Revolution 1989

by Victor Sebestyen

  The lessons were learned. People devised ways of living with Communist totalitarianism. They retreated into their private lives, where they hoped the Stasi or the Securitate could not follow. The Polish journalist and author Konstanty Geberte said he built ‘A small, portable barricade between me and silence, submission, humiliation, shame, impregnable for tanks. As long as this [exists] . . . there is around me, a small area of freedom.’1

  It had been a joyous party - at least until three uninvited guests turned up towards the end of the evening and arrested the band. The musicians had just finished their set at an apartment in central Prague on 15 March 1976. The beer had flowed freely and the group were mixing with the partygoers, when a trio from the Czech secret police, the Státní Bezpecnost - StB - walked in. That night they took away members of the Plastic People of the Universe, Czechoslovakia’s best known pop group, and locked them up, as well as several of the band’s supporters - nineteen people in all-for ‘disturbing the peace’. The next day they were charged with ‘alcoholism, drug addiction and antisocial behaviour’. After the court case that followed, four of the group were jailed for periods of between one and three and a half years, including the Plastics’ twenty-seven-year-old founder, lyricist and bass player Milan Hlavsa.2

  They were not a great band musically. Compared with their heroes Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart or the Velvet Underground, the Plastics were hardly innovative as artists. Nor, as their guiding spirit Hlavsa would repeatedly say, ‘were we political . . . we didn’t have a message, certainly we did not plan to bring down communism. We just loved rock and roll and wanted to be famous.’3 Yet Gustáv Husák, the Soviet puppet leader installed by Moscow in 1969, was jittery. Deeply conservative in many ways, he was a humourless man who wanted silence and obedient conformity from his people. A stern, unbending figure from a small town on the Danube close to Bratislava, he had been jailed by the fascist regime that ruled in Slovakia under German occupation during the war. Later, when a fast-rising Communist Party apparatchik, he spent six years in a detention camp during the purge years in the 1950s on charges of ‘bourgeois nationalism’. The experience scarred him. Aged sixty-three now, he felt threatened by anything he imagined was unconventional. He had recently prosecuted the Slovak writer Jan Kalina for editing and publishing a book called 1001 Jokes - a collection of (mostly) anti-Communist gags that the regime believed were deeply subversive. Kalina’s home in Bratislava was bugged so the intelligence agency could find out who was passing jokes on to him. Then he was jailed for two years.4

  Pop music was perceived as a danger to the State. The Plastic People of the Universe had been founded in the late 1960s and at first were allowed to perform legally. But in 1973, along with some other Czech bands, they were forbidden to play at public events. They found a way to appear within the law at ‘private gatherings’ like weddings, anniversary parties, in people’s homes or - as a loophole in the law allowed - in gardens. They quickly attracted a cult following. Young people thought that if Husák and the full force of the Communist regime were against them, the Plastic People must be doing something right. One of their great admirers was a man beginning to make his mark as a playwright, essayist and philosopher, Václav Havel, whose work was receiving some attention in the West.

  The Plastics dressed in the same way as counter-culture bands of the time in the US or Western Europe - leather jackets, jeans, tie-dye T-shirts, lots of beads - and they wore their hair long. The police and the StB of course knew they were performing, but for some years let them carry on, not wishing to provoke a conflict between generations. The Plastics were more psychedelic than capitalist, but the popularity of the band was a constant irritant to the neo-Stalinist voices in the regime. The Communist oligarchs in Prague Castle ordered the security apparatus to arrest these ‘work-shy people’, according to a conversation at the highest level in the Czech government. ‘Their music has nothing to do with art and seriously threatens the moral values of society. The lyrics . . . [display] extreme vulgarity with an anti-socialist and an anti-social impact, most of them extolling nihilism, decadence and clericalism.’5 When they appeared at a show trial in October 1976 Havel, who loved the vigour and vibrancy of rock music, managed to watch the ‘performance’ from the gallery for part of the case. He wrote a brilliant essay with a title echoing Kafka, ‘The Trial’, which he published in samizdat, and which, much to the embarrassment of the authorities, was smuggled to the West. ‘The Plastics were simply young people who wanted to live in their own way, to make the music they liked, to sing what they wanted to sing, to live in harmony with themselves in a truthful way,’ he wrote. The Plastics represented ‘life’s intrinsic desire to express itself freely, in its own authentic and sovereign way’.6

  Two months after the Plastic People were convicted and sentenced, Havel and a few other writers, artists, academics and musicians launched an organisation to campaign for the band’s release and, more broadly, to call attention to the violations of human rights behind the Iron Curtain. It was ‘a loose, informal and open association of people . . . united by the will to strive individually and collectively for human and civil rights in our country and throughout the world’. The document, known as Charter 77, was sent to West German TV and Deutsche Welle Radio, where it received modest coverage. Initially it was signed by 243 people.7

  There was another catalyst behind the formation of Charter 77, which along with the Polish KOR became the best-known human rights group in Eastern Europe. The Helsinki Accords on Security in Europe, signed after lengthy negotiations in 1975, gave civil rights campaigners a powerful weapon they could turn against the Communist regimes. The ‘rights’ package within the Helsinki Treaty had a far more profound impact than any of the diplomats who worked on it could have conceived. Over time it helped to sap the confidence, the strength and the will of the Communists to govern.

