by Ivan Klíma
Of course they ousted us from the party; Pavel Kohout got off with only a reprimand.
They insisted that I report to their palace to be informed of their verdict and hand in my party card, but I had not the slightest desire to set eyes on them again. After receiving two reminders, I replied:
Dear Comrade,
I am aware via the foreign press of the results of the disciplinary proceedings. It therefore seems to me unnecessary to be made aware of the results yet again. Furthermore, I cannot bring with me my party card because I have surrendered it to our constituent organization.
I did not add that I had surrendered it with relief.
Thus, after fourteen years, concluded my membership in the Communist Party. What also ended was my attempt to understand what had happened. Everything that they had called wrongdoing, error, or a necessary sacrifice on the path toward Communism, but that caused the tragic deaths of many people, was merely a necessary, concomitant phenomenon of the building of a new society. This was the Communist Party under whose leadership a society was supposed to arise that was less selfish, more peaceful, and at the same time wealthy.
I admit that not even at this moment did I realize that the party of which I had been a member represented a nefarious confederacy that in the name of grand objectives stole the property of society and destroyed what had taken generations to create. But I did know for certain that in the name of some sort of future objectives, the party had deprived the people of freedom, usurped all power, destroyed political life, falsified history, mocked the act of voting, and transformed a free country into a colony.
I wasn’t much interested in economics and did not ponder whether a planned economy could actually work or whether the entire concept of socialism was an unrealizable utopia. But I was certain that without unencumbered scholarship and free clashes of opinion in which no subject could be forbidden, no society could evolve. Thus the party that defended its dogmas and persecuted all who refused to subordinate themselves to it was leading its society to ruin.
The fact that they had banned me from the party without even trying to understand what I was saying made me bitter. I was convinced that everything I had been trying for years to achieve and everything that I demanded was correct, even necessary, if society was not to fall to ruin.
At the same time I felt free. I was no longer a member of an organization in which a person was required to submit to the will and despotism of those who, by whatever means, had worked their way into a leadership. In the party, having one’s own opinion, let alone expressing it, was considered a deed for which one was at first sent to the hangman, later sent to prison, and later merely ostracized.
Surprisingly, I did not have any great fear of further punishment, whether I would be allowed to publish anything or whether I would even be able to find a job. I was thirty-six, and it was high time to tread a path that was, as much as possible, not subordinated to anyone who had arrogated to himself the right to define for me what was correct and what was not.
PART II
14
Just after the leadership of the Writers’ Union was dissolved, every single one of our editors was fired during the summer of 1967. I had a meeting at the writers’ club with a German journalist. (Journalists are always most interested in someone who has something scandalous going on around him.) He wanted to know if there had been an agreement among us before the writers’ congress and if I was worried I would be brought before a court or at least banned from publishing.
He was surprised that I didn’t think I’d be arrested, nor did I think I would have much trouble finding employment. He said he wished he shared some of my optimism. We said goodbye and parted on the corner by the National Theater. I’m not sure why, but I looked around and noticed a young man wearing jeans and a checkered shirt who seemed to be trying to conceal himself behind a column near the theater’s entrance.
I set off along the embankment in the direction of my former editorial offices. When I stopped after a moment and looked around again, the same man, not far away on the opposite sidewalk, also halted. Then he pulled out a camera and began photographing the castle.
I was suddenly curious and started wandering aimlessly through the streets of the Old Town. The man in the checkered shirt disappeared, but I was almost certain he was replaced by someone else, this time by a man wearing a short-sleeved shirt.
I’d never been followed before, or at least not that I’d noticed. Even with all my optimism, I had to admit that I’d suddenly found myself in a different category of people—the dubious and suspicious who are kept under surveillance—enemies of socialism.
Literární noviny continued to be published, but its entire orientation had changed. The new editors came from the military press and departments of the Communist Party; most of them, as it became clear after the Soviet occupation, had thereby ensured themselves a career for the next twenty years. Jan Zelenka was the head of the new editorial board. Under his direction, the newspaper tried to attract contributors from among the ranks of its writers, but most of my colleagues from the misappropriated newspaper refused. A letter written by Milan Kundera to Zelenka exemplifies the prevailing mood among the writers at the time.
Comrade Zelenka,
A short time ago you stopped me on the street and we spoke for about three minutes. I have recently learned that you referred to this conversation before a large gathering of students from the departments of law, humanities, and journalism; referred to me intimately by my first name (even though we’ve spoken to each other only twice in our lives); claimed that I regretted my position as I formulated it at the Writers’ Congress and elsewhere, and that I am now on the way to grasping my errors; et cetera, et cetera.
