1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  When it was time for Cohn-Bendit to appear before a judge, he realized that by coincidence, it was the same week as the scheduled trial in Warsaw of the Polish student movement leaders Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski. Such things had been watched closely back in Paris, especially championed by Alain Krivine and the JCR, who would frequently chant in demonstrations, “Free Kuroń and Modzelewski.” Back in the days when police breaking onto a campus was unthinkable in France, the Trotskyites used to circulate this joke: Who are the best-educated police in the world? The answer: The Polish, because they are always going to the university.

  When Cohn-Bendit went before the judge in a Frankfurt courtroom crowded with his young followers and the judge asked his name, Cohn-Bendit sensed that he had the moment and the audience. He answered in a clear, loud voice, “Kuroń and Modzelewski.”

  “What?” said the judge. “Who?” he demanded, looking as if he were trying to decide if Cohn-Bendit was a lunatic.

  “What?” muttered his young supporters. “Who? What did he say?”

  Cohn-Bendit realized that no one in the courtroom, including the judge, knew who Kuroń and Modzelewski were. He had to explain that they were Polish dissidents, about the open letter and the student movement, and that their trial was this week. By the time it was all clear, the moment had been lost. Nothing kills drama like a thorough explanation, as Abbie Hoffman had pointed out.

  “May ’68: the beginning of a long struggle.” 1968 Paris student silk-screen poster.

  (Galerie Beaubourg, Vence)

  CHAPTER 13

  THE PLACE TO BE

  Springtime will be beautiful; when the rapeseed is in blossom, truth will have had its victory.

  —Czech student slogan, 1968

  AS THE COLD, WET DAYS grew longer and warmer, and the sun returned to dark, old Prague, the city’s young people became infected with a sense of optimism that could be found in few places that spring. The Paris talks showed no signs of bringing the Vietnam War to an end; the war in Biafra was starving children; there seemed no hope for peace in the Middle East; the student movement had been crushed in Poland, France, and Germany—but in Prague there was optimism or, at least, determination. New clubs opened, though it took a few demonstrations to get them open, with young men in long hair, women in miniskirts and velvet boots and fishnet stockings as in Paris, and jukeboxes playing American music.

  Thousands of people in Prague, especially the young, had taken to the streets on February 15 to celebrate the Czechoslovakian hockey team’s victory over the undefeated Soviet team five to four in the winter Olympics in Grenoble, France—and it seemed they hadn’t left the streets since. They discussed the game for weeks. It was a widespread belief that if Novotny´ had stayed in power, somehow the Czechoslovakian team would not have been allowed to win. No one could explain how Novotny´ would have stopped it. It was simply that with Novotny´ nothing was possible, while without him everything seemed possible. And while the news from neighboring Poland was depressing, the Czechoslovakian press was covering the student movement there with a candor and openness that was exciting, even shocking, to its audience.

  The news media—print, radio, and television—were still controlled almost entirely by the government, but to the utter amazement of their readers, listeners, and viewers, the government was using the press to promote the idea of democracy—communist democracy, it was always careful to emphasize. The independent and reform-minded Writers Union, once considered a dissident group, was given permission to start its own magazine, Literarni Listy—Literary Journal—though it did have to struggle to get a sufficient allotment of paper for the weekly. That was often the way things now worked. The top officials would open the way, but lesser bureaucrats would still try to obstruct. As time went on and Dubek purged more and more of the old guard, fewer of these incidents occurred.

  The protocol officials paid a visit to the new leader and suggested that Dubek’s shabby hotel room was not an appropriate residence. They showed him a number of houses, which he said were “too big for my family’s needs and my taste.” Finally he accepted a four-bedroom house in a suburb.

  For a man of communist training, schooled in a foggy rhetoric left to interpretation, Dubek was turning out to have a startling directness and simplicity to his message. People were finding him not only clear but even likable. He said, “Democracy is not only the right and chance to pronounce one’s own views, but also the way in which people’s views are handled, whether they have a real feeling of co-responsibility, co-decision, whether they really feel they are participating in making decisions and solving important problems.”

  The people took him at his word. Meetings became lengthy debates. The Congress of Agricultural Cooperatives, normally a dull, pre-dictable event, turned into a rowdy affair with farmers actually voicing their grievances to the government—demanding more democratic collectives, lobbyists to represent peasant interests, and benefits comparable to those for industry. The sixty-six-district Party meetings around the country in March were equally frank and raucous. Thousands of youth cross-examined government officials and stamped their feet and booed what they thought were unacceptable responses.

  Many inside and outside the country wondered, as did Brezhnev, if Dubek had gone further than he meant to and was now losing control. “Freedom,” wrote Paris Match, “is too strong an alcohol to be used pure after a generation of a dry regime. Dubek is from the elite of the Soviet Union—a Communist, after all. Is it possible that he has gotten carried away with the forces he has liberated? And that he will try, too late, to put the brakes on?”

  Having been raised in its hinterlands, Dubek thought he had a deep understanding of the Soviet Union. But he could only guess at the inner workings of the Brezhnev government. He had never been close to Brezhnev and had never felt a rapport with him. Dubek wrote in his memoirs, “It is Brezhnev who always brings to mind the not entirely welcome Russian custom of male kissing.”

