The Taste of Ashes

by Marci Shore

  Ivan Jirous went to prison. Yet outside the courtroom where the Velvet Underground–inspired Plastic People were being tried, Havel felt a presentiment of something good. Havel was an able organizer, and by New Year’s Day he had called into existence a collectively authored text that would become its own movement. Charter 77 lamented that human rights in Czechoslovakia existed on paper alone. The Charter’s demand was morally—and legally—pure: it asked only that the Czechoslovak government respect the Helsinki Accords. Havel persuaded the revered philosopher Jan Patočka to be among the initial spokespersons. When the text was ready, the aging philosopher went to see the art historian Miloslava Holubová, his close friend of many years. Holubová was not a fan of the Plastic People.

  “I didn’t like them very much,” she told me when I went to visit her at her apartment in Malá Strana, not far from Prague Castle.

  “… Maybe I’m old-fashioned … In the same song they talked about Jesus Christ and some sexual organs.”

  That was of little consequence: she signed Charter 77.

  On New Year’s Day of 1977, the Charter made itself public. And the signatories waited for the secret police.

  “They came,” Miloslava Holubová told me, “I think, for all of us in this first group during the night, the sixth or seventh of January.”

  By then she was in her midsixties, and she understood what arrest meant. A quarter century earlier, after helping her cousin cross the Czechoslovak border, she had sat in Stalinist prison for fourteen months. She didn’t dare judge anyone who chose not to sign.

  By 1977 the Stalinist years had passed. Torture was no longer common, although there remained, in the darkness of the interrogation rooms, “people who do this brutal work with physical consequences,” the philosopher Radim Palouš told me.

  Radim Palouš had felt the importance of being in prison. In prison, he said, he had felt “free in a deeper sense.” We met at Charles University, where he was now rector. Radim Palouš, like his son, like Miloslava Holubová and Václav Havel and many others, endured and survived. But the philosopher Jan Patočka did not. He was sixty-nine and his health was poor. In March 1977, in the midst of draining interrogations, he died.

  “It was shameful,” Jan Patočka’s friend Eva Stuchliková said. She was speaking of the funeral, where the secret police photographed the mourners, and the helicopters and motorcycles made it impossible to hear the priest.

  At a café, I met Josef Hiršal and Bohumila Grögerová, an aging couple who in the past had together composed experimental verses and translated poetry from many different languages. They, too, spoke about Patočka’s funeral, about the deafening noise and the regime’s attempt to deny the service any dignity.

  For all of the mourners at Patočka’s funeral, the philosopher’s death marked a rupture in consciousness. Everyone still saw so vividly those helicopters and motorcycles, heard their vulgar sounds.

  Jan Patočka became the sacrificial martyr of Charter 77. Yet he was more than that. For Bohumír Janat, Patočka’s death was the death of Socrates. The then twenty-seven-year-old Janat had intended to sign Charter 77 several months later, when he had finished his studies. Yet that day in March 1977, after he returned home from his professor’s funeral, he knew what he had to do: he signed at once. He was cast out of the university. For the next dozen years, when he was not in prison, the young philosopher worked as a janitor and a stoker in a boiler room. This was the fate of intellectuals who chose to sign the Charter.

  In Prague that summer of 1993 I was trying to understand Charter 77—what it was and what it was not. It was not anti-Marxist. It appealed for neither the restoration of capitalism nor the introduction of multiple political parties. It proposed no alternative political system. It called on the government only to take seriously its own laws. Everyone told me this; it was a kind of refrain. I was interested in democratic politics, but in Czechoslovakia the dissidents had been interested in “antipolitics.” The Helsinki Accords had inspired a language that was not only post-Marxist but also postpolitical. Inside politics, the dissidents had believed, it was impossible to have clean hands. Political opposition would always imply something shared with the regime it opposed. The language of Helsinki was a language of human rights, transcendent of communist—or capitalist—ideology.

