by Tony Judt
It was this apparent lack of real reforming intent on the part of the party chiefs, and the absence of any effective external opposition—the summer demonstrations lacked common objectives and no leaders had yet emerged to channel discontent into a programme—that lent credence to a widespread suspicion that what followed was in some measure a staged ‘plot’: an attempt by would-be reformers in the administration and police to jump-start the moribund Party in the direction of a Czech perestroika.
This is not as bizarre as it may sound in retrospect. On November 17th the Prague police officially approved a student march through the inner-city to commemorate yet another gloomy date, the 50th anniversary of the Nazi murder of a Czech student, Jan Opletal. But when the marching students began to chant anti-Communist slogans the police attacked, scattering the crowd and beating up isolated victims. The police themselves then encouraged the rumour that—in a replay of Opletal’s own murder—one of the students had been killed. This was later acknowledged to be a false report; but meanwhile it had the predictable effect of provoking anger among the students themselves. In the course of the next forty eight hours tens of thousands of students were mobilized, the universities were occupied and huge crowds began to gather in the streets to protest. Now, however, the police merely stood by.
If there ever had been a plot it decidedly backfired. To be sure, the events of November 17th and their aftermath dislodged the neo-Stalinist leadership of the Communist Party: within a week the entire Praesidium, led by Jakeš, had resigned. But their successors had absolutely no popular credibility and were in any case immediately submerged by the speed of events. On November 19th Václav Havel, who had been consigned to virtual house arrest in rural northern Bohemia, returned to a capital city in turmoil, where the Communists were rapidly losing power but there was as yet no-one around to take it out of their hands.
Installing himself—appropriately enough—in a Prague theater, Havel and his friends from Charter 77 formed Občanské Fórum (Civic Forum), an informal and fluid network that metamorphosed within days from a debating society to a civic initiative and thence into a shadow government. The discussion in Civic Forum was driven partly by the longstanding goals of its best-known participants, but mostly by the spectacularly accelerating course of events in the streets outside. The first thing the Forum did was to demand the resignation of the men responsible for the invasion of ’68 and its aftermath.
On November 25th, the day after the Party leaders duly resigned en masse, a crowd of half a million people gathered at the Letná stadium in Prague, not so much to demand particular reforms as to make their presence known, after two decades of cowed public silence: to themselves and to one another. That same night Havel was granted an unprecedented interview on Czech television. The following day he addressed a crowd of 250,000 in Wenceslas Square, sharing a platform with the Communist Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec—and Alexander Dubček.
By now it had become clear to the emerging leadership of Civic Forum that they were, despite themselves, running a revolution. In order to provide some direction—and to have something to say to the massed crowds outside—a group led by the historian Petr Pithart drew up the ‘Programmatic Principles of Civic Forum’. These contained a brief summary of the general objectives of the Forum and are an instructive guide to the mood and priorities of the men and women of 1989. ‘What do we want?’ the program asks. 1: A state of law. 2: Free elections. 3: Social justice. 4: A clean environment. 5: An educated people. 6: Prosperity. 7: Return to Europe.
The mixture of boilerplate political demands, cultural and environmental ideals, and the invocation of ‘Europe’ is characteristically Czech and owed much to various Charter 77 pronouncements over the previous decade. But the tone of the Programme nicely captured the mood of the crowds in the heady days of November: pragmatic, idealistic and wildly ambitious all at once. The mood in Prague and the rest of the country was also more avowedly optimistic than in any of the other Communist ‘transitions’. This was an effect of acceleration .293
Within a week of the bloody repression of the student demonstrators the Party leadership had resigned. One week later Civic Forum and Public Against Violence (PAV—its Slovak alter ego) had been legalized and were negotiating with the government. On November 29th the Federal Assembly, responding meekly to a Civic Forum demand, removed from the Czechoslovak constitution the seminal clause guaranteeing the Communist Party its ‘leading role’. At this point the Adamec government proposed a new governing coalition as a compromise but the representatives of Civic Forum—boosted by large and determined crowds now in permanent occupation of the streets—rejected it out of hand.
