My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  For one revolution, nobility becomes an ignominious sign; for another, one’s origin or property and resulting wealth. For another it is perhaps religious indifference or another faith, and almost always it is education, decency, and the conviction that one is not prepared to give up personal responsibility. The first great revolution of the twentieth century classified people according to their class origin. Their leaders placed those of the working class at the highest level of values. They still allowed smallholders, but they did not hesitate to divest the other levels of society of their fundamental rights. They tried to abuse some ill-fated individuals; others they banished, interned, or murdered. They murdered even the tsar along with his whole family, including the young children, since the dynasty was a deadly class enemy.

  Another revolution only a few years later classified people according to their racial heritage and placed Germans at the highest level. It did not hesitate to persecute members of other races, and it resolved to exterminate those designated as Jews or Gypsies. As Albert Camus writes: The unavoidable fundamental and intrinsic attribute of most revolutions is murder.

  A society that accepts such aberrant criteria, especially in modern times, cannot operate without inflicting grave trauma on its people. But the revolution takes this into consideration. In the beginning, it has its fiery supporters who are willing to sacrifice everything for their ideals. They believe in their greatness or at least assume they will create personal prosperity. The number of devotees, however, is never enough, so the revolution acquires adherents precisely among those who joined out of calculation or fear, and it succeeds in gaining supporters among those it had unexpectedly elevated. After the victory of the revolution, new members pour into the party, either the Nazi or the Communist. Whatever the party, it will differentiate between “old” and “new” members.

  A common characteristic of every revolution is the co-opting of the dregs of society, whether judged from a material or moral point of view. Revolution offers them social security and inclusion in the functioning of governance, but primarily participation in the spreading of terror and the resulting fear, which in turn provides those beaten-down or inferior with a feeling of satisfaction. No revolution can do without its guard, which it quickly arms and endows with special powers. At its head it places fanatical and fiery leaders: Trotsky, Dzerzhinsky, Yagoda, Yezhov, Röhm, Himmler, Heydrich. Only with them can the government begin its revolutionary terror.

  The architects of the revolution soon realize that there are quite a few who do not long for their rule and rightly fear the impending changes. As time goes by, it turns out that the system the leaders of the revolution are trying to implement on the basis of their spurious visions cannot function. Therefore, they begin to battle for its existence.

  The police no longer pursue only criminals but also pursue those whom it designates as enemies of the new order. Newly appointed judges sit in judgment not in order to strengthen justice but rather to call it into question, in order to make it clear that anyone can be designated an offender and found guilty. The citizen must understand that at any time he can lose his work, his freedom, even his life, and the same can befall his loved ones. The citizen must live in constant fear.

  The first demented adherent of revolutionary terror in the twentieth century, Lenin, announced: You certainly do not believe that we will be victorious if we don’t use the harshest kind of revolutionary terror. . . . If we’re not capable of shooting a White Guard saboteur, what sort of great revolution is it? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush. In his decree “On Red Terror,” he then orders: It is essential to protect the Soviet Republic from class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps. Anyone connected to the White Guard organizations, conspiracies, and rebellions will be shot; the names of all those executed will be published. . . . We shall not hesitate to shoot thousands of people. In the name of the revolution, he and his followers had thousands, hundreds of thousands, and later millions of people murdered.

  Immediately after Hitler became chancellor, the Nazis began to arrest genuine and possible opponents. The arrests increased after the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933. Hitler lost no time in forcing President Hindenburg to issue an “emergency decree,” whereby all basic human rights ceased to be valid, from freedom of the press, expression, and demonstration to even the assurance that no one would be unlawfully deprived of freedom. This opened the door to unlimited terror, which continued for the remaining twelve years of the Nazis’ “thousand-year” Reich.

  In Nuremburg, a Social Democratic representative testified about what had happened to him ten days after the Reichstag fire. Members of the SS and SA came to my home in Cologne and destroyed the furniture and my personal records. I was taken to the Brown House in Cologne, where I was tortured, being beaten and kicked for several hours. Over the course of a single month in Germany, twenty-five thousand people were taken off to concentration camps. Prussian police were allowed to use weapons against enemies of the state, and many people branded as enemies were executed on the spot. Hitler noted somewhat later and in passing: It is a good thing if the fear precedes us that we are exterminating Judaism. The Nazis aroused fear not only among Jews but also among Christians, Communists, Social Democrats, and the democratically minded intelligentsia.