  That power corrupts was inevitable, Bohumír Janat told me. The Velvet Revolution had returned him to the university after the many years of manual labor. His voice was emphatic, yet soft. He spoke about the funeral, about the helicopters and the motorcycles. He spoke about an opposition whose strength was rooted in individual moral choice—a moral choice to live in truth. There was a Manichaean distinction in his mind, but it was not between communism and anticommunism: it was between lies and truth. When I asked him about the communist regime, he began to talk about Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and the tale of the Grand Inquisitor.

  When I asked Bohumír Janat about the efficacy of nonviolence in opposing totalitarianism, he told me: “One who uses violence is a very big coward because he refuses to carry his own existential burden.”

  There was much that the signatories of Charter 77 agreed about: the inspiration of Jan Patočka’s search for philosophical truth, the shamefulness of his funeral, the meaning of antipolitics, the opposition between truth and lies, the fact that they were a small ghetto of intellectuals. As a group they were both proud and self-critical; another of Jan Patočka’s onetime students, the philosopher Ladislav Hejdanek, knew that in the last decades of communism, the years after 1968, most people had looked upon the dissidents as “stupid people who openly say what all know.

  “I am afraid,” he added, “it had no real political relevance.”

  In retrospect Charter 77 seemed to Ladislav Hejdanek a mere gesture. Bohumír Janat disagreed: he believed that Charter 77 had made a difference, that it had been “the silent and tranquil cause” of what happened in 1989.

  This was the central point of the former dissidents’ lack of consensus: in the end, had what they had done mattered?

  On the other side of the Vltava River, in Malá Strana, tucked on a small street not far from the American embassy, I talked to Milan Otahal at the Institute for Contemporary History. A historian, he was certain that international politics—Gorbachev’s renunciation of the Brezhnev Doctrine, in effect a promise of nonintervention; the domino effect of revolutions in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria—had played a large role. In 1989 the East Germans had poured into Prague, suitcases in their hands and children in their arms, headed to the West German embassy. This had an impact, psychologically.

  No one, though, would ever know for certain how much Charter 77 or anything else had to do with communism’s fall: it was impossible to do a control study on real life.

  What was important was that the revolution had happened. In November 1989 there were demonstrations, first by students, then not only by students—dissidents gathered in the Magic Lantern Theater and called themselves the Civic Forum. Looking back, the art historian Miloslava Holubová saw the Velvet Revolution as theater, staged under Václav Havel’s artistic direction. Outside on the streets the police arrived, as the demonstrators had known they would. There were beatings. Not long afterward someone spoke at a demonstration and told the crowd that there were two policemen present who had beaten demonstrators just days earlier. The demonstrators were furious. Then the speaker said that the policemen wished to ask for forgiveness. And the crowd began to chant: “We are forgiving! We are forgiving!” For Miloslava Holubová this was a miracle, a proof of Christian goodness and God’s presence in the world.

  After that things moved quickly.

  In Bratislava, Miloš gave me a videotape of the November 1989 demonstrations, the crowds chanting on Wenceslas Square in Prague. There were literary references: “For whom the bell tolls,” they shouted. “Liars!” “The truth will prevail!” Truth—pravda in Czech—the dissidents used as the most concrete of nouns, as tangible as
the keys in one’s pocket.

  WHEN I ARRIVED at his Prague apartment one day in late August, the Charter 77 signatory Jan Urban opened the door for me. His small dogs came to the door as well, the adorable dachshunds who were then ubiquitous in Prague. His English was comfortable and refined, and he had a kind of jazz club hipness to him. Everything about him was engaging: he was articulate and self-reflective, his manner of being a fusion of self-possession and vulnerability.

  “I didn’t sign one bloody paper,” Jan Urban said of the secret police’s attempts to force him into collaboration. “Even a rat, when you push it into a corner, it jumps.”