By now the Communists could hardly fail to note events abroad: not only had their colleagues in the former East German leadership been expelled on December 3rd; but Mikhail Gorbachev was sitting down to dinner with President Bush in Malta and the Warsaw Pact states were preparing publicly to renounce their 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Discredited and disqualified by their own paymasters, the remaining members of the Husák group of Czech and Slovak Communists, including Prime Minister Adamec, resigned.
After a two-day ‘Round Table’ meeting (the briefest of all the round tables of the year) the Civic Forum leaders now agreed to join a cabinet. The Prime Minister—the Slovak Marían Čalfa—was still a Party member, but a majority of the ministers—for the first time since 1948—were non-Communists: Jiří Dienstbier of Charter 77 (a stoker until just five weeks earlier) was to be foreign minister; the Catholic lawyer Jan Čarnogurský of PAV was to be Deputy Prime Minister; Vladimír Kusý of Civic Forum was information minister; and the hitherto obscure free-market economist Václav Klaus was to direct the Ministry of Finance. The new government was sworn in on December 10th by President Husák, who then promptly resigned.
The re-emergence of Alexander Dubček from two decades of obscurity had opened the possibility that he might be chosen to replace Husák as President—in part as a symbol of continuity with the thwarted hopes of 1968, in part to assuage the wounded feelings of the Communists and maybe even mollify hard-liners in the police and other services. But as soon as he began to make public speeches it became embarrassingly clear that poor Dubček was an anachronism. His vocabulary, his style, even his gestures were those of the reform Communists of the Sixties. He had learned nothing, it seemed, from his bitter experiences, but spoke still of resurrecting a kinder, gentler, Czechoslovak path to Socialism. To the tens of thousands of young people in the streets of Prague, or Brno, or Bratislava he was at first a historical curiosity; soon he became an irritating irrelevance.294
By way of compromise Dubček was elected chairman (i.e. Speaker) of the Federal Assembly. It fell to Václav Havel himself to become President—a notion so bizarrely implausible just five weeks before that he had gently dismissed the suggestion when it was first mooted by cheering crowds in the streets of Prague: ‘Havel na Hrad!’ (‘Havel to the Castle’). By December 7th, however, the playwright had come around to the view that his acceptance of the post might be the best way to facilitate the country’s exit from Communism; on December 28th 1989 the same Communist Assembly which had dutifully rubber-stamped the legislation that had hitherto consigned Havel and others to years of imprisonment now elected him President of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. On New Year’s Day 1990 the new President amnestied 16,000 political prisoners; the following day the political police itself was disbanded.
Czechoslovakia’s remarkably expeditious and peaceful exit from Communism—the so-called ‘velvet revolution’—was made possible by a confluence of circumstances. As in Poland, the intellectual opposition was united above all by the memory of past defeats and a determination to avoid outright confrontation—it was not for nothing that the leading civic organization in Slovakia called itself ‘Public Against Violence’. As in the GDR, the utter bankruptcy of the ruling Party became clear so fast that the option of an organized rearguard action was excluded almost from the start.
> But the role of Havel was equally crucial—no one individual of comparable public standing emerged in any other Communist country, and while most of the practical ideas and even the political tactics of Civic Forum might have been forthcoming in his absence, it was Havel who caught and channeled the public mood, moving his colleagues forward while keeping the expectations of the crowds within manageable bounds. The impact of Havel and his public appeal cannot be overstated. Like Tomáš Masaryk, with whom he came increasingly to be compared, the improbably charismatic Havel was now widely regarded by many as something akin to a national saviour. One Prague student poster from December 1989, in a possibly unintended but highly apposite religious allusion, depicted the incoming President with the words ‘He gave Himself to us.’
