The New York Review Abroad

by Robert B. Silvers

  There are rocks ahead here. For the issue is not just democracy as such; it is also the degree of self-government to be enjoyed by the two nation(alitie)s within the federal state.

  But before anyone can discuss this, a group of students come on stage, dressed comically as young pioneers: white blouses, red bows, the girls’ hair in pigtails. It is the students’ Committee for a More Joyful Strike. We have come, they say, to cheer you up—and to make sure that you don’t turn into another politburo. Then they hand out little circular mirrors to each member of the plenum.

  Back to business. Point three reads:

  The prime minister in yesterday’s negotiations with the CF said that he wished to discuss with us the members of the new cabinet. The CF does not aspire to any ministerial post, but would like to suggest to the prime minister that the minister of national defense be a civilian who has not compromised himself and is a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, while the minister of the interior be a person who has not compromised himself, is a civilian and is not a member of the Party. This suggestion was given to the prime minister in the course of this morning.

  In fact the suggestion came, drafted by Havel, from his dressing room to the “crisis staff” dressing room, and was agreed on within a few minutes. A little afterthought: Oh, and by the way, you can’t have the interior ministry any more!

  Who wants to speak at the press conference? No takers. People have to be press-ganged to face the press.

  Should we talk about this as a revolution? someone asks. For, after all, “in our linguistic context” the word “revolution” has a clear subtext of violence. A “peaceful revolution” sounds like a contradiction in terms. A rather academic point, you might think. But actually a great deal of what is happening is precisely about words: about finding new, clear, true words rather than the old, prefabricated, mendacious phrases under which they have lived for so long. The drafting committees try to ensure that from the outset the Forum’s statements are in a new, plain language. Alas, they do not always succeed. The communiqués, with their repetition of abbreviations—CF and PAV—soon begin to sound a little like the old officialese.

  7:30 PM. Press conference. The communiqué. News of the Federal Assembly vote. Václav Klaus smilingly reports a press interview with the deposed Party leader, Miloš Jakeš, in which he said that the Forum is well organized. “I’m sorry to say,” Klaus comments, “that even on this point we can’t agree with him.” The issue of academics sacked after 1969. We are already drawing up a list of those who should be reinstated, says a student leader. But how would they find places for them? “I can assure you that we have quite enough very incompetent professors.…”

  Day Fourteen (Thursday, November 30). 4 PM. Plenum. The first topic is the internal organization of the Forum “coordinating center.” Ivan Havel, whose subject is cybernetics, has produced a most impressive and logical plan, now displayed on a blackboard on stage. Suddenly the theater looks like a lecture room: the revolution has become a seminar.

  One of the issues being discussed in the corridors is how to change the composition of the Federal Assembly. Once again, there is the conflict between the moral imperative of democracy and the political imperative of swift, effective action. There is a legal provision by which members of parliament can be “recalled,” that is, removed, on a vote of the parliament itself, and replaced by new nominated—not freely elected—members. This method was used to purge the parliament after the Soviet invasion. Now Professor Jicinský, a constitutional lawyer who was himself removed from the parliament by this method, proposes to hoist the Communists with their own petard. Others say: but this is undemocratic, there should at least be free elections in the vacated constituencies (as, incidentally, has happened in Hungary). But this would take much longer, and time is what they do not have. They need a more representative assembly, now. So can you take an undemocratic shortcut to democracy?

  Meanwhile, a Forum delegation has the first direct, bilateral meeting with Party leaders. The Party side is led by Vasil Mohorita, who, as head of the official youth movement, licensed the students’ demonstration that started it all, and then agreed to a statement condemning the use of violence against the demonstrators. Perhaps he is the looked-for partner in the Party?