  The Czechoslovakian people pushed to get as much as quickly as possible, so that it would be too late to go back. But Dubek knew that he had to be clearly in charge of events. He would complain to colleagues that the people were pushing too hard. “Why do they do this to me?” he said more than once to Central Committee secre-tary Zdenek Mlynár. “They would have been afraid to do it under Novotny´. Don’t they realize how much harm they are causing me?” The government continually warned the people that reform must not go too quickly. Dubek’s mistake, as he later admitted, was not understanding that he had a limited time. He thought that by going gradually, he could bring his allies, the Soviets, with him. Dubek was careful, in almost every speech he made, to once again declare the loyalty of Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union, its contempt for the pro-Nazi West Germans, and its admiration and friendship with East Germany. If true, this last was an unreciprocated friendship. East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht was one of Dubek’s harshest critics.

  It was difficult to go far with reforms while Novotny´ was still president. But a series of outrageous corruption scandals involving him and his son made it possible to remove him from his second post only months after he was ousted as Party chairman. At the last moment he tried to develop a following, by suddenly becoming a “regular guy,” being seen having beers with the boys in working-class bars. But he was a deeply disliked figure. On March 22, with no other possible choice, he resigned from the presidency.

  Dubek did not have a free hand in naming Novotny´’s replacement because it was critical that the new president be someone who would not only work with him, but also please, or at least not enrage, Brezhnev. Various groups wrote letters suggesting different candidates. It was the only open discussion of an appointment for head of government in the history of the Soviet bloc. The students favored forty-seven-year-old Cestmír Cisar, a known reformer and somewhat charismatic television personality whose liberal ideas had met with disfavor in the Novotny´ regime. He was exactly the kind of candidate who would not ease Moscow’
s fears.

  The intelligentsia and some of the students also liked Josef Smrkovsky, age fifty-seven, whose popularity was enhanced by an attack on him from the East German government. In the end, Dubek chose the least popular of the three top candidates, seventy-two-year-old retired general Ludvik Svoboda, a hero of World War II who had fought with the Soviets. The other contenders were given important but lesser positions. The students in the new Czechoslovakia let their disappointment be known by demonstrating for Cisar. The demonstration, in itself something unheard of, went on for hours undisturbed, and at midnight the students moved to Communist Party headquarters and shouted their demand to speak with Dubek.

  This was in March, when in neighboring Poland students were being clubbed to the ground for demanding freedom of speech. Dubek was at home when he was told of the student demonstration. He reacted as though this were the normal way things were done here in the Communist People’s Republic: He went over to Party headquarters to talk to the students. He tried to explain his choice to them, saying the other candidates were needed in other places in government, and he assured them that Cisar would have an important role in the Central Committee. One student asked Dubek, “What are the guarantees that the old days will not be back?”

  Dubek responded, “You yourselves are the guarantee. You, the young.”

  Was it possible to have a communist democracy in the Soviet bloc? Some were daring to hope. But the students took Dubek at his word, that they were the guarantors, so when Svoboda was installed as president, as protest, and perhaps also just to say that the students of Czechoslovakia could have a sit-in, too, they staged one that lasted for hours.

  When spring, with all its promise, came to Prague, not everyone was happy. In the month of April there was an average of a suicide a day among politicians, starting with Jozef Brestansky, the vice president of the Supreme Court, who was found hanging from a tree in the woods outside of the capital. He had been working on a massive new project attempting to undo miscarriages of justice from the 1950s. It was believed the judge feared that his role in the sentencing of several innocent people was about to be revealed. Such revelations were surfacing every day, and television was playing a prominent role. Victims were being interviewed on television. Even more shocking, some of the perpetrators were interviewed on television, with viewers across the country watching them squirm as they gave their evasive answers. Camera crews also traveled throughout the country, filming the points of view of ordinary people. What resulted was a national debate about the injustices of the past two decades under communist rule.

  The mass rallies and public meetings that began in the winter became widespread in the spring, and many were shown on televi-sion. Students and workers were seen challenging government officials with tough, even hostile, questions. In a country where most officials were gray bureaucrats little known to the public, the officials who played best to cameras and spoke best to microphones—like Josef Smrkovsky—were now becoming national media stars.

  If, as some suspected, Dubek hoped to satisfy the public with a small taste of democracy, that was not what was happening. The more they got, the more they wanted. Increasingly the demand was heard for opposition political parties. The Literarni Listy frequently championed this idea, as did playwright Václav Havel and philosopher Ivan Svitak, who wrote an article contending that there had been no reforms, just a few measures that had slipped by because of a power struggle. According to Svitak, the entire Party apparatus had to be uprooted. “We must liquidate it or it will liquidate us.” The press, both print and broadcast, were in the vanguard of political reform. They were well aware that although the state censors were not censoring anymore, they still had their positions. The press wanted a law that banned censorship. One radio editor said, “We have press freedom only on the promise of the Party, and that is democracy on recall.” Dubek warned of excesses. Though he did not say so, he must have understood that Brezhnev would never tolerate relinquishing the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.