It was not just Havel’s multiple incarcerations and his unflinching record of moral opposition to Communism that placed him upon this pedestal: it was also his distinctively apolitical disposition. It was not in spite of his theatrical preoccupations that his fellow-citizens turned to Havel, it was because of them. As one Italian commentator observed of Havel’s emerging role on the Czechoslovak political stage, his distinctive voice allowed him to articulate the feelings of a silenced nation: ‘Se un popolo non ha mai parlato, la prima parole che dice è poesia’.295 For just these reasons it was Havel—notably skeptical of the seductions of capitalism (in contrast to his Finance Minister Klaus)—who alone could bridge the uncomfortable gap separating the mendacious but seductive egalitarianism of a defunct Communism from the uncomfortable realities of the free market.
In Czechoslovakia such a bridge was important. For all that it was in many respects the most western of the European Communist lands, Czechoslovakia was also the only one with a markedly egalitarian and left-leaning political culture: this, after all, was the only country in the world where almost two voters in five had ever chosen a Communist Party in free elections, back in 1946. In spite of forty years of ‘real existing Socialism’—and twenty years of deadening ‘normalization’—something of this political culture still endured: in the first post-Communist elections, held in June 1990, 14 percent of the electorate opted for the Communist Party. It was the enduring presence of this sizeable core of Communist supporters—together with the much larger penumbra of apolitical citizens not sufficiently dissatisfied to protest their condition—that had led dissident writers like Ludvík Vaculík to question the likelihood of great changes in the immediate future. History seemed to be against the Czechs and Slovaks: ever since 1938, Czechoslovakia had never quite managed to recover control of its own destiny.
Thus, when the people themselves finally seized the initiative in November 1989, the ensuing velvet revolution appeared almost too good to be true. Hence the talk of police plots and manufactured crises, as though Czechoslovak society had so little self confidence that even the initiative to destroy Communism must have come from the Communists themselves. Such skepticism was almost certainly misplaced—all the evidence that has since emerged suggests that on November 17th the Czech security police simply went too far. There was no ‘plot’ to force the hand of the ruling clique. In 1989 the people of Czechoslovakia really did take charge of their destiny.
The Romanian case was another matter. There it seems clear that in December 1989 one faction within the ruling Romanian Workers’ Party did indeed decide that its best chance of survival lay in forcibly removing the ruling coterie around Nicolae Ceauşescu. Romania, of course, was not a typical Communist state. If Czechoslovakia was the most western of the Communist satellite countries, Romania was the most ‘oriental’. Under Ceauşescu, Communism had degenerated from national Leninism to a sort of neo-Stalinist satrapy, where Byzantine levels of nepotism and inefficiency were propped in place by a tentacular secret police.
Compared with Dej’s vicious dictatorship of the Fifties, Ceauşescu’s regime got by with relatively little overt brutality; but the rare hints of public protest—strikes in the Jiu mining valley in August 1977, for example, or a decade later at the Red Star tractor works in Braşov—were violently and effectively suppressed. Moreover, Ceauşescu could count not only on a cowed population but also upon a remarkable lack of foreign criticism for his actions at home: eight months after imprisoning the strike leaders in the Jiu Valley (and murdering their leaders) the Romanian dictator was visiting the United States as the guest of President Jimmy Carter. By taking his distance from Moscow—we have seen how Romania abstained from the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia—Ceauşescu bought himself freedom of maneuver and even foreign acclaim, particularly in the early stages of the ‘new’ Cold War of the 1980s. Because the Romanian leader was happy to criticize the Russians (and send his gymnasts to the Los Angeles Olympics), Americans and others kept quiet about his domestic crimes.296
Romanians, however, paid a terrible price for Ceauşescu’s privileged status. In 1966, to increase the population—a traditional ‘Romanianist’ obsession—he prohibited abortion for women under forty with fewer than four children (in 1986 the age barrier was raised to forty-five). In 1984 the minimum marriage age for women was reduced to fifteen. Compulsory monthly medical examinations for all women of childbearing age were introduced to prevent abortions, which were permitted, if at all, only in the presence of a Party representative. Doctors in districts with a declining birth rate had their salaries cut.
