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 Listyfrequently 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.

(Photo by Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos)

It is true that Prague, with its blend of Slavic and German culture, has always seemed more Western than other central European cities. It is the city of Kafka and Rilke, where German is a common second language. This has always been one of its profound differences with Slovakia, whose capital, Bratislava, is not German speaking and is clearly central European.

The leading jazz club in Prague that spring was the Reduta, near the sprawling green mall known as Wenceslas Square. The Reduta was a small room that could comfortably seat fewer than one hundred but always had more crammed into it. Before the Dubek era, this club had been known for the first Czech rock band, Akord Klub. Havel used to go there and wrote, “I didn’t understand the music very well, but it didn’t take much expertise to understand that what they were playing and singing here was fundamentally different from ‘Krystynka’ or ‘Prague Is a Golden Ship,’ both official hits of the time.” When Szulc went there in the spring of 1968, he reported a group doing variations on Dave Brubeck “with a touch of bossa nova.”

Among the theater offered that spring was Who’s Afraid of Franz Kafka?, which had first opened in 1963 when the works of Kafka, previously banned as bourgeois, had become permissible again. The title was intended to resemble that of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?Another theater presented Frantisek Langer’s long-banned work, The Horseback Patrol, about Czech counterrevolutionaries fighting Bolsheviks in 1918. Another drama appearing that spring was Last Stop by Jiri Sextr and Jiri Suchy, considered two of the best playwrights of this 1968 renaissance. Their play is about the fear that the Dubek reforms could be undone and Czechoslovakia could go back to the way it had been before January.

There was a great deal of excitement about the international film festival at the spa of Karlovy Vary because the Cannes Film Festival, three weeks earlier, had been closed by directors Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Lelouch, Louis Malle, and Roman Polanski to show sympathy for the students and strikers. It was hoped that some of the Cannes films, including Alain Resnais’s Je t’aime, je t’aime, would be shown at Karlovy Vary. When Cannes had attempted to show Je t’aime, je t’aime against Resnais’s wishes, actor Jean-Pierre Léaud had physically held the curtains shut to keep it from being projected. Léaud was starring in La Chinoise, Godard’s new film about the New Left. The Karlovy Vary Festival also showed three Czech films that could not be shown at Cannes, including Jiri Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains, which went on to win the 1968 Oscar for best foreign film.

Václav Havel was not among the literati in Prague that spring because he was in New York, one of five hundred thousand Czechoslovakians who traveled abroad in 1968, since travel for the first time in many years was open to anyone. Havel, thirty-one years old, spent six weeks of the Prague Spring working with Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare Festival in the East Village, where The Memorandum, his absurdist comedy about a new language for offices, was produced to reviews that instantly made Havel a recognized name in Western theater. “Wittily thought provoking” and “strangely touching” were among the descriptions in Clive Barnes’s review for The New York Times. The play went on to win an Obie Award. Meanwhile, Havel may have had one of the more interesting glimpses of democracy in America since Tocqueville, frequenting the Fillmore East and other institutions of the East Village and talking to students at riot-torn Columbia University. He returned to Czechoslovakia with psychedelic rock band posters.

A poll was taken from June 30 to July 10 asking people if they wanted the nation to continue with communism or turn to capital-ism. The Czechoslovakian population responded unequivocally—89 percent wanted to stay with communism. Only 5 percent said they wanted capitalism. Asked if they were satisfied with the work of the current government, a third of the respondents, 33 percent, said they were satisfied, and 54 percent said they were partially satisfied. Only 7 percent said they were dissatisfied. Dubek, walking a precarious line with Moscow, was leading a happy, hopeful communist country at home.

But the Soviets were not happy and by July had settled on a choice of three possible solutions. Either they would somehow get the wily Dubek to commit to their program, or the leaders still loyal to Moscow within Czechoslovakia—and they seem to have overestimated how many remained—would take back the country by force, or they would invade. Invasion was by far the least appealing of the three options. It had taken twelve years of difficult diplomacy to recover from the hostility and anger from the West caused by the 1956 invasion of Hungary. An invasion of Czechoslovakia would be even more difficult to explain, because Dubek had gone to great lengths to show that he was not opposing the Soviet Union. Also, the two nations had a long history of friendship, going back to the 1930s, whereas Hungary had been a Nazi ally and an enemy of the Soviets. The Soviets liberated Czechoslovakia, and the Czechs were the one people who voluntarily voted in communism and welcomed an alliance with the Soviets. As the July poll showed, Czechoslovakia was a nation still committed to communism.

Now at last, just as the faltering economy needed it most, Soviet relations with the West were warming. It was called détente. The Johnson administration had worked hard at improved Soviet relations. After long negotiations, the nuclear proliferation treaty had been achieved. In late July, after ten years of on-again, off-again cold war negotiations, a deal between Pan Am and Aeroflot would establish the first direct air service between the Soviet Union and the United States. These were good beginnings to more important openings.

Still, the Soviets had decided that the one thing they could not risk was letting Czechoslovakia drift out of their orbit, to be followed—they imagined—by Romania and Yugoslavia, with the students then taking over in Poland—and after twelve years, how pacified were the Hungarians? Ironically, in all of Dubek’s statements and writings there is no indication that he ever contemplated leaving the Soviet bloc. He clearly recognized that as a line not to be crossed. But the Soviets did not trust him because he would not run his country the way they wanted him to.

