by Ivan Klíma
Respected members of the National Assembly, I would like to present an interpellation in the name of twenty-one members of Parliament in which we would like to demonstrate how resources required by the state budget are being squandered. . . . This regards two films we have seen, which, according to Literární noviny, . . . “demonstrate the fundamental path of our cultural life.” We are convinced (however) that no honorable worker, farmer, or intellectual would want to or could tread this path, because the two films, Daisies and A Report on the Party and the Guests, filmed at the Czechoslovak film studios Barrandov, have nothing in common with our republic and the ideals of communism.
We therefore request the Minister of Culture and Information, Comrade Hoffman, the Cultural Commission of the National Assembly and the People’s Central Auditing Commission, and the National Assembly as a whole to deal radically with this situation and adopt the appropriate measures against those who were involved in these films and especially against those who were willing to finance this refuse. We ask the directors Němec and Chytilová what sort of enlightenment—occupational, political, diversional, or otherwise—this trash brings to people working in factories and fields, on engineering projects, and at other workplaces. We ask these “cultural workers” how long do they plan to offend the lives of all honorable workers, how long will they continue to trample upon Socialist achievements, how long do they plan to dally with the nerves of workers and farmers? What kind of democracy are you trying to achieve? Why do you think our Border Guard carries out its combat duties keeping enemies out of our country, while we, Comrade Minister of National Defense and Minister of Finance, pay a small fortune to our internal enemies, allowing them to trample upon, Comrade Minister of Food and Agriculture, the fruits of our labor?
The denunciation mentioned two more films and ended with the appeal: We demand these film be withdrawn from our cinemas!
This unbelievably reactionary attack (today it seems almost like a parody) roused most of us to action. Fourteen film directors signed an indignant protest, ending with the words:
Artistic freedom is indivisible. If one of us is subject to restrictions, we are all subject to restrictions. Therefore we categorically reject Deputy Pružinec’s proclamation and point out the danger of threatening fundamental civil rights and freedoms, an essential part of which is the freedom of speech.
Then we waited to see how other writers would react to such opinions at the congress.
I’ll try to give at least a general outline of our opinions in those days. We had no doubt that the Communist regime ruling the Soviet Union, and other countries that had accepted its political system, had nothing in common with socialism or democracy. It was in no way any sort of rule of the people. It had committed serious crimes, admitted to only a small number of them, and apologized for even fewer. Those responsible for the crimes had gone unpunished, and some were still governing us. The dictatorship, also known as the cult of personality, persisted in a somewhat more sophisticated form, and there was no guarantee that past crimes would not be repeated in the future. We were exasperated by the mendacious propaganda, the manipulated elections “by acclamation,” with an absurd 99 percent of the votes going to candidates proposed directly by the party. At the same time, however, we were still not convinced that socialism was an unrealizable utopia. We knew that the nationalization of private property had been not only unjust and violent but also senseless and was the reason why almost nothing in the country functioned the way it did in democratic countries. Nevertheless, it didn’t occur to any of us that everything should be returned to the hands of private banks, mines, and the largest industries. (In many traditionally democratic countries, large enterprises had become the property of the state.)
We wanted to do everything we could to help renew basic freedoms in the country. We wanted political parties to stop being just formal organizations that were trying to hide the totalitarian character of the regime from the uninitiated. We knew that the Communist Party, which had its eternal rule enshrined in the constitution, controlled all organizations and placed its own members in positions of authority. From our experiences as journalists, however, we also knew that the Communist Party was united only superficially; in reality its members held quite disparate points of view. Many were dissatisfied with developments in the country and disdained contemporary politicians. As a result of the experiences of recent years, they were afraid to express their opinions, but they still wanted more freedom: freedom of thought, freedom to travel, genuinely free elections, and a judiciary not beholden to power.
At the time, few thought a complete transformation of the political system was possible. We ourselves didn’t think so.
I was intending to defend Literární noviny at the congress. Some colleagues were trying to accuse us of serving only a narrow and limited group of writers. In the second, more substantive part of my contribution, I wanted to talk about censorship and had collected examples of the censor’s interventions. The day before the meeting, a lawyer brought me some interesting information from one of our contributors. He’d noticed that the National Assembly had approved a new press law legalizing censorship and defining its field of activity without realizing that the law would go into effect on the one-hundredth anniversary of the enactment of a law whereby the “corrupt” Austro-Hungarian monarchy guaranteed freedom of the press when the Czechs had been the monarchy’s vassals. This one-hundred-year-old law was much more liberal than the one to be enacted.
On June 27, 1967, the congress convened in the festively decorated Vinohrady House of Railway Workers in Prague.
Obligatory invitations had been sent out to a good-sized party delegation led by a member of the presidium of the Central Committee of the party. A minister and other party bureaucrats were in the delegation, which was supposed to keep an eye on the activities of artists. The delegation, as was appropriate (or inappropriate), was greeted by the applause of at least a few writers.