The population did not increase, but the death rate from abortions far exceeded that of any other European country: as the only available form of birth control, illegal abortions were widely performed, often under the most appalling and dangerous conditions. Over the ensuing twenty-three years the 1966 law resulted in the death of at least ten thousand women. The real infant mortality rate was so high that after 1985 births were not officially recorded until a child had survived to its fourth week—the apotheosis of Communist control of knowledge. By the time Ceauşescu was overthrown the death rate of new-born babies was twenty-five per thousand and there were upward of 100,000 institutionalized children.
The setting for this national tragedy was an economy that was deliberately turned backward, from subsistence into destitution. In the early Eighties, Ceauşescu decided to enhance his country’s international standing still further by paying down Romania’s huge foreign debts. The agencies of international capitalism—starting with the International Monetary Fund—were delighted and could not praise the Romanian dictator enough. Bucharest was granted a complete rescheduling of its external debt. To pay off his Western creditors, Ceauşescu applied unrelenting and unprecedented pressure upon domestic consumption.
In contrast to Communist rulers elsewhere, unrestrainedly borrowing abroad to bribe their subjects with well-stocked shelves, the Romanian Conducator set about exporting every available domestically-produced commodity. Romanians were forced to use 40-watt bulbs at home (when electricity was available) so that energy could be exported to Italy and Germany. Meat, sugar, flour, butter, eggs, and much more were strictly rationed. To ratchet up productivity, fixed quotas were introduced for obligatory public labour on Sundays and holidays (the corvée, as it was known in ancien régime France).
Petrol usage was cut to the minimum: in 1986 a program of horse-breeding to substitute for motorized vehicles was introduced. Horse-drawn carts became the main means of transport and the harvest was brought in by scythe and sickle. This was something truly new: all socialist systems depended upon the centralized control of systemically induced shortages, but in Romania an economy based on overinvestment in unwanted industrial hardware was successfully switched into one based on pre-industrial agrarian subsistence.
Ceauşescu’s policies had a certain ghoulish logic. Romania did indeed pay off its international creditors, albeit at the cost of reducing its population to penury. But there was more to Ceauşescu’s rule, in his last years, than just crazy economics. The better to control the country’s rural population—and increase still further the pressure on peasant farmers to produce food for export—the regime inaugurated a pro
posed ‘systematization’ of the Romanian countryside. Half of the country’s 13,000 villages (disproportionately selected from minority communities) were to be forcibly razed, their residents transferred into 558 ‘agro-towns’, Had Ceauşescu been granted the time to carry through this project it would utterly have destroyed what little remained of the country’s social fabric.
The rural ‘systemization’ project was driven forward by the Romanian dictator’s mounting megalomania. Under Ceauşescu the Leninist impulse to control, centralize and plan every detail of daily life graduated into an obsession with homogeneity and grandeur surpassing even the ambitions of Stalin himself. The enduring physical incarnation of this monomaniacal urge was to be the country’s capital, scheduled for an imperial make-over on a scale unprecedented since Nero. This project for the ‘renovation’ of Bucharest was to be aborted by the coup of December 1989; but enough was done for Ceauşescu’s ambition to be indelibly etched into the fabric of the contemporary city. A historic district of central Bucharest the size of Venice was completely flattened. Forty thousand buildings and dozens of churches and other monuments were razed to make space for a new ‘House of the People’ and the five-kilometer-long, 150-meter-wide Victory of Socialism Boulevard.
The whole undertaking was mere façade. Behind the gleaming white frontages of the boulevard were run up the familiar dirty, grim, pre-cast concrete blocks. But the façade itself was aggressively, humiliatingly, unrelentingly uniform, a visual encapsulation of totalitarian rule. The House of the People, designed by a twenty-five-year-old architect (Anca Petrescu) as Ceauşescu’s personal palace, was indescribably and uniquely ugly even by the standards of its genre. Grotesque, cruel and tasteless it was above all big (three times the size of the Palace of Versailles . . . ). Fronted by a vast hemicycle space that can hold half a million people, its reception area the size of a football pitch, Ceauşescu’s palace was (and remains) a monstrous lapidary metaphor for unconstrained tyranny, Romania’s very own contribution to totalitarian urbanism.