  After the television news, there is a long interview with Zdenek Mlynár, a leading member of the Dubcek leadership in 1968. He was invited to Prague from his exile in Vienna by the new Party leader, Karel Urbánek, and rushed to a meeting with him after crossing the border in the dead of night. In their desperation, the Party leaders are turning for advice to, and hoping to win back, the old Communists, whom they expelled (some half a million of them) and defamed after the invasion. Mlynár is introduced on television as a “political scientist from Innsbruck.” He gives a highly eloquent performance, stressing the importance of the international context, as at all the previous turning points in Czechoslovakia’s history, in 1918, in 1938, in 1948, in 1968.… What he does not spell out is the concrete steps needed to dismantle the Communist system. At the end of the interview you feel that he is still ultimately pleading, like Dubcek, for the concepts of 1968, for a reformed communism called “socialism with a human face”—in short, for an idea whose time has gone.

  Later in the evening, I walk with the theater director Petr Oslzlý through the impossibly beautiful streets of the old town, to the small Theater on a Balustrade, where Havel’s first plays were performed in the early 1960s. Today, like all the other theaters, it becomes the setting for an improvised happening. After a short talk by an economist, and a discussion with an exiled choreographer about how theaters are financed in the West, there is a Czech country-and-western group. In what might be called Czenglish they sing: “I got ol’ time religion.…”

  Day Fifteen (Friday, December 1). Pavel Bratinka sits in his stoker’s hut at the metro building site, with a huge pile of coal outside the door, a makeshift bed, junk-shop furniture, and he says: “On the whole I favor a bicameral legislature.” He has been studying these issues for years, politics and law and economics, writing articles for the underground press, and occasionally for Western publications. With him, one has that rare experience of someone who has really thought his political views through for himself, not taking anything for granted. He is therefore unmatchably confident of the positions he takes up: positions which in American terms would be considered neoconservative. I have known him for several years, and always treasured his explosive intellectual wrath. But this conversation is unique. For while we still sit in the grimy hut, Pavel in his enormous, leather-reinforced stoker’s trousers, I think that, within a few months, he will actually be sitting, in a smart suit, in the new lower house of a real parliament.

  5 PM. Plenum. Several people have been nominated already for the “crisis staffs” over the weekend. Are there any more volunteers? This is a critical weekend, since Sunday is the deadline set by the Forum for the announcement of the new government, and they will then have to react to Adamec’s list. Effectively, almost anyone from among this miscellaneous group could appoint himself to participate in the crucial decision. But everyone is simply exhausted after a fortnight of revolution. Their wives and children are complaining. And damn it, it is the weekend. So the list of volunteers grows only slowly.

  The meeting wakes up when a burly farmer arrives, having just successfully disrupted an official congress of agricultural cooperatives. He reads out—no, he elocutes—a rousing statement, beginning, “We the citizens …,” and calling for everything from freedom to fertilizers. Then he asks for speakers from the Forum to come out into the countryside. People in the country, he says, think Charter 77 is a group of former prisoners.

  After seven, Havel and Petr Pithart return, also exhausted, from their five-hour-long negotiations with the Czech (as opposed to the federal) prime minister, František Pitra. Here, too, the central issue was the composition of a new government, and changes in those arrangements (e.g., for education) whi
ch are within the competence of this body. Finally they have agreed to a joint communiqué, after arguing for an hour over one word—“resignation.” Havel says: You must understand what it means for these people to sign a joint communiqué with us, whom for twenty years they have regarded—or at least treated—as dangerous criminals.

  The early hours. The king of Bohemia arrives back in his basement pub. “Ah, pane Havel!” cries a girl at a neighboring table, and sends over her boyfriend to get an autograph on a cigarette packet. Havel is a Bohemian in both senses of the word. He is a Czech intellectual from Bohemia, with a deep feeling for his native land. But he is also an artist, nowhere happier than in a tavern with a glass of beer and the company of pretty and amusing friends. Short, with light hair and moustache, and a thick body perched on small feet, he looks younger than his fifty-three years. Even in quieter times, he is a bundle of nervous energy, with hands waving like twin propellers, and a quite distinctive, almost Chaplinesque walk: short steps, slightly stooping, a kind of racing shuffle. He wears jeans, open shirts, perhaps a corduroy jacket, only putting on a suit and tie under extreme duress: for example, when receiving one of those international prizes. Negotiations with the government, by contrast, do not qualify for a suit and tie. His lined yet boyish face is constantly breaking into a winning smile, while from inside this small frame a surprisingly deep voice rumbles out some wry remark. Despite appearances, he has enormous stamina. Few men could have done half of what he has done in the last fortnight and come out walking, let alone talking. Yet here he is, at one o’clock in the morning, laughing as if he made revolutions every week.