I do not intend to ponder how or why you fabricated this self-criticism, but so that it does not happen again, I must inform you that I would not change a word of what I said at the congress; I disagreed then and disagree now with the encroachment upon Literární noviny (I announced it publicly, after all). I consider your role in this matter extremely cowardly and yourself a preposterous figure.
While most writers boycotted Zelenka’s “G.I. paper,” as they referred to it, those of us who were fired were invited to other journals that had not yet been misappropriated.
It was as if, in a society that had been divided since the end of the war—actually since the beginning of the republic—the dividing line had shifted. Now it was no longer democrats versus followers of the revolutionary dictatorship, Communists versus non-Communists. Instead it was those who were trying to hold on to power versus those who wanted to think and act more freely.
*
My wife and I met now and then with my friends from the editorial board, who would bring me news of battles raging within the leadership of the Communist Party. Apparently there had been arguments, especially between Slovaks and Czechs. The chairman of the Slovak Communists, Alexander Dubček, had criticized First Secretary Antonín Novotný. In his turn, Novotný had treated the Slovaks with haughty disdain on a trip around Slovakia. It all culminated in the city of Martin on a visit to the oldest and most revered cultural institution, the Slovak Matica, where the Slovaks intended to present Novotný with a copy of the 1918 Pittsburgh Agreement that paved the way for the creation of Czechoslovakia. Novotný refused the gift.
Besides conflicts between Czechs and Slovaks, followers of Novotný and devotees of reform were fighting in the Central Committee. The economist Ota Šik gave a long speech criticizing the fact that a small group of conservatives led by Novotný was ruling the country, and he said economic reforms would fail without political reforms. We tried to figure out what he meant and if such reform was even possible in a country ruled by the Communist Party.
On the last day of the year, we invited a few friends over. A minute before midnight the telephone rang, and an unfamiliar voice introduced himself as Borůvka, Borůvka from the Central Committee of the party, he explained. First he wished me a happy New Year and
then he assured me that everything would turn out fine for me and other writers. “Comrade Klíma, please tell your colleagues that everything is about to change completely in the next few days. But we’re also counting on your help and support!”
I didn’t know how to respond. Was this some kind of joke, or a drunken dialer? The voice on the telephone added, “Read Rudé právo and watch the television. You’re going to be surprised!”
I didn’t subscribe to Rudé právo, and we didn’t own a television set.
Astonished by this bizarre communication, I told my friends what I’d just heard.
It was typical of the times that no one knew whether to take this seriously or as a practical joke.
On January 5, 1968, the citizens of Czechoslovakia were informed that Antonín Novotný had stepped down as first secretary of the Communist Party. The Central Committee thanked Comrade Novotný and praised the selfless and meritorious work he had performed on behalf of the party and the republic. Alexander Dubček was elected first secretary (unanimously, as usual). Not even those of my friends who had remained party members knew what to make of this new development. But they understood from experience that as long as a party that alone assumed the right to govern existed in the country, every political change must be preceded by a change in the leading positions of the party.
When I was reading Kafka’s diaries, I was struck by his entry from August 2, 1914. It was very brief. Germany has declared war on Russia—Swimming in the afternoon. I wrote two exclamation points next to it and in the margin penciled: This concurrence of world events and personal history is an inherent aspect of modern literature. More exact would have been: an inherent aspect of human life.
At the end of January, the Writers’ Union announced that the administrative interference in Literární noviny had been politically misguided, and the union should request permission to register the weekly.
At the beginning of February, a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, Josef Smrkovský (only sixteen years earlier sentenced to life in prison), wrote a letter to Rudé právo:
It is necessary to eliminate everything that deformed socialism, everything that corrupted the spirit, everything that inflicted harm on the people and took from them so much of their trust and enthusiasm. We must finalize the rehabilitation of those Communists and others who were innocently sentenced in the political trials. . . . It is up to us Czechs and Slovaks to bravely set out toward uncharted territories and seek our own Czechoslovak Socialist path.
Something like this from a high party functionary would previously have been unthinkable. It was beginning to become apparent that events were occurring that were more significant than the replacement of the first secretary of the ruling party.
On February 20, 1968, our journal was in fact renewed under the name Literární listy. All those who had been fired from the editorial board in the summer of 1967 returned to their positions on Betlémská Street with the feeling that justice had for once prevailed, and we started to prepare the first issue.
Around this time, Ludvík Vaculík, A. J. Liehm, Pavel Kohout, and I were invited to the Municipal Council of the Communist Party, where an apology was transmitted to us from the higher-ups. They decided that our punishment had been an improper administrative response to criticism. Our expulsion from the party and Vaculík’s reprimand were nullified.
The realization that they were thereby acknowledging the truth of what I had claimed at the congress concerning the suppression of freedom of speech blinded me to such an extent that I accepted their decision without mentioning that I did not want their membership card, that I no longer desired to be responsible to any superior committee or party discipline. (Fortunately, a few weeks later, when I was once again banished from the party, no one asked me for any discipline.)