  In April Dubek issued the Action Program of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, which spoke of a “new model of socialist democracy.” At last the official positions of the Dubek regime were stated, declaring the equality of Czechs and Slovaks, that the aim of government was socialism, and that personal and political beliefs could not be subject to secret police investigations. It denounced abuses of the past and the monopoly of power by the Communist Party.

  Articles in Pravda in Moscow made it clear that the Soviets were not pleased. Pravda wrote of “bourgeois elements” undermining socialism and by summer was writing of anti-Soviet propaganda on Czech television. One of the problems was that efforts to investigate crimes of the past kept ending up on trails that led to Moscow. There was the mystery of Jan Masaryk, for example. Masaryk had been the Czech foreign minister and son of the founding father, who two days after the communist coup in 1948 jumped, fell, or was thrown from a window to his death. The subject had been untouchable for twenty years, but the Czechs wanted at last to resolve what had happened. On April 2 the Prague weekly student paper carried an article by Ivan Svitak demanding the case be reopened. He noted evidence connecting a Major Franz Schramm to the case. Schramm had gone on to become a liaison officer between Czechoslovakian and Soviet security police. Both Czechoslovakian and foreign press discussed the hypothesis that Masaryk was murdered on the direct orders of Stalin. In some stories, Soviet agents had pulled Masaryk from his bed, dragged him to the window, and thrown him out. Investigations into injustices of the 1950s also led to the Soviets. But this was not a time when the Soviet Union was prepared to review the crimes of Stalin, since the two top figures, Brezhnev and Premier Aleksei Kosygin, had been not insignificant figures in his regime.

  May Day in most of the communist world was the occasion for a very long military parade displaying very expensive weapons and even longer speeches. But in Prague a touch of the ancient rite of spring had always remained. Three years earlier Allen Ginsberg had been crowned King of May in Prague, shortly before being expelled. This May Day people poured into the streets and passed before the official reviewing stand carrying signs and flags. Some carried American flags. Some carried Israeli flags. If it was forbidden last year, it was fashionable this year. Among the signs:

  Fewer monuments more thoughts

  Make love, not war

  Democracy at all costs

  Let Israel live

  I would like to increase our population but I have no apartment

  The official guests on the reviewing stand were becoming uncomfortable. The Bulgarian ambassador left in anger after seeing a sign stating that Macedonia, which Bulgaria claimed, belonged to Yugoslavia. The crowd surrounded Dubek. Hundreds of people tried to shake the hand of the tall, smiling leader. The police stepped in to rescue him, and then, remembering that police force had been used the year before, a Prague Party official went to the microphone to apologize and explain that too many people had crowded the first secretary. The police had not been violent, and the crowd seemed to understand. But the representatives of other Soviet bloc countries were shocked by how things were done here. That night demonstrators marched to the Polish embassy to protest Poland’s treatment of students and the anti-Zionist campaign that was continuing to drive Jews from their Polish homeland. Two nights later there were more protests against Poland. Then, abruptly, Dubek left for Moscow.

  The lack of explanation produced considerable anxiety in Czechoslovakia. Nor were the Czechs calmed by a communiqué from Dubek saying that it was “customary among good friends not to hide behind diplomatic politeness” and so the Soviets had been forthright in expressing concern that “the democratization process in Czechoslovakia” was not an attack on socialism. He seemed to be saying that their concern was a reasonable one, and he added that the Czechoslovakian Communist Party had often warned against such “excesses.” The statement did not in the least reassure his people, and the trip did not appear to calm the Soviets.


  It was not easy to grab world attention on May 9, 1968. Columbia and the Sorbonne had been closed. Students were building barricades in the streets of Paris. Bobby Kennedy won the Indiana primary, securing his place as a contender for the nomination. Peace talks opened in Paris. Investors went on a buying spree. Competing with these stories was a rumor that huge numbers of Soviet troops stationed in East Germany and Poland were heading for the Czechoslovakian border. Reporters who attempted to go to the border region to confirm this were stopped by Polish roadblocks. The day before, Bulgaria’s Zhivkov, East Germany’s Ulbricht, Hungary’s Kádár, and Poland’s Gomułka had met in Moscow and issued a communiqué on Czechoslovakia that was so intricately worded and evasive, even by communist standards, that no one could interpret what it was attempting to convey. Had they decided on invasion?

  The following day the Czech news agency reported that these were normal Warsaw Pact military maneuvers about which they had been forewarned. No one inside or outside the country completely believed this, but at least the crisis seemed to be over—for now.

  With the new freedom in Czechoslovakia came an explosion of culture. Thin young men in blue jeans with long hair sold tabloids with listings of rock, jazz, and theater. Prague, which had always been a theater city, had twenty-two theaters offering plays in the spring of 1968. Tad Szulc of The New York Times asserted enthusiastically, “Prague is essentially a Western-minded city in all things from the type and quality of its cultural life to the recent mania for turtleneck sweaters.” He observed that not only artists and intellectuals but bureaucrats in the ministries and even taxi drivers were wearing turtlenecks in a wide range of colors.

  May Day parade in Prague, 1968.