Milan Kundera was the first to speak. He avoided direct criticism of the current political conditions but emphasized that the primary role of the union was to facilitate the free exchange of different opinions. He recalled the famous passage attributed to Voltaire: “I do not agree with what you are saying, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Then he talked about the great sweep of Czech art, especially literature and film, and emphasized, If our art has blossomed, it is because intellectual freedom has increased. The fate of Czech literature is vitally dependent, just now, on the degree of intellectual freedom that exists. Then he moved on to Věra Chytilová’s Daisies, one of the films attacked by Pružinec. The film concerned vandalism, claimed Kundera, and he used the film as a pretext to discuss the subject.
Who are the vandals today? Not your illiterate peasant setting fire to the hated landlord‘s mansion in a fit of rage. The vandals I see around me these days are well-off educated people, satisfied with themselves and bearing no particular grudge. The vandal is a man proud of his mediocrity, very much at ease with himself and ready to insist on his democratic rights. In his pride and his mediocrity he imagines that one of his inalienable privileges is to transform the world after his own image, and since the most important things in this world are the innumerable things that transcend his vision, he adjusts the world to his own image by destroying it.
Everyone (even the party delegation) understood that this definition of vandalism, still valid today, was a criticism of the current party’s attitude to literature, art, and independent thought.
Saša Kliment then spoke about censorship and the freedom necessary to create. I understand plenty, but not, however, necessity as freedom. He was referring to Marx’s assertion that freedom is the recognition of necessity, especially when those things that enter our lives as necessary, inevitable, and essential are in fact only at the discretion of the people. . . . Ever since literature began, administrative and psychological pressure has been, to a greater or lesser degree, exerted on the author in order
that he conform to the present needs of society. . . . Whereas, however, the needs of society are represented by a collective ideal of the group, the writer always expresses his own independent and personal viewpoint. . . . Thus the writer’s word has been, and always will be, uncomfortable; he will always be more likely to jab his finger in the wounds of society than try to bandage them. . . . The relationship between the individual conscience of the writer and his work and official doctrine, therefore, will always be strained. . . . Culture, however, is a public affair, and the writer, even though he creates in isolation, can exist physically and intellectually only in dialogue. He then demanded that literature be allowed to assume an independent and free position. Because the current practice of censorship is incompatible with the constitution of the republic, with the union’s articles of association, and primarily with the personal conscience of every writer, I move that it be abolished . . . and that our congress present a concrete proposal to the National Assembly.
Here his address was interrupted by applause, but what exasperated the party delegation even more was his next, quite legitimate, demand:
I recommend that the secretariat undertake effective action to ensure that members of the union be kept better informed. It is astounding that we must learn about many things that have a direct bearing on literature from Le Monde or West German radio broadcasts. I have in mind specifically A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s letter to the Fourth Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers.
Here Pavel Kohout announced that he had the text of the letter with him and, if the congress wished, he would read it aloud. The writers voted and, with a single exception, requested that it be read.
The reading of the letter, so deeply critical of the Soviet regime, obviously alarmed, or rather enraged, the party delegation, which demonstratively left the meeting, at least for that day.
The next day Antonín Liehm, an editor of Literární noviny, read another critical speech. The subject of his analysis was official cultural policies. The protection of state interests, something politicians typically referred to with respect to culture, must be clearly delineated and defined and can never be concealed by blanket proclamations or laws, which are being generated more and more arbitrarily. Then Liehm formulated a program demanding the freedom of culture unrestricted by anything other than criminal prosecution, and that the state undertake to be the tangible guarantor of such an emerging culture and that it do everything in its power to ensure that the culture of the nation, in all respects, will become the property of the widest strata of the nation.
My account of Literární noviny and primarily my criticism of the current press law, which fully legalized prior restraint, infuriated the party delegation.
I was talking the other day with a party official who insisted that the law was a good one. When I disagreed, he was amazed, saying that it had to be incomparably better than the previous situation, when we’d had no press law at all. This opinion is not unique. It assumes, of course, that we view our entire history as beginning in 1948. . . . But our history goes farther back. Permit me to quote: “Everyone has the right to express his opinion freely in work, letter, print, or pictorial representation. The press may not be subject to censorship.”
To the delight of the audience, I pointed out that this quotation came from an imperial patent issued for the Bohemian Crown Lands under No. 151 of the Imperial Statute Book. Censorship had been restored for a brief time under the absolutism of Alexander Bach, but it did not last long, and under the December constitution of 1867, press freedom was guaranteed, and censorship and the licensing system were abolished. I added that those who had issued the latest law did not lack a certain sense of absurd humor when they passed censorship regulations, which, as an outrageous holdover from Bachian absolutism, had been abolished exactly one hundred years ago. I concluded with a number of proposals, which were immediately judged by party organs as provocative. I demanded that the union protest with all vehemence any abuse of power by an administrative body . . . and that the congress should express its disagreement with the literal wording of the law that, among other things, instituted precensorship, which had been outdated for decades.
