectuals access to the changing language of political opposition in Eastern Europe and a way of communicating across the divide—just in time, for it was east of the Iron Curtain that truly original and significant change was now under way.
In 1975 the Czech reform communist Zdeněk Mlynář wrote an ‘Open Letter to the Communists and Socialists of Europe’, addressed above all to Eurocommunists and appealing for support against the repression of dissent in Czechoslovakia. The illusions of reform Communism died hard. But Mlynář was already in a minority, his faith in both Socialism and its Western sympathizers already regarded with bemusement by most of Communism’s domestic critics in the Soviet bloc.
These critics, not yet called ‘dissidents’ (a term generally disfavoured by those it described), had for the most part turned away from the regime and the ‘Socialist’ language it espoused. In the aftermath of 1968 that language, with its wooden embrace of ‘peace’ and ‘equality’ and ‘fraternal goodwill’, rang peculiarly false—especially to the Sixties activists who had taken it seriously. The latter—overwhelmingly students, scholars, journalists, playwrights and writers—had been the chief victims of the repression in Czechoslovakia especially, where the Party leadership under Gustav Husák (the ‘President of Forgetting’) correctly calculated that its best hope of re-establishing ‘order’ lay in mollifying popular discontent with material improvements while energetically silencing all dissenting voices and references to the recent past.
Forced underground—quite literally in the Czech case, where many unemployed professors and writers found work as stokers and boilermen—the regime’s opponents could hardly engage in a political debate with their oppressors. Instead, abandoning Marxist vocabulary and the revisionist debates of earlier decades, they made a virtue of their circumstances and espoused deliberately ‘un-political’ themes. Of these, thanks to the Helsinki Accords, ‘rights’ were by far the most accessible.
All Soviet bloc constitutions paid formal attention to the rights and duties of the citizen; the package of additional and quite specific rights agreed to at Helsinki thus furnished Communism’s domestic critics with a strategic opening. As the Czech historian Petr Pithart noted, the point was not to demand some rights as yet un-possessed—a sure invitation to further repression—but to claim those that the regime already acknowledged and that were enshrined in law, thus conferring upon the ‘opposition’ a moderate, almost conservative air, while forcing the Party onto the defensive.
Taking seriously the letter of ‘Socialist’ law was more than just a tactic, a device for embarrassing Communism’s rulers. In closed societies where everything was political—and politics as such were thus precluded—‘rights’ offered a way forward, a first breach in the curtain of pessimism shrouding Eastern Europe in the ‘silent Seventies’, an end to the regime’s monopoly on language-as-power. Moreover the constitutional rights of persons, by their very nature, bear formal witness to the existence of persons as such, with claims upon one another and upon the community. They describe a space between helpless individuals and the all-powerful state.
The movement for rights (‘human rights’), as the young Hungarian theorist Miklós Haraszti conceded, was an acknowledgement that the necessary corrective to Communism’s defects was not a better Communism but the constitution—or reconstitution—of civil (i.e. ‘bourgeois’) society. The irony of inverting Marxism’s agenda and seeking to replace the Socialist state with bourgeois society was not lost on intellectuals in Prague or Budapest. But as Haraszti’s Hungarian colleague Mihaly Vajda explained, the supremacy of the bourgeois looked decidedly preferable to their country’s ‘unbearable historical experience of the tyranny of the citizen’.
The significance of efforts to reconstitute civil society—a nebulous phrase describing an uncertain objective but one widely espoused by the intellectual opposition in Eastern Europe from the mid-Seventies onward—was that they recognized the impossibility after 1968 of trying to reform the Party-state. Few seriously expected Husák in Prague, or Honecker in Berlin (much less the Soviets themselves), to concede the logic of ‘rights-talk’ and take their own constitutions seriously. To speak of rights in theory was precisely to illustrate their absence in practice, to remind observers at home and abroad of just how un-free these societies actually were. Instead of en
gaging the Communist authorities, the new opposition was deliberately talking past them.
