1968 (40 page)

“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

A
S 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 Dub
ek 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 Dub
ek’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, Dub
ek 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 Dub
ek 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. Dub
ek 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, Dub
ek 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. Dub
ek 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 Dub
ek 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. Dub
ek’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. Dub
ek 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 Dub
ek’s harshest critics.