Ludvík Vaculík—unknown to most of those present—offered something never before heard in a public forum the entire time the Communists had been in power, namely, an analysis and condemnation of the totalitarian nature of the regime.
Vaculík began with the concept of the citizen and the manner in which he exerts his influence on the powers that be.
The preservation of such a formal system of democracy [in other words, the level of the democratic institution] does not bring an especially solid government along with it; it merely brings the conviction that the next government might be better. So the government falls, but the citizen is renewed. On the other hand, when a government reigns continually and stands for a long time, it is the citizen who falls. Where does he fall? I will not oblige our enemies and say he falls on the gallows—this is only a few dozen or hundred citizens. But even friends realize this is plenty, for what follows is the descent of an entire nation into fear, political apathy, and civic resignation. . . . I believe we no longer have citizens in this country.
The introduction alone was sufficient for the entire Writers’ Union (not to mention the present author) to be denounced. But Vaculík continued his analysis that power relies exclusively on the most obedient and the most mediocre; everything is controlled by people less competent than those whom they control, and this situation has lasted for twenty years. On the status of art, he said:
Just as I do not believe that the citizen and the power structure can ever become one, that the ruled and the rulers can come together in song, I also do not believe that art and power structures will ever take pleasure in each other’s company. They will not, and they cannot—ever. They are different, incompatible.
Everyone knew that Vaculík was speaking about our contemporary Communist government, but lest anyone be in doubt, he added:
Are they really masters of everything? What, then, do they leave in the hands of others than their own? Nothing? Then we needn’t be here. Let them say, let it be completely perceptible by all: Essentially, a handful of people seeks to decide on the existence or nonexistence of everything, of what is to be done, of what is to be thought, and what is to be desired. This reveals the position of culture in our land; it is an image of the nature of our culture. This politics of nonculture . . . is creating a focal point for struggles for freedom, and it is always being talked about; it does not understand that freedom exists only when it does not have to be discussed. . . . [All of this imperils the one thing worthy of passion:] the dream of a government that is identified with the citizen, and of the citizen who rules almost by himself.
In conclusion, Vaculík voiced that famous appraisal of Communist rule:
It is obvious that in twenty years no human problem has been solved in this country—from such fundamental necessities as housing, schools, or a flourishing economy to more insubstantial necessities that nondemocratic regimes cannot satisfy, such as a sense of one’s value in society, the subordination of political decision making to ethical criteria, . . . the necessity of trust among people, and the enhancement of education on a mass scale.
When Vaculík finished speaking, the hall erupted in enthusiastic applause, and I think most of us, for a moment at least, experienced enormous and liberating relief that this was precisely what we felt ourselves but were unable, or lacked the courage, to put into words.
For their part, the party delegates did not even wait for the ovation to end but rose and demonstratively stormed out. The leader of the party delegation said—but only the next day—that not even the most primitive anticommunist propaganda would dare voice such an appraisal.
At that moment, it was as if many of my colleagues had woken from a delirium and then descended into gloom.
Yes, we’d had our say, but they held the reins of power. They’d made it clear that we had ove
rstepped a boundary that they had graciously shifted just a bit toward freedom. What would happen now?
All these speeches ended in the apparent and total defeat of everyone who held a different opinion of how the country might be ruled.
Our proposal for a new committee of the Writers’ Union was killed by the party bureaucracy, which then filled the committee with people it considered obedient. Literární noviny was taken out of the hands of our own union, and the editorial board dismissed. There were rumors that other union journals were under threat. But most likely all that would happen was that prominent writers would be deprived of Dobříš Castle—the horror.
Some of the speeches, of course, could not be published. These included, especially, Vaculík’s, so it was copied, and hundreds of copies began to circulate among the populace.
At the same time, it turned out that the regime no longer dared resort to more brutal and repressive measures; no one was arrested or interrogated.
Upon the determination of the presidium of the Central Committee, a disciplinary commission was formed, aimed against the primary persons involved in the writers’ revolt who were at the same time members of the Communist party: Kohout, Liehm, Vaculík, and myself.
Because I was almost completely forbidden to speak at the hearing, I subsequently wrote a brief letter in which I defended my views. I wrote that I had sought to understand and find sympathy with everything that went on, from the wrongdoing that took place in establishing the cooperatives to the arrest of my father. I continued:
I realized that everything could be comprehended (that is, everything could be explained by the occasion and the needs of a given situation), and in this ability to “comprehend” lies an inherent danger for any kind of human, let alone creative, activity. To comprehend something does not mean to resign oneself to it. I am not a politician. As a writer, if I were to resign myself to the existence of censorship, given the way it is today and the way I spoke about it in my contribution to the congress, . . . I would have to be somehow corrupt and internally divided. For one cannot expect me to write counter to my conscience and convictions. How then could I welcome the prior restraint placed upon me?