  Initially, the Soviet Union and its satellite states hailed the Helsinki agreement as a masterstroke of diplomacy for the Kremlin bosses. The Accords recognised the post-World War Two borders as inviolable and appeared to give the Communist regimes a legitimacy they had not possessed. In particular, the East German Communists were delighted. Previously nobody outside the socialist bloc had recognised the GDR as a country. Now the East Germans would have diplomatic links everywhere. But the Soviets paid a price. They agreed to a declaration on a range of rights about free assembly, free speech and democratic values enshrined in the United Nations Charter. ‘All signatories agree to respect civil, economic, social, cultural and other rights and freedoms, all of which derive from the inherent dignity of the human person,’ the preamble to the Treaty stated.8 The Soviets thought that if the West agreed to recognise postwar borders it also meant nobody would seek to change the internal politics in the socialist countries. They believed it would make Communist rule in the satellite states permanent and put an end to any potential Prague Springs. They seriously miscalculated. It wasa nail in the coffin of Communism . . . Brezhnev looked forward to the publicity he would gain when the Soviet public learned of the final settlement of the postwar boundaries for which they had sacrificed so much. As for the humanitarian issues, those could be mentioned at home, just vaguely, without much publicity. He thought this would not bring much trouble inside our country. But he was wrong . . . In the Kremlin, some amongst the old guard were stunned when they first saw the language of the Human Rights provisions in the treaty. Andropov, Suslov (and others) had grave doubts about assuming international commitments that could open the way for foreign intervention in our political life . . . Many Soviet ambassadors expressed doubts because they correctly anticipated difficult international disputes later on. But Gromyko won the argument proclaiming ‘we will be masters in our own house’, thus admitting non-compliance with the treaty from the start . . . The agreements gradually became a manifesto of the dissident and liberal movement - a development totally beyond the imagination of the Soviet leadership.9

  The Soviets felt they cou
ld hardly say no to the Accords. The rights enshrined in them were, theoretically at least, guaranteed in the constitutions of the USSR and its satellite countries, in noble and uplifting prose. Nor could they easily just ignore the provisions, which clearly they had intended to do. The Treaty permitted the West to upbraid the Soviets and their allies when they failed to live up to its terms and gave civil liberties campaigners throughout the empire a legal basis on which to insist that their governments uphold the terms of the agreement. Helsinki Watch groups mushroomed throughout the socialist bloc, except Romania, where nobody dared to form one. The Czech historian Petr Pithart said the Treaty provisions armed the opposition with a new strategy. Rather than demand new rights they did not possess, the Helsinki Watch groups could claim that these freedoms were already enshrined in law, but not recognised in reality. The argument made the opposition sound reasonable and forced the Communist Parties on to the defensive. The Hungarian philosopher and human rights activist Miklós Haraszti agreed. ‘Helsinki gave us a stick we could beat the regime with constantly. It was vital,’ he said.10

  Even cynics in the West became convinced. When it was being negotiated, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger mocked the Helsinki agreement. His own chief aide on Europe, William Hyland, admitted his boss’s attitude was one of ‘disdain. He said “I don’t care what they do . . . they could write it in Swahili for all I care . . . I don’t believe that a bunch of revolutionaries who have managed to cling to power for 50 years are going to be euchred out of it . . . by the kind of people negotiating in Helsinki’.11 Later Kissinger changed his mind and recognised it as ‘a political and moral landmark that contributed to the progressive decline of the Soviet system . . . Rarely has a diplomatic process so illuminated the limitations of human foresight.’12

  Václav Havel did not look the part of a charismatic leader. He was short of stature, with an awkward gait, and gave the air of a slightly diffident and absent-minded professor. He was a man who could not conceal his insecurities and self-doubts. He made a good living by writing about them with wit, charm and searing honesty. Yet when the time came he could act with certainty, boldness and speed. In many ways he was the archetypal Central European intellectual, at his happiest talking about philosophy, drama and politics late into the night in a bar with fellow writers. He spent, by his own admission, many months of his life at his favourite pub near the Vltava River in Prague’s Old Town. By inclination he was a philosopher, but he loved the theatre and actors. Circumstances and accident turned him into a political leader, a man of action, but he found he had an aptitude for it almost as great as his skill as a writer.

  Havel was born in Prague on 5 October 1936, into a prosperous family. He had a pampered, privileged early childhood. His grandfather had made a fortune in land speculation and built a famous and elegant art deco shopping mall, The Lucerna, just off Wenceslas Square in the centre of the Czech capital. It was one of the earliest ventures of its kind in Europe. His father was a famous Prague restaurateur. All the family property was seized in 1948 when the Communists took over. Havel and his kind were regarded as class enemies by the new power in the land. As the son of a bourgeois, he was denied any education beyond grammar school. University places were reserved for the sons of workers - or of loyal Communist Party members from whatever class. He got a job as a stagehand at Prague’s Balustrade Theatre, where his passion for the stage was born. He started writing plays in his spare time, elliptical, absurdist work, most of which could not be performed in his own country because it did not pass the censor. His best plays began to be staged regularly abroad, though, where his reputation grew.13

  Havel made a name for himself as an ‘oppositionist’ before he was twenty at a meeting of the Czech Writers’ Union - an important organisation under communism, as nobody could get published without being a member. He made a speech criticising older, more established writers for ‘hypocrisy’, not so much because they did not tell the truth - a difficult and dangerous thing to do - but because they would not even listen to the truth. It was ‘the truth’ that exercised Havel more than anything else. His best-known works were essays of a discursive, philosophical nature about living as honestly as one could under oppression in a land where ‘the State has an outpost in everyone’s mind’ and where ‘real history has stopped . . . (where) all history has become pseudo history . . . the government, as it were, nationalised time. Hence, time meets the sad fate of so many other nationalised things. It has begun to wither away.’14

  Havel became the chief spokesman for ‘the Chartists’ after the document was launched in January 1977. The group was tiny and at most a minor irritant. But Havel was arrested several times for short periods of twenty-four hours in the months afterwards. His repeated description of Gustáv Husák as the ‘President of Forgetting’ was among the reasons. In April 1979 the regime lost patience and decided to make an example of him. He was picked up by the StB, tried for ‘slandering the State’ and sentenced to four and a half years in a tough prison with hardened career criminals rather than amongst gentle intellectuals. He was worked hard and his already poor health - he repeatedly suffered from chest and lung problems - deteriorated further. But this was Czechoslovakia, Good Soldier Švejk and Kafka territory, and there were moments of farce behind bars. Havel used to say that he recalled prison guards - called bonzaks - persuading him to write their reports on inmate Václav Havel. ‘I had to write many confidential reports on myself,’ he said. ‘I wanted to help the bonzaks, and besides it was a chance to mystify the authorities.’15

  After his release he was watched and followed, suffered many petty indignities, yet was allowed to make a good living . He was permitted to keep the money he earned from royalties abroad. In Czech terms he was a rich man. He spent long periods writing quietly at his country cottage in Bohemia two and a half hours from Prague. The secret police built a two-storey chalet nearby so that they could keep an eye on him. On a clear day he could see the officer on duty peering at him through binoculars. Havel simply ignored them, as he did the two StB goons placed permanently outside his apartment in Prague. He knew his phone and home were bugged; he ignored that too, as far as possible, and lived as ‘normal’ a life as he could, meeting whomever he wanted, whenever he wanted, and talking about whatever he wanted. He was developing a way of surviving under totalitarian conditions while maintaining his integrity intact. His message was that when you live as if you are free, you can learn to be free, whatever the totalitarian State throws at you.

  The idea seems personal and moral, but Havel recognised it as supremely political. He explained it best in a classic essay, The Power of the Powerless. There was no point in confronting those in power or arguing with them, he said. The point was not even to tell the truth, though against a system based on lies that was important. The crucial thing was to ‘live in truth’ - all else was compromise. ‘If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, it is not surprising the fundamental threat to it is living the truth . . . the very act of forming a political grouping forces one to start playing a power game, instead of giving truth a priority,’ he wrote. People who can find no autonomy from the State ‘confirm the system, fulfil the system, make the system, are the system’. It was a difficult concept to grasp - easily mocked by workers whose main worries were not notions about ‘truth’ or moral sensibility, but keeping a roof over their heads if they landed in trouble with the regime, or providing for their children’s higher education. ‘The moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out “The Emperor is naked”, when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game, everything suddenly appears in another light, and the whole crust seems to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably.’ These were ideas totally foreign to the likes of Husák or his henchmen. Paranoid they may have been, but they could sense a real threat when they saw one: in a totalitarian society, bypassing the State is potentially a dangerous challenge to the regime.
Havel recognised that on the surface it did not seem to say a great deal to a factory worker in the tractor plant in Brno. ‘These are perhaps impractical methods in today’s world and very difficult to apply in daily life,’ he acknowledged. ‘Nevertheless I know of no better alternative.’16

  Havel was the most imaginative, eloquent and powerful critic of Soviet-style communism. He inspired and encouraged others. Yet he was always among a mere handful throughout the socialist empire. The importance of dissident intellectuals far outweighed their minuscule numbers. Writers, for example, had always been highly valued by communism as, in Stalin’s phrase, ‘engineers of the mind’. That is why the dictatorships over the years went to such elaborate lengths to seduce and use them. An artist who went along with the system, acted as a Party propagandist, wrote paeans of praise and birthday tributes for the dictator, as they were expected to do, could live in great comfort and achieve stardom. Historically in most of Central and Eastern Europe the intelligentsia was a class on its own, involved politically in a way unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world and rare in the rest of Europe. As Bronisław Geremek, one of the most influential advisers to Solidarity in Poland, used to say: ‘The West is different, “normal”. Here . . . an intellectual must be engaged . . . Because we are fighting for the very right to think.’17