  He was speaking of how the regime had threatened him and of how he had not broken. He had not, though, been immune to the fear: while he had learned to live with death threats, they stayed inside him. By summer of 1989 he was being detained more or less every fortnight, and the pressure was too much. He fled. Being in hiding was “a strange feeling,” he told me. “This was my city and I was totally alone.”

  We talked about the communist regime, about fear, and about Václav Havel. The man who was now president had called the years after 1968, the years when belief and practice had parted ways, “post-totalitarian.” These were the years of living “as if.” No one any longer believed in communism—and no one, including those in power, any longer believed that anyone believed in communism. It was enough, though, that everyone pretended. In his 1978 samizdat essay “The Power of the Powerless,” dedicated to the memory of Jan Patočka, Havel wrote of the seemingly innocent greengrocer, the ordinary man who every morning in his shop window, alongside the carrots and onions, hung the sign bearing the famous communist slogan “Workers of the World Unite!” The greengrocer did not believe this message, the words meant nothing to him; nonetheless he obliged the regime by displaying the sign. Such a gesture was profoundly in the greengrocer’s self-interest: it enabled him to live in peace. If one day he took down that sign, perhaps buried it at the bottom of a carton of rotten tomatoes, someone was likely to report him. The police would quickly arrive. Alone, the greengrocer was seemingly powerless. If he resisted displaying the sign, he would face harassment, persecution, eventually arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment. And yet … if one day all the greengrocers were to take down their signs, that would be the beginning of a revolution. Thus in fact the greengrocer was not so powerless after all. Because he was powerful, he was also responsible—and therefore guilty: for it was the greengrocers who allowed the game to go on in the first place.

  Jan Urban had understood that the greengrocers were in the majority and that he and his friends were living in a ghetto. Most people in communist Czechoslovakia, he believed, had been happy—or at least content.

  “It’s very difficult to quarrel with or explain something to people who don’t believe in anything,” he said. Of course the regime was oppressive. Of course it was built on humiliation and the violation of human rights. Yet people—perhaps even most people—didn’t mind. “Many people remember it as a very comfortable life,” he told me, “nothing to really cry about.”

  Jan Urban was a warm person, but he did not speak warmly about “the people.” He was not alone. Milan Otahal, too, was convinced that ordinary people cared much more for going abroad to the Yugoslav seaside on holidays than for free speech. The philosopher Ladislav Hejdanek, too, harbored no illusions about the masses. His fellow citizens, he believed, had been unwilling to risk anything. Eva Stuchliková described the majority as having reached a modus vivendi with the regime—in her mind like a dog chained to his house who doesn’t want to upset his master. The experimental poet Josef Hiršal had friends who, under pressure, had signed the communist regime’s declaration condemning Charter 77. They wanted his understanding: they had signed out of fear. Hiršal was unsympathetic: they were simply cowards.

  The implications were disconcerting. In Czechoslovakia, I wanted very much to hear a story about the dissidents who spoke for the people, who led the people, who were the people. Yet now I began to see that even Havel, the hero of the revolution who became the people’s president, he, too, had not had so much faith in the people. Alone in the studio apartment I rented, inside one of Prague’s many faceless high-rises built of gray cement, I read Havel again and again. His tale of the greengrocer was both lyrical and merciless, the harshness of the accusation only thinly veiled by the aesthetics of the prose. The line between victim and oppressor, Havel wrote, “runs de facto through each person, for everyone in his or her own way is both a victim and a supporter of the system.”

  Ladislav Hejdanek agreed. “We have to be clear,” he told me. “We are all responsible for the last forty years because we didn’t react against it.”

  But of course, he did.

  Miloš’s attraction to Allen Ginsberg and The Strawberry Statement notwithstanding, the dissidents of Czechoslovakia had acted above all not on behalf of “the people” but rather on behalf of “truth.” And “truth” in Czechoslovakia was generationally inflected. Once upon a time, there had been both terror and honesty. The Stalinists tortured and executed, but they were sincere: they truly believed they were ushering the people into paradise. Then came Stalin’s death and his successor Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s “excesses.” Eventually Alexander Dubček came to preside over a “socialism with a human face”—which was never to be. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev decided that Dubček’s liberalizing reforms had gone too far. In August 1968 Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague and put an end to what might have been a different kind of socialism, a better kind.