  Day Sixteen (Saturday, December 2). A shabby back room, with a broken-down bed and a girlie calendar on the wall. On one side, the editors of a samizdat—but soon to be legal—paper. On the other side, Havel, the head of the Stockholm-based Charter 77 Foundation, František Janouch, and, from Vienna, the chairman of the International Helsinki Federation, Prince Karl von Schwarzenberg, with tweed jacket and Sherlock Holmes pipe. Arrangements are to be made for the newly legal paper. The Prince takes note of their needs. At one point, there is talk of some fiscal permission required. Havel takes a typewritten list of names out of his bag, and finds the name of the finance minister. “Does anyone know him?” he jokes. Silence. Schwarzenberg says: “What kind of country is this, where one doesn’t know the minister?”

  Suddenly people have red, white, and blue badges saying “Havel for President.” They are made, I am told, in Hungary. Havel shyly says, “May I have one?” and pops it into his pocket.

  In the evening there is a ceremony on the stage of the Magic Lantern to thank the staff for their help, since on Monday they are to resume more normal performances. After short speeches, the lights go down, a fireworks display is projected onto the backdrop, and everyone joins in signing the Czech version of “We Shall Overcome,” swaying from side to side with hands raised in the V-for-Victory sign. Then we drink pink champagne. Emerging from the auditorium, I see a solitary figure standing in the foyer, with half-raised glass, indecisively, as if pulled in four directions at once by invisible arms. It is Havel. We sit down on a bench and he rumbles confidentially: “I am just engaged in very important negotiations about …”—at which point a pretty girl comes up with another bottle of champagne. Then someone with an urgent message. Then another pretty girl. Then Prince Schwarzenberg. I never do get his account of those vital negotiations.

  Day Seventeen (Sunday, December 3). Another stage, another founding meeting, this time of the new writers’ union, in the Realistic Theater. Havel says a few words and is just slipping away when they haul him back on stage, and tell him he must be chairman of the new union. Elected by acclamation, he makes his racing shuffle to the microphone and says thank you, yes, thank you, and he is frightfully sorry but he really has to dash … which he does, for they are about to make known the proposed composition of Adamec’s new government.

  And a very bad composition it is too. Despite Adamec’s solemn declaration about proposing a “broad coalition” government of experts, and despite the deletion of the leading role of the Party from the constitution, no less than sixteen out of the twenty-one proposed members of the government are Party members. Among them are almost no experts, but some very compromised figures, such as the foreign minister, Jaromír Johannes. Clearly this is unacceptable.

  Crisis meeting in the smoking room. What is to be done? Some say that the Forum must go for what the people obviously want: a real government of experts led by Komárek. Others say that is impossible, and Komárek is not the right man. Professor Jicinský, the constitutional lawyer, points out that the Forum is in danger of painting itself into a constitutional corner: for if they don’t accept the government, and demand the President’s resignation by next Sunday, then they could end up with no constitutional authority in the land except the old and corrupt parliament. A confused discussion ends in general agreement that the Forum must demand the further reconstruction of the government, backing this up with a demonstration on Wenceslas Square tomorrow afternoon, and the threat of a general strike a week from Monday. Petr Pithart, now a central figure, is chosen to deliver the Forum’s reaction on television this evening, along with a student, an actor, and Petr Miller, with the worker’s muscle at the end. They hurry off down into the stuffy, overheated dressing rooms to draft the statements, together with the master draughtsman, Havel. Now there is no pink champagne and no laughter. It is too serious a business.