For dissidents like Haraszti, or Adam Michnik in Poland, whose 1976 essay ‘A New Evolutionism’ laid out much of the strategy of the Polish opposition in coming years, this was a radical departure from their youthful engagement with Marxism and its socio-economic priorities. For those who had never been remotely drawn to Marxist debates, like Václav Havel, the transition was much easier. The son of a wealthy Prague businessman whose family was dispossessed by the Communist government after 1948, Havel evinced none of the youthful revolutionary enthusiasm of his engaged contemporaries, nor did he play a very active part in their reformist efforts before 1968. Havel’s relationship with the Communist authorities was always antagonistic, thanks in large part to his bourgeois origins, but it had never been political.
In the course of the Seventies and Eighties, as he was harassed, arrested and ultimately imprisoned for his activities, Havel was to become a supremely political figure. But his ‘message’ remained resolutely un-political. The point, he insisted, was not to argue with those in power. It was not even primarily to tell the truth, though in a regime based on lies this was important. The only thing that made sense in the circumstances of the time, he wrote, was to ‘live in truth’, All else was compromise—‘The very act of forming a political grouping forces one to start playing a power game, instead of giving truth priority.’
The objective, as Havel explained in a 1984 essay reflecting on the goals and tactics of Czechoslovakia’s fragile intellectual opposition, should be to act with autonomy, whatever the regime tries to impose on you; to live as if one were truly free. This was hardly a prescription for most people, as Havel well understood: ‘These are perhaps impractical methods in today’s world and very difficult to apply in daily life. Nevertheless, I know no better alternative.’
Havel’s position was not without precedents, even in recent times. Ludvík Vaculík, addressing the Fourth Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union in June 1967, had recommended a similar ‘as if’ strategy to his colleagues even then. We should, he told them, ‘play at being citizens . . . make speeches as if we were grown-up and legally independent.’ But in the more optimistic atmosphere of the Sixties Vaculík and others could still hope for some accommodation and adaptation from those in power. By the time Michnik or Havel were espousing similar arguments, circumstances had changed. The point was no longer to advise the government how to govern, but to suggest to the nation—by example—how it might live.
In the circumstances of the Seventies, the idea that Eastern European intellectuals could ‘suggest to the nation’ how it should comport itself might appear more than a little ambitious—most intellectuals were in no position to suggest much of anything even to one another, far less to their fellow citizens at large. The intelligentsia in Hungary and Poland especially was largely ignorant of conditions and opinion in the industrial centers, and even more cut off from the world of the peasantry. Indeed it might be said that thanks to Communism—a political system which, in the words of the Hungarian dissidents Ivan Szelenyi and George Konrád, put ‘intellectuals on the road to class power’—the old Central-European distinction between ‘intelligentsia’ and ‘people’ (more applicable in aristocratic societies like Hungary and Poland than in plebeian ones like Czechoslovakia, but artificially instituted even there after 1948) had resurfaced in an acute form.
The first to bridge this gap were the Poles. In 1976, following a series of strikes protesting at sharp increases in the price of food, the regime struck back hard, beating and arresting workers in the industrial towns of Ursus and Radom. In a response that broke quite deliberately with the mutual indifference of worker and intellectual protests a few years before, Jacek Kuroń and a few colleagues announced the formation in September 1976 of KOR, an acronym for the Committee for the Defense of Workers. The object of KOR, and a Committee for the Defense of Human and Civil Rights (ROPCiO) founded a few months later, was to publicize the assault on workers’ civil liberties, assist in their legal defense, and form a common front. Three years later, in December 1979, the intellectual leaders of KOR—some Jewish, some Catholic, some former Communists, others not—would be responsible for the framing and publication of a ‘Charter of Workers’ Rights’.
The creation—or, rather, the assertion—of an autonomous civil sphere in Poland thus grew out of a social confrontation. Across the border in Czechoslovakia, in even less promising political circumstances, it was born of a legal opportunity. In January 1977 a group of Czechoslovak citizens signed a document (initially published as a manifesto in a West German newspaper) criticizing their government for its failure to implement the human rights provisions of the Czechoslovak Constitution, the Final Act of the 1975 Helsinki Accords, and United Nations covenants on political, civil, economic, and cultural rights, all of which Prague had signed—and, in the case of Helsinki Decree 120, formally incorporated into the Czech Legal Code.261
The signatories of this document (‘Charter 77’ as it became known) described themselves as a ‘loose, informal, and open association of people . . . united by the will to strive individually and collectively for respect for human and civil rights in our country and throughout the world.’ They took care to emphasize that Charter 77 was not an organization, had no statutes or permanent organs, and ‘does not form the basis for any oppositional political activity,’ a stipulation intended to keep their act within the bounds of Czechoslovak law.