  In 1968 the arrival of the Red Army in Prague meant, paradoxically, the end of Marxism. In its wake, Marxist belief was decoupled from communist practice. The new hard-line government installed by Moscow brought “normalization”: a return to dogmatism, to censorship and oppression, yet now without Stalinist terror. Normalization-era socialism was no longer so bloody. Nonetheless, Ladislav Hejdanek believed, “morally it was much worse.”

  For “normalization” meant the reign of the opportunists.

  At a Prague pub, Brad, a graduate student at Stanford, told me that during normalization, as the regime imprisoned dissidents, it took a chunk of its operating budget and transferred it from capital investment to consumer spending.

  “The Czechs traded their freedom for new refrigerators,” he told me. He said it not at all viciously, just as a matter of information.

  The communist period, I began to appreciate more and more, had not been a homogenous bloc of time. The moral problems of Stalinism and normalization had been very different ones. I was thinking about this when I took the overnight train once more from Prague to Bratislava to meet the philosopher Miroslav Kusý. Slovakia was more provincial than the Czech Republic; even the capital felt like a town and not a city, and to have been a dissident in Bratislava was to have been even more isolated than to have been a dissident in Prague. Miroslav Kusý had been one of the isolated ones, and he, too, felt the sharp generational split. In the 1970s and 1980s, his secret police interrogators, he understood, were “pragmatic people”: they belonged to a second, agnostic generation of communist apparatchiks, bereft of any ideals. One of his interrogators had graduated from the law faculty. Why, Miroslav Kusý had once asked him, had he joined the secret police? And the younger man had obligingly explained: it was a thousand-crown difference in salary.

  Sincerity of ideology “definitely existed in the first generation … but nothing of it in the next,” Jan Urban said. After our conversation, I thought again of Bohumír Janat and the Grand Inquisitor parable in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: during the Inquisition, Jesus Christ returned to earth only to be imprisoned. While in prison, he received a visit from the Grand Inquisitor, who was not pleased to see him. Only slowly did their conversation reveal the Grand Inquisitor’s one secret: he did not believe in God.

  IN SOME WAY Jan Urban found the Velvet Revolution depressing: after all those years, the communists had simply run away.r />
  “It’s not that we won—it’s that they collapsed. And we just had to step in, because there was no one else around.”

  For Jan Urban, “the power of the powerless”—of that small ghetto of dissidents—lay not in what they said but in that they said it. Those who signed Charter 77 stood apart only in saying aloud what everyone knew. They suffered, moreover, from a certain weakness: they were preoccupied with reacting to the regime’s stupidity. They knew what they didn’t want—that was obvious, everyone knew it. Jan Urban could not remember, though, any occasion from “the old days” when they had discussed the future, what would come after communism. There were no such expectations; the dissidents had no project, no future of their own. And this, he thought now, had been their great mistake.

  They had been caught unprepared. Ladislav Hejdanek, too, was disappointed in 1989: he had believed that Charter 77 would form the basis for a postcommunist politics. That it had not—could not—had come as an unpleasant surprise. Others were not so surprised. The historian Milan Otahal was a pragmatist: the dissidents’ entire strategy had been an “existential revolution”—a call to live in truth and in accord with one’s own conscience. Antipolitics had been about the moral restoration of human beings; its objectives had never been political ones.

  Miroslav Kusý belonged to those who believed in the Charter’s efficacy. After all, in the very early days of communism’s fall, it was the Charter signatories who had directed the critical first wave of changes. Kusý had been among them, serving as federal minister for censorship, given the happy task of destroying his own office. He was a philosopher, though, not a politician, and in the end he was skeptical about the possibility of a moral politics. To be engaged meant to forgo having clean hands. He opted out.