Alternative number two, the internal coup, showed little sign of being possible. The Soviets would try solution one, trying one last time to bring Comrade Dubek around before resorting to invasion. There was clearly great disagreement about what to do. Kosygin, for one, appeared to oppose invasion. And the two largest Western Communist Parties, the French and the Italian, sent their leaders to Moscow to argue against invasion.

The Soviets nevertheless began putting the option of an invasion in place so that were it to be decided on, it could roll at the wave of a hand. A huge circle of Warsaw Pact troops, most of them Soviet, backed by massive armored divisions, encircled Czechoslovakia from East Germany across Poland and the Ukraine and arching through Hungary. There may have been hundreds of thousands of troops ready for an order. The only perimeter not facing tanks was the small Austrian border. A media campaign on the terrible antisocialist crimes being carried out in Czechoslovakia was intended to prepare the Soviet people for the idea of an invasion. The East German and Polish leaders were already prepared. In July the Soviets met with Hungary’s Kádár to pressure him. After a July 3 meeting, both Kádár and Brezhnev issued strong statements about “defending socialism.”

Then, as the one last attempt to persuade Dubek, he was ordered to Moscow to discuss the Czech program. Dubek considered this an obnoxious and illegal interference with internal affairs of his country. He put it to the Czechoslovakian presidium, which voted overwhelmingly to turn down the Moscow invitation. How unfortunate that no chronicler was present to record Brezhnev’s reaction to the polite message from Prague, the first time ever that a head of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party had turned down an order from Moscow to attend a meeting.

Dubek was absolutely confident that he could manage the Soviets. To him it was unimaginable that they would invade. They were friends. It was as far-fetched as the United States invading Canada. He believed that he knew how to reassure them. When he spoke with Brezhnev and the senior Soviet leaders, he knew the words to avoid. He would never say “reform,” “reformist,” or especially “revision.” These were terms certain to enrage the true Marxist-Leninist.

In June thousands of Soviet troops had been allowed into Czechoslovakia for “staff maneuvers.” This was normal, but the quantity, tens of thousands of troops and thousands of vehicles, including tanks, was not. The maneuvers were supposed to end on June 30, and as each July day passed with the troops still there, the population was growing angrier. Clearly stalling, the Soviets presented a steady stream of ridiculous excuses: They needed repairs and so additional “repair troops” began entering, problems with spare parts, the troops needed rest, they were concerned about blocking traffic, the bridges and roads on which they had entered seemed shaky and in need of repairs.

Rumors spread through Czechoslovakia that the trespassing Soviet troops had brought with them printing presses and broadcast-jamming equipment, files on Czechoslovakian political leaders, and lists of people to be arrested.

The Czechoslovakian government demanded the removal of the Soviet troops. The Soviets demanded that the entire Czechoslovakian presidium come to Moscow and meet with the entire Soviet presidium. Prague responded that they thought the meeting was a good idea and “invited” the Soviet presidium to Czechoslovakia. The entire Soviet presidium had never traveled outside the Soviet Union.

Dubek knew he was playing a dangerous game. But he had his own people to answer to, and they clearly would not accept capitulation. In retrospect, one of the deciding factors that kept the Soviets from giving the invasion order that July was the tremendous unity of the Czechoslovakian people. There had never before really been a Czechoslovakian people. There were Czechs and there were Slovaks, and even among Czechs there were Moravians and Bohemians. But for one moment in July 1968 there were only Czechoslovakians. Even with troops around and within their border, with the Soviet press vilifying them daily, they spoke with one voice. And Dubek was careful to be that voice.

At almost 3:00 in the morning on July 31, a rail worker and a small group of Slovak steel workers recognized a man out for a walk as First Secretary Comrade Dubek. Dubek invited them to a small restaurant that was open at that hour. “He spent about an hour with us and explained the situation,” one of the workers later told the Slovak press. When they asked why he was out so late, he told them that for the last few weeks he had been sleeping only between 3:00 A.M. and 7:00 A.M.

Czech television interviewed Soviet tourists and asked them if they had seen counterrevolutionary activity and if they had been treated well. They all spoke highly of the country and the people and saluted Soviet-Czechoslovak friendship. For four days, the two presidiums met in ›ierna nad Tisou, a Slovak town near the Hungarian-Ukrainian border. On August 2, when the meeting had ended, Dubek gave a television address in which he assured the Czechoslovakian people that their sovereignty as a nation was not threatened. He also told them that good relations with the Soviet Union were essential to that sovereignty, and he warned against verbal attacks on the Soviets or socialism.

The message was that there would be no invasion if the Czechoslovakians refrained from provoking the Soviets. The following day, the last of the Soviet troops left Czechoslovakia.

Dubek appeared to be reining in free speech. Still, he seemed to have won the confrontation. Sometimes survival alone is the great victory. The new Czechoslovakia had made it through the Prague Spring into Prague summer. Articles were being written around the world on why the Soviets were backing down.

Young people from Eastern and Western Europe and North America began packing into Prague to see what this new kind of liberty was about. The city’s dark medieval walls were being covered with graffiti in several languages. With only seven thousand hotel rooms in Prague, there was often nothing available anywhere in the city, although sometimes a bribe would help. A table at one of the few Prague restaurants was getting hard to come by, and a taxi without a fare was a rare sight. In August The New York Timeswrote, “For those under 30, Prague seems the right place to be this summer.”