1968 (8 page)

Dub
ek said nothing. He seldom criticized the government or the Party, either, for incompetence or brutality. In 1955 he was rewarded with a place at the Higher Party School in Moscow. He seemed thrilled by the honor and the opportunity to improve on what he regarded as a poor education. He felt that he lacked “ideological training.” But his three years of advanced ideology in Moscow turned out to be a vague discipline, because Khrushchev had denounced Stalin, leaving the school uncertain about what it should be teaching. Dub
ek returned from a reforming Soviet Union to a still-Stalinist Czechoslovakia in which Novotny´ had now become president. Since Novotny´ still headed the Party, the country was, for the first time, under one-man rule.

Students and young people were not afraid to show their displeasure. At cultural festivals in both Prague and Bratislava, they openly demanded more political parties, access to Western books and magazines, and an end to the annoying buzz, the jamming, that accompanied broadcasts of Radio Free Europe and the BBC World Service.

Dub
ek’s new education was rewarded with the position of regional secretary of Bratislava. He was now one of the important Slovaks. He still believed in blind Party loyalty, but to whom? