1968 (6 page)

On Friday, at the end of the first week of 1968, the weekly summary of Vietnam casualties showed that 185 Americans, 227 South Vietnamese, and 37 other allied servicemen had been killed in action. America and its allies reported killing a total of 1,438 enemy soldiers.

That was the first week, and so 1968 began.

CHAPTER 2

HE WHO ARGUES WITH
A MOSQUITO NET

The people were dissatisfied with the party leadership. We couldn’t change the people, so we changed the leaders.

—A
LEXANDER
D
UBCEK,
1968

O
N JANUARY
5, 1968, the day Dub
ek took over as leader of the Czech Communist Party, while Czechs and Slovaks cheered, his wife and two sons could not help crying at the miserable fate that had befallen him.

At the center of one of the most dramatic moments in the history of Soviet-dominated Central Europe stood a gray, ambiguous man. Despite being six feet four inches tall, all his life Alexander Dub
ek was always described as unobtrusive. But he was not as dispassionate as he appeared. By the time he had deposed Novotny´, whose nickname was Frozen Face, the animosity between the two men had a twenty-three-year history.

When Dub
ek took office at age forty-six, he did not seem youthful. Tall, enigmatic, often a dull speaker, but the inspiration for millions of energized youth, Dub
ek in some ways resembled Senator Eugene McCarthy. In fact, he had come very close to being born in the Midwest.

“I was conceived by a pair of Slovak socialist dreamers, who happened to immigrate to Chicago,” Dub
ek wrote. In 1910, Stefan Dub
ek, an uneducated Slovak carpenter, weary of a Slovakia repressed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and without opportunities, walked out of his mountain home along a curving bank of the Danube until he had reached Budapest, the domed and tree-lined capital of his oppressors. There he organized a socialist cell in a furniture factory and dreamed of overthrowing the monarchy. The factory management quickly realized what he was doing and fired him. Soon after, he immigrated to America, which he had been told was a land of democracy and social justice. He settled into a Slovak community on Chicago’s North Side.

American capitalism seemed a harsh system, neither as free nor as just as he had been told, but at least he could speak his political beliefs without being arrested, and he would not get drafted into World War I to fight for the monarchy he hated. The entry of the United States into the war was a blow to American socialists, who were generally opposed to war—and had believed Wilson’s promise that he would keep the United States out of war. Stefan, a pacifist—a belief that would reemerge in his son, Alexander, at a critical moment in history—went to Laredo, Texas, to meet up with Quakers and other pacifists who could help him get across the border to sit out the war in Mexico. But he was caught, arrested, fined, and imprisoned for a year and a half. When he was released, he returned to Chicago and met and married a young Slovak, Pavlina, who, unlike Stefan, was a devout communist. At Pavlina’s urging, Stefan studied Marx. When his sister in Slovakia wrote that she was getting married, he sent her a lengthy political questionnaire with which to screen the prospective groom. Stefan became very excited about the revolution in Russia, and in a letter to Slovakia in 1919 he wrote, “In America you can have most things but you certainly can’t have freedom. The only free country in the world is the Soviet Union.”

After nearly a decade of struggle for socialism, Stefan was disappointed with the United States and Pavlina missed her country, so in 1921 they took their baby and, with Pavlina pregnant, moved back to Slovakia to a newly created Czechoslovakia, and that is how Alexander Dub
ek, born a few months later, came to be a Czechoslovakian. He had many relatives on both sides in America, though he had no contact with them until near the end of his life when they started writing him letters after the fall of communism.

The new country where Stefan vowed to build socialism at first seemed exciting. Czechoslovakia had been thought up by a Prague professor, Tomás Garrigue Masaryk. At first the country seemed as though it would be an equal union among Bohemians, Moravians, and Slovaks. To Slovaks this was an enormous reversal of history, because since the tenth century they had always been the downtrodden and abused fiefdom of some powerful state. The Czech lands, Bohemia and Moravia, had had a late-nineteenth-century industrial revolution that had produced a literate middle class, including bureaucrats and technocrats with which to staff a new government. But after one thousand years of rule by the Magyars of Hungary, Slovakia was an impoverished agricultural region much like the neighboring part of Poland. Few Slovaks could read or write even in their native Slovak language. Most were peasants on very poor land. They had first expressed their nationalism in 1848, a year of rebellion not unlike 1968 except that the events were limited to Europe. In 1848 the Slovaks rose up against the Hungarians and demanded equal rights in a document known as Demands of the Slovak Nation. This became the model for Slovak nationalism, and its author, Ludovit Stur, became the Slovak national hero long before and after Masaryk. By a strange coincidence, when Stefan and Pavlina Dub
ek moved back to Slovakia, they settled into a cottage where Stur had been born in 1815, and it was there that Alexander Dub
ek was born.

The Slovaks’ Hungarian masters and Czech neighbors had always regarded them with condescension. If Slovaks had listened closely to Masaryk, they would have realized that he harbored that same contempt. He tended to characterize Slovaks as backward, lacking political maturity, and being “priest-ridden”—all familiar, pejorative Czech stereotypes of Slovaks.