Charter 77 was always the work of a tiny network of courageous indivuduals who represented no-one but themselves: 243 people signed the original document, and they were joined by just 1,621 others (in a population of 15 million) in the course of the next decade. The Charter’s first spokesmen were Havel, Jiří Hájek (the country’s foreign minister under Dubček) and the elderly Jan Patočka, Czechoslovakia’s leading philosopher, all of them isolated intellectuals without public standing or influence; but this did not stop the authorities reacting furiously to their manifesto, ‘an antistate, antisocialist, demagogic, abusive piece of writing’. Individual signatories were variously described—in language drawn verbatim from the show trials of the Fifties—as ‘traitors and renegades,’ ‘a loyal servant and agent of imperialism’, ‘a bankrupt politician’ and ‘an international adventurer’. Retaliation and intimidation were deployed against the signatories, including dismissal from work, denial of schooling for their children, suspension of drivers’ licenses, forced exile and loss of citizenship, detention, trial, and imprisonment.
The harsh treatment of the signatories of Charter 77 and the Czechoslovak government’s vindictive persecution of a new generation of young musicians (notably the rock group The Plastic People of the Universe) prompted the formation in April 1978 of a support group, the ‘Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted’ (VONS), with goals similar to those of KOR. The response of the Prague regime to this latest development was to arrest six of the leading figures in VONS, including Havel, and try them for subversion the following year. In October 1979 they were sentenced to prison terms of up to five years.
In the wake of 1968 the Communist regimes had all (with the exception of Ceauşescu’s Romania) adopted in practice the approach of Kádár’s Hungary. They no longer even pretended to seek the genuine allegiance of their subjects, asking only that people proffer the outward symbols of public conformity. One goal of the Charter, like VONS—or KOR—was to overcome the resulting cynical indifference to public affairs among their fellow citizens. Havel in particular laid stress on the need to deprive governments of the satisfaction of seeing people heedlessly abase themselves in order to pass unnoticed. Otherwise, he wrote, the regime can count upon an ‘outpost in every citizen’—a theme illustrated in his classic essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’ by the example of the greengrocer who ritually hangs in his shop-window the sign ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’.
Some of the concerns of the dissenting intelligentsia were b
etter adapted than others to this effort to overcome public apathy and fear. The emerging environmental catastrophe, already mentioned in Chapter 15, was one. In Slovakia, according to the regime’s own figures, 45 percent of the 3,500 miles of rivers in Slovakia were ‘dangerously’ polluted in 1982. Four-fifths of the well water in the eastern part of the republic was unusable for human consumption. This was largely due to the over-use of fertilizer on the collective farms of the area, leading to soil-poisoning and crop failures like those experienced in the black soil areas of the Soviet Union.
By the early Eighties northern Bohemia had the worst air pollution in Europe, thanks to the use of (cheap) brown coal in industrial and energy production there. Of 73.5 billion kwh of power generated in the region, 64 billion came from plants burning this high-sulphur fuel. As a result, by 1983 some 35 percent of all Czech forests were dead or dying, and one-third of all Czech watercourses were too polluted even for industrial use. In Prague itself the government was forced to set up a special hospital service dealing with the respiratory ailments of children. Ivan Klíma, in a short story called ‘A Christmas Conspiracy’, described stepping out into the streets of the Czech capital: ‘The dark, cold mist smelled of smoke, sulphur and irritability.’
Under Socialism it was the state that polluted. But it was society that suffered, and pollution was thus a subject about which everyone cared. It was also implicitly political: the reason that it was so hard to protect the environment was that no-one had an interest in taking preventive measures. Only effective and consistently applied official sanctions could have enforced improvements, and these would have had to come from the same authority which was encouraging the wastage in the first place. Any factory or farm manager imprudent enough to risk his ‘quotas’ by applying pollution-control measures on his own initiative would have been in serious trouble. The Communist economic system was inherently prejudicial to its environment, as more and more people came to appreciate.262