  But later in the evening there is a moment, if not for laughter, then at least for a quiet tear. There is a concert “for all right-thinking people,” a concert to celebrate the revolution. When Marta Kubišová comes on stage, the audience erupts in the kind of applause that usually only follows a brilliant performance. But they are not applauding her singing. They are applauding her silence. Years of silence. For Marta Kubišová, one of the most popular singers of the Sixties, has not been allowed to appear in public in her native land since she signed Charter 77. When the applause finally subsides, a girl presents her with a bunch of flowers, “one for each lost year.” A fragile, gentle figure—now in early middle age—Marta Kubišová is so overwhelmed that she can hardly speak, let alone sing. “Thank you, thank you,” she whispers into the microphone. Then, with a friend supporting her, she sings: “The times they are a changin’ …” It is a moment of joy, but with an inner core of bitter sadness. For to most of her audience the songs she sings are ancient history—the sounds of the Sixties.

  Day Eighteen (Monday, December 4). Three forty-five. Wenceslas Square. Despite the freezing cold, the demonstration will be huge, and a success. Of course it will. Everyone knows it. They file into the square slowly and matter-of-factly, as if they had been doing this for years. A few minutes before four, they start warming-up with the familiar chants, “Now’s the time!” “Resignation!” and ringing the keys. “Long live the students” they cry—is there another city in the world where you would hear that? “Long live the actors.”

  Then come the official—that is, official unofficial—speakers, slowly reading rather complicated statements, full of “CF and PAV.” “Long live the Forum!” they chant, nonetheless. Loud support for the general strike on December 11. A fine, theatrical performance by Radim Palouš, who reads out the proposal to recall compromised members of the Federal Assembly, such as—pause—and then, like a whiplash: “Jakeš.” Whistles and jeers. And so on down the list of gibbering thugs: Fojtík, Indra, Bilak. “Let it be done,” says the crowd. And from one corner: “Do it like the Germans!” (Meaning the East Germans, for this morning brought the news of Erich Honecker et al. being expelled from the Party, and placed under house arrest.) But “like the Germans” is how the Forum leadership does not want to do it. They want to do it like the Czechs, that is, gently, without hatred and revenge.

  Finally, the bell-clear voice of Václav Malý reading the Forum statement: the demand for free elections by the end of June 1990 at the latest, with a new indica
tion that the Forum will propose or endorse candidates; the formation of a genuine coalition government by next Sunday, otherwise the Forum will propose its own candidate; the Forum and the PAV declaring themselves to be the guarantors of the transition to a democratic state based on the rule of law. “Long live the Forum!” Then, in a last touch which verges on kitsch, the pudgy pop star Karel Gott (a housewives’ darling) and the exiled Karel Kryl come out onto the balcony together, to lead the singing of the national anthem(s), the slow, heart-rending first verse in Czech, the sprightly, dance-rhythm second verse in Slovak.

  Up the street to my hotel, where the television brings news of the successful Malta summit, of Gorbachev’s subsequent meeting with Warsaw Pact leaders in Moscow, and then, separately, with Urbánek and Adamec. Then a report about the roundup of Communist leaders in East Germany. Later, a flash: the five Warsaw Pact states that invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 have formally renounced and condemned this as an intervention in Czechoslovakia’s internal affairs.

  So every schoolboy can see which way the external winds are blowing. No doubt this will be a week of tense and tortuous negotiation. But it is hard to see what alternative the authorities have, other than to make further concessions. They are caught between the hammer of popular revolt and the anvil of a completely transformed external context, symbolized by the Malta summit and that Warsaw Pact statement: “From Yalta to Malta” for the world; from Husák to Havel for Prague.

  A late-night walk through the old town, veiled in a mist. After twenty long years, the sleeping beauty of central Europe has woken up. The improvised posters on the shop windows deserve an article in themselves. “Unity is strength,” they say. “People, open your eyes.” And: “The heart of Europe cries for freedom.”