*
It was apparent that with the arrival of Alexander Dubček, the Slovak Communists were acquiring much greater influence. We in the editorial office suffered from what most of Czech society suffered—an ignorance of Slovak conditions, Slovak history. We didn’t even know most of the Slovak politicians. Since I had written two books about Slovakia, some of my colleagues assumed I knew more about the country, but my books had been about the most eastern part of Slovakia, which was a republic within a republic.
Substantial changes were taking place under Dubček. Censorship was abolished in the spring, and important political organizations were being established: the Club of Engaged Independents and the association K231, which brought together political prisoners sentenced in the show trials at the beginning of the ’50s.
Our editor in chief, Milan Jungmann, invited a representative of K231 to our offices. From the chair of this organization, Jaroslav Brodský, I once again heard how little attention the courts, and government offices in general, were giving to reevaluating the trials of those who had been victims of arbitrary despotism even though they had never been Communists. I heard tales about concentration camps in the uranium mines and prisons where priests lived side by side with former democratic politicians and scouts, as well as criminals and swindlers and even the last remnants of Nazis. I was ashamed to confess that much of this was new to me—they wouldn’t have believed me anyway and would have considered it merely a pitiful excuse.
The times did indeed seem favorable for serious changes, but what should be the priorities? What was imperative, and what could be put off for a time? What could we allow ourselves without provoking those whom we referred to as conservatives? What was still acceptable in the eyes of the superpower to the east, the superpower that demanded that no one doubt whatever it proclaimed indubitable?
The launch issue of Literární listy came out on March 1. The first two issues comprised twelve pages just like the previous instantiation of the paper. With the third issue, however, we increased the number of pages to sixteen, and our circulation rose from the previous 120,000 to 270,000, and a few weeks later to 300,000—an unprecedented number for a literary newspaper. (Even during the big news moments we continued to write about literature and culture in general.)
I was put in charge of the so-called opinion pages. I’m not sure if we were aware, but we should have assumed, that these pages would become the most talked-about section of our newspaper.
It was already apparent that the promised reforms would apply to all spheres of life. I started to realize that a couple of editors from our opinion section were not qualified. I recommended we establish several multimember advisory boards composed of specialists, each for a different sphere of societal life. Thus arose our working groups in which we discussed articles on economics, history, philosophy, sociology, and law. The working groups met at least twice a month; the members worked without pay and mainly brought in their own articles.
At first we considered the essential focus to be the rectifications of recent injustices. It was necessary to rehabilitate the unjustly persecuted or sentenced—professors deprived of their positions during the purges, students forbidden to study, the western resistance, works that were not allowed to be published, ideas that the ruling ideologues had designated as erroneous or unfriendly. This was the past of our First Republic.
Soon, however, other points rose to greater significance. We understood that if we did not succeed in removing, or at least limiting, the rule of a single party and renewing democracy, things could always turn around. The first voices demanding a radical change in the political system came from artists in response to a question published in our paper: Whence, With Whom, and Whither?
The philosopher Karel Kosík wrote:
Because the politicians who brought this country to the edge of economic, political, and moral catastrophe still hold powerful and influential positions and are hoping they will survive today’s wave of regeneration, democracy must be vigilant and not forget the fundamental experience of history: politics is decided by power and deeds, not words and promises.
My friend Alexandr Kliment went even farther in his re
sponse:
Renewing political life means finding the courage for free discussion of all vital matters. Such a discussion cannot take place in a privileged party circle; it must include all citizens of the republic. I believe in free elections, a functioning parliamentary opposition, the rehabilitation of public opinion, active neutrality, and the federalization of a neutral state.
Today these demands seem innocuous and obvious, but they seemed at the time more like a dreamy, unrealizable fantasy.
*
In the fourth issue of our journal we published an article titled “The Renaissance of Power” by one of our foremost lawyers, Vladimír Klokočka. He began by discussing power in general:
It is possible to misapply political power as well as steal it. . . . The theft or misapplication of power is still a more advantageous type of criminality than the theft of property. It brings rule not only over property but also over people. [The people] must therefore be protected even from their own representatives and delegates.
One of the most important questions in a modern society is how to control power and by what means we can ensure this control. Ever so cautiously, Klokočka moved on to questions of a legal opposition. The word “opposition” itself must be stripped of its criminal connotations. A healthily functioning society requires opposing opinions. The fundamental question of power is whether opposing opinions will become the basis for organizing interests in the creation of political will, that is, whether opinions will be the foundation for specific political behavior, political action. The idea of the need for an opposition party was concealed behind this formulation.