  Fear gives rise to informers and collaborationists. It drives people to the ballot box, where they cast their votes for candidates whom they hate or to whom they are indifferent. They attend demonstrations and applaud murderers who speak from the rostrum. When the mob smashes a window of an enemy of the new order, a Jew or a kulak, those whose windows were not targeted draw their curtains. When the secret police take away the innocent, those innocent who were not taken away pretend to see nothing that does not concern them. When they are summoned, they sign resolutions demanding the death penalty for everyone designated an enemy of the revolutionary state. The regime thereby brazenly pretends that except for a handful of enemies, everyone is its supporter. And the masses that live in fear accept this role and hope that if they display acquiescence, they will be spared.

  Not even the representatives of the regime and the implementers of terror can escape fear.

  The mob in police uniforms then knock on the doors of their houses and lead them off to the torture chambers. With fiendish schadenfreude, they force from them confessions to implicate other revolutionaries. Since the French Revolution, hangmen have received their victims from the ranks of the defeated victors as well. Hence the maxim: Revolution devours its own children. This metaphorical formulation, however, is sentimental and indeed false. Revolution devours its own children along with their parents. It begins to murder not only its victims but also their murderers.

  During the period of the greatest wave of Stalin’s terror, to which hundreds of thousands of “parents and children” fell victim, Stalin delivered a grand speech:

  Some journalists abroad are babbling that the purge of spies, murderers, and evildoers such as Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Jakir, Tukhachevsky, Rosenholz, Bukharin, and other scum has “shaken” the Soviet system, it has injected it with “degeneracy.” This disgusting babble is laughable. . . . Who needs this pitiful band of slaves who sold out? . . . In 1937, Tukhachevsky, Jakir, Uborevich, and other scum were sentenced to death by firing squad. Then elections for the Highest Soviet of the USSR were held; 98.6 percent of voters voted for the rule of the Soviets. At the beginning of 1938, Rosenholz, Rykov, Bukharin, and other scum were sentenced to death by firing squad. Then elections for the Highest Soviet of the federal republics were held; 99.4 percent of all voters voted for the rule of the Soviets. I ask you: Where are there signs of “degeneracy,” and why did not this “degeneracy” appear in the election results?

  Indeed, fear did not fragment the society, for even fragmentation is movement. It killed it. The moment fear, without distinction, seized both the victors and the defeated, the rulers and the ruled, it immobilized the entire complex apparatus because no one dared decid
e anything. Everyone tried to avoid responsibility for this intractable situation. Terror brought society to the edge of annihilation.

  There are only two points of departure in such a state of affairs. The first is war, that is, the transference of terrorist methods onto the international field. The second is the cessation of terror. The first subjugates the citizen even more in the name of war mobilization, but it leads nowhere. In case of a military defeat (such as that suffered by Hitler’s Germany), the revolution along with its ideals and its representatives is swept out, and the country is destroyed. In case of victory (such as that achieved by Stalin’s Soviet Union with the help of democratic powers), society returns to its prewar situation: Terror continues and with it the all-immobilizing fear.

  The other point of departure, which calls for the renewal of at least partial freedom and thereby extricates itself from the rule of fear, likewise does not safeguard the revolution. Revolution and the dictatorship it establishes cannot survive for long without the coregency of fear simply because the ideals forced upon the people have been so compromised that almost no one accepts them.

  Revolutionary power must necessarily die away, sometimes early, sometimes not for several generations. In both cases it leaves behind innumerable dead, a devastated country, an incomprehensible number of personal tragedies, frustrated possibilities, destroyed talents, subverted morals, and the memory of omnipresent fear, which will inhibit for a long time the activity of those who experienced it.

  Abused Youth

  On March 1, 2006, the Czech News Agency reported that around five thousand children from eight to twelve years of age gathered for a demonstration in Karachi, Pakistan, and called for the execution of the authors who caricatured the prophet Muhammad. (The children had certainly never seen the caricatures and had probably never seen a caricature in their lives.) The hijackers of the planes that hit New York and Washington, which took the lives of thousands of civilians in suicide attacks, were young people. Most Muslim suicide bombers are young. It also was young people, even twelve-year-old children armed with machine guns, who fought in most of the African civil and tribal wars. They fought enthusiastically and ruthlessly.

  All totalitarian regimes, all fanatical ideologies see in the young the most appropriate executors of their goals. Here are the words of one of many Socialist songs from the ’50s.

  Forward, boys and girls,

  a new world we are building among perils.

  This one has but little strength,

  thus all must work together at length

  Forward, boys and girls,

  a new world we are building among perils.

  Lenin, Stalin, Gottwald as well,

  them we shall follow and enemies expel.

  The coup was supposed to be a new beginning of history. But there were, and still are, more convenient reasons to celebrate youth. Radicalism belongs more to the young than to the old, just as does the image that the world could be better organized than it ever has been. The young have a tendency to question the values of their parents’ generation and are more open to slogans and simplifying explanations of society’s ills and the promise of a finer world. They cannot oppose a false ideology with their own insufficient life experiences, and they usually lack a deeper understanding of history and the inherent laws of society. On the one hand, the totalitarian regime flatters the young, and on the other it forces upon them its own image of the ideal person and the ideal society.

  In 1920, Lenin outlined his ideal of a young communist:

  The Union of Communist Youth will deserve its name and will show that it is a union of the young Communist generation only by linking up every step in its studies, training, and education with the continuous struggle of the proletarians and the working people against the old society of exploiters. . . . This generation should know that the entire purpose of their lives is to build a Communist society. . . . [Its] morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building a new, Communist society.

  Fifteen or sixteen years later, it was precisely this generation that was killed off in Stalin’s purges, and a new generation of fifteen-year-olds was bombarded with flattery. Pavlik Morozov, who informed on his own parents and fulfilled Cabet’s vision that every citizen will be an informer, became the new official hero and role model recommended to Soviet youth according to Lenin’s theory of the new morality.

  At the same time (1935), Adolf Hitler was embodying his image of the young generation in images that corresponded to his poetic invention: In our eyes, the German youth of the future must be slender and supple, swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel. We must cultivate a new man in order to prevent the ruin of our nation by the degeneration manifested in our age. A year later the Reich government passed a law specifying that, among other things, all German youth besides being reared within the family and school, shall be educated physically, intellectually, and morally in the spirit of National Socialism to serve the people and community, through the Hitler Youth.

  The first of the Ten Commandments for students, delivered in Nazi Germany in 1934, was: It is not necessary to live, but it is necessary that you fulfill your duty to the German people. Whatever you are, you must be German.

  The Nazis emphasized the mission of the people, the Communists the mission of the working class; today’s theoreticians of Muslim fundamentalism emphasize the cleansing mission of their religious faith as revealed in the Koran, from which they select those passages that justify the hatred and violence they commit.

  The youth of postwar Czechoslovakia was an especially propitious section of society upon which Communist propaganda could concentrate. The life experiences of those born during the 1920s and ’30s were one-sided and mostly negative. The way their parents’ generation had organized society seemed unconvincing and had obviously caused, or at least allowed, not only a cruel economic crisis but even the war and an unbelievable number of casualties.

  Politicians and thinkers of the older generation, even those democratically minded ones, admitted their mistakes. The president of the republic, Edvard Beneš, in a speech at the law school where he was receiving an honorary degree shortly after the war, criticized late-nineteenth-century liberalism.

  Politically this is a society with an expanded number of contending and anarchizing political parties, which are subverting the nation as a whole with their battle; economically—it is a society with a highly cultivated culture of capitalism and industrialism, which produces a relentless class struggle between the exploiters and the exploited; socially—it is a society waging an exalted battle between the person of the past with his feudal aristocratic conceptions and the person with egalitarian ideas attempting to assert the equality of people; culturally and artistically—it is a superficial and aestheticizing society, a welter of opinions and chaotic conceptions without any literary or even artistic style; in short, it is a sick society, uncertain, searching for something new and incapable of finding it.

  Even though Beneš reached the conclusion that the new society must be democratic, he defended friendship with the Soviet Union as well as a new social politics: One of the most important issues is to open the gates to social change in the sense of socialism.

  It was not difficult for Communist ideologues to interpret this to the members of the younger generation, who barely remembered the First Republic, as a clear condemnation of liberalism and of an unjust social system, and emphasize the necessity of doing away with the bygone system and replacing it with a Socialist one.

  To the naive or politically inexperienced, it could seem that democrats and Communists were in agreement on the need for societal and economic changes.

  When the Communists achieved power after the February 1948 coup, they sought as quickly as possible to destroy or remove their political opponents from all important positions. It was, however, necessary to replace them posthaste. Suddenly there was an op
portunity not only for the “reliable” ones—genuine believers in Communist ideology, or pragmatic careerists who understood that the new authority would reign for many years—but also, and primarily, for the young, who still had no political past and were now being offered a marvelous future as long as they assumed the proper form. And so, in only a few weeks, the young enthusiasts could become (as long as they underwent the necessary courses) attorneys, judges, teachers, officers, factory directors, even doctors, although they often lacked a degree.

  At the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the ’50s, young people voluntarily and often enthusiastically left home to construct huge smelters in Ostravsko and a Railway of Friendship into eastern Slovakia. News articles and films were produced upon the order of the party, celebrating their heroic feats of labor. Journalists praised these marvelous achievements with the pathos characteristic of the time. These disingenuous campaigns served several purposes. They provided an inexpensive labor force, and participation in a work brigade contributed to the further reeducation of people and transformed them into confirmed disciples of the new regime. At the larger construction sites, the organizers invited young people from democratic countries as well. Thus young adherents of communism from different countries came together to spread revolutionary ideology.