To be sure, amid all the demands for vengeance there are also voices of moderation. Professor Goldstücker, when he was asked to join a new and militant political group made up of former political prisoners and called “K231,” after the law under which they were tried during the Stalinist era, published a letter in Mladá Fronta explaining his position on the “rehabilitation” question. Goldstücker, to whom a great deal of the credit is due for the revival of Kafka’s reputation here during the past five years, has been a leading figure in the reform movement, and he was nominated for the Presidency by the students of Prague’s Philosophical Faculty. In the present climate, the fact that he is a Jew serves to strengthen his ties to the students and intellectuals, who have strongly denounced Poland’s “anti-Zionist” campaign. (During the war between Israel and the Arabs last June, nearly the entire population of Czechoslovakia was on the side of Israel, though the Stalinist regime favored the Arabs. The writer Ladislav Mňačko was deprived of his citizenship when he went to Israel to demonstrate his opposition to the official policy of his country.) Goldstücker, who was sentenced to death in the early fifties and was saved only by the intervention of Khrushchev, set forth his views on vengeance in these terms:
I have been wondering whether one can ever rehabilitate anyone who was humiliated as a political prisoner. A man who was in prison may get back his freedom, the accusations against him may be retracted, he may even get back his citizens’ rights and obtain financial indemnity, but no one can indemnify him for the loss of human dignity that he suffered. Because I belong to a minority that suffered so much, I am especially careful about looking for the guilty ones who made me suffer, and I will not summarily condemn my fellow men. Today I can understand and forgive more than before. I write to you because today it is getting very easy to become unjust and because I do believe in tolerance among men. Tolerance must begin at home.
Many people say now that they would like to forget the past, but that it is impossible to forget some of the awful things that they were exposed to only yesterday—the spies and informers, the stupidities and crimes. A man I have known since we were both boys described his feelings to me the other evening over a glass of wine. “You walk along the Moldau,” he said, “and you look up to where the government ordered the enormous Stalin monument built that cost two billion koruny and made us a laughingstock everywhere—and then the government had to pull it down. For that money we could have built a small town, or a couple of hospitals. We are not a stupid people. We know that we are broke because the Stalinists gave away billions of goods to the Russians in ridiculous barter deals. And when you opened your mouth, some old woman who was a member of the street council might denounce you as a ‘reactionary,’ and you and your family would be in trouble. We have been deceived so many times that it’s hard to believe anyone.”
The fate of the huge Stalin monument on Summer Hill, overlooking the entire city, has acquired a special significance here in Prague, and it will surely stimulate generations of satirists. (In Ivan Klíma’s excellent play The Castle there is a character known as the Head of the Commission for the Correction of the Statue.) The actual events were comic enough. Having decided, after painful deliberation, that the statue had to go, the authorities called in an English outfit to do the job in one night. But the work proved unexpectedly complicated, and eventually Stalin’s head was lifted from his shoulders in broad daylight, with nearly everybody in Prague watching. Now only the empty pedestal remains. Children play around it during the day, and at night couples go there to look down at the lights of Prague reflected in the Moldau.
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Western observers in Prague have been amazed by the bloodless character of the revolution and its aftermath. There has been much drama but little violence. There have been no defenestrations, and so far no one has even been arrested. “That the government didn’t fall at once, which might have created chaos, is proof of our political maturity,” Rudé Právo has declared. It is also proof of the traditional Czechoslovak dislike of melodrama and heroics. Poland’s national composer is Chopin, and during the war the strains of his “Revolutionary” Étude rallied citizens in the cellars of Warsaw’s bombed-out houses against the German oppressors. Czechoslovakia’s national composer is Smetana, whose masterpiece, The Bartered Bride, is all clear-eyed happiness. The political sophistication the students here have shown in recent weeks has been very different from the behavior of their fellow-students in Warsaw or Budapest—or, for that matter, in West Berlin, Rome, or Berkeley. The students of Prague, by and large, are progressive (in the present local meaning of the word), and the radical fringe is very small. During a time of upheaval, the students here get angry, but they do not cross the boundary line between youthful indignation and uncontrolled violence. Early in March, some students started to talk about marching on the Polish Embassy to demonstrate against police brutality in Warsaw. Dubček himself went to discuss the situation with the students, and the discussion was “extremely frank,” according to a girl who was there. Ultimately, he persuaded them that although their indignation was justified, they must avoid any action that might be considered a “provocation” by the country’s Warsaw Pact partners. The students called off their demonstration. Some students from Slovakia who appeared at the American Embassy to submit a protest against the war in Vietnam displayed a degree of moderation and political maturity that surprised the Americans. “They showed that they understood what was going on,” an Embassy official told me.
Eighteen thousand students recently attended a mass meeting at which they were able to ask questions directly of prominent Communist reformers; the meeting was televised nationally and kept people at their TV sets until one-thirty in the morning. Nearly everybody I know in Prague stayed up to look and listen, and everybody who did agreed that it was fascinating to hear the students ask questions of a sort that older and more cautious people would not dream of asking, even today. It was during this meeting that Smrkovský had the exchange with a student about Czechoslovakia’s position on the map of Europe. At the end of the meeting, which became fairly vehement at times, Smrkovský told the students to “go home quietly,” and they did. What amazed the nationwide TV audience most was the absence of policemen. “Eighteen thousand demonstrators and not one policeman,” I heard a middle-aged man say. “What a remarkable display of democratic discipline!”
Though the works of Tomáš Masaryk, Karel Čapek, and other writers admired by those of us who lived in the “bourgeois” Republic were officially forbidden for many years, young people apparently got hold of them somehow. Relatively few of the present generation of students are Communist Party members—possibly only one in ten—but nearly all the students I have talked with understand and accept their responsibilities as the future leaders of a Communist nation. Though there are close ties between the students and the writers, the students maintain their independence when it comes to politics. An editor of Student told me, “We read the writers’ Literární Listy, but that doesn’t mean that we always do what they suggest.” I asked him whether they would support the reform, and he gave me the same answer I got from an editor of the writers’ weekly: “For the time being, we are behind Dubček.”
In a recent issue of Literární Listy, the playwright Václav Havel—his work (The Garden Party and Memorandum) continues the satirical tradition of Kafka, Hašek, and Čapek—began a discussion of the future role of the opposition in Czechoslovakia. Though the reformers agree that an opposition is needed, there is no agreement on who should form it or how it should work. One obvious solution would be to let the mass media—the press, radio, and television—carry out the duties of criticism. The mass media had a great deal to do with the changes that have taken place in the last few months; people in remote areas have been able to follow events in Prague, and Dubček has been supported by instantaneous “resolutions” from Party groups all over the country. In many ways, the media have already become the watchdogs of the reform. On one new
TV program, people telephone in complaints, which are supposed to be taken care of immediately. While I was watching it the other day, several callers claimed that at a certain Prague post office there was still a secret unit reading letters sent abroad. Reporters in the studio telephoned the post office and various Ministries; everybody denied that there was such a unit, but the reporters promised the audience to investigate further and tell them the results within a few days. Such activities may not be welcomed in high Party circles even now. Dubček has spoken of the responsibility of the mass media in the matter of “erroneous or non-objective reports that may meet with a mass response.”
Some people believe—or perhaps one should say hope—that the Social Democrats and the People’s Party, both of which were permitted a moribund existence in support of the Communist Party as members of the so-called National Front, may now take over the role of a constructive opposition. But these parties have been discredited in most people’s eyes by dubious accommodations they made with the Stalinists. The chairman of the People’s Party, Josef Plojhar, is an unfrocked priest who served as Minister of Public Health in the Novotný regime; he is ridiculed even by the Catholics, but even after he was ousted as a member of the government he managed to get himself elected “honorary chairman” of his party. Obviously, a new generation of leaders would be needed to revive these parties. Under a proposed new law to reform electoral procedures, the names of candidates, rather than the names of parties, will appear on the ballot. And, what is more important, the new law will guarantee a secret ballot. Apparently, the Communist Party feels that it is strong enough to risk such an election; after all, it has the country’s best-trained and ablest politicians. No one in Prague is apt to forget that back in 1946 38 percent of the popular (and secret) vote was cast for the Communist Party, while the party of Eduard Beneš, Tomáš Masaryk’s student and successor, got only 26 percent. It was not the election of the Communist slate, headed by Klement Gottwald, but the way Gottwald took over that caused night to fall upon the city.
Among certain Communist intellectuals, an extremely interesting new method of forming a political opposition is being discussed. One of them outlined it for me this way: “Suppose that in two or three years it is realized that the events of early 1968 created a split between the conservative and the progressive wings of the Communist Party, so that there are really two parties, which agree on the fundamental tenets of Marxism-Leninism but disagree on methods and practical politics—just as the two big parties in the Anglo-Saxon countries agree on the fundamentals of their system but not on how it should be run. It is conceivable that Czechoslovakia could become the first Communist country with a two-party system. This would not be incompatible with the Communist gospel. Think of the abyss that divides the Communist Party in the Soviet Union from the progressive Communists in Italy—and I’ve read in Western papers that some of the ideas of our reformers could have been taken from Togliatti’s testament. Ideally, Czechoslovakia could become the testing ground for a new, enlightened Communism.”
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No one in Prague expects the future to be easy. “During the honeymoon, one doesn’t like to think about money,” a writer said to me the other day. “As you say in America, it’s ‘Fly now, pay later.’ But eventually the bills will come in, and they will have to be paid, and that will be the time of crisis.” At the moment, people are enjoying the delightful game of publicly attacking men in high places, but what would happen if they began to attack Dubček and his supporters? Would the leaders be as tolerant of free speech as they are now? So far, the top members of the Stalinist Old Guard have been neutralized or put off by themselves in some corner, often after they have made abject apologies. But what about the vast army of bureaucrats and Party officials all over the country—the faithful Party hacks who served Novotný loyally and have now declared their loyalty to the new regime? There are said to be half a million of them. (The Czechoslovak Communist Party now has one million seven hundred thousand members. Every eighth citizen is a Party member, though a great many people joined simply out of the need to make a living.) Will it be possible to replace the “dogmatists” by able young Communists who can practice Socialist democracy as Dubček has envisioned it?
As the spring advances, many of the groups that have been supporting Dubček are sending him their demands. But, come summer and harvest time, will it be possible to meet all those demands? A case in point is offered by the Catholic Church, which has already “recognized” the regime but has expressed “expectations.” Bishop František Tomášek, the Apostolic Administrator of Prague, told the papers that the Church will demand an increase in the number of bishops, expansion of the seminaries, and the removal of the obstacles to religious instruction for school-children. (In the past, both parents had to sign a petition if they wanted their child to have religious instruction in school, and even then permission was not always granted.) It has already been agreed that priests who were sent to work in factories and on farms will be permitted to return to their parishes, and the Vatican may appoint a chargé d’affaires to occupy the seat of the Papal Nuncio. (The Nuncio’s palace, across from the Prague Castle, has been empty for years.) The Theological Faculty of the University will be permitted to publish a magazine of its own, and the Catholic press will get a larger supply of newsprint. But it is doubtful whether Josef Cardinal Beran, who has been living as an exile in Rome, will return to Prague, and no one expects the Party to restore to the Church all the property that was seized when the Party came to power. The demands of the Church, like those of many other groups in the country, cannot be fully met. Nevertheless, anticipations are growing stronger in the spring weather here, and hopes are increasing in scope and intensity. After the long binge, there is certain to be a nationwide hangover.
But if no one can say now that the great experiment in Prague is going to succeed, it is clear that, even as an attempt, it may have tremendous consequences for other countries. The Czechoslovak reform is already a much bigger thing than János Kádár’s “goulash Communism” in Hungary or even Titoism in Yugoslavia. “We made greater progress in personal freedom in twenty days than the Yugoslavs made in twenty years,” a friend of mine boasted. If the Czechoslovaks prove that Communism can coexist with freedom, their success will unquestionably affect not only the intellectuals but the entire populations of other Communist countries—Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and perhaps even the Soviet Union.
The Czechoslovak movement might also have sizable repercussions in the West, where it has always been claimed that Communism is synonymous with dictatorship and terror; in no country have the Communists ever stayed in power through secret ballots that expressed the true will of the people. A Czech writer who has been in and out of jail several times in the past two decades told me the other day, “Perhaps in a few years we shall be able to create something that is acceptable to both the East and the West—a combination of enlightened Communism and Western-style personal freedom that could form a bridge between the world’s two most powerful ideological systems and a basis for peace in the very heart of Europe. If anybody can do it, we can. We have the idealism and the tradition. And we are not impractical dreamers but hardheaded realists.”
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Now that my visit here is approaching its end, I have taken a long walk through some of the streets I knew before the war. A number of people were out enjoying the fair weather. Old men and old women sat on benches in squares and in small gardens that have been laid out in vacant lots. Even some valuable lots in the Old Town Square have been turned into improvised recreation grounds. Benches have been put up around the statue of Jan Hus—erected near the spot where twenty-seven Bohemian nobles were beheaded in 1621—and, sitting there, I had a fine view of the Old Town Hall, where in 1618 angry members of the Bohemian Diet threw two Austrian councillors out a window, in the famous defenestration that started the Thirty Years’ War. Beneath the window, I noticed, there is a plaque commemorating some Czechs who w
ere shot there by the Germans during the Occupation. The clock of the Old Town Hall struck, and a couple of sightseers photographed the medieval clockwork pageant that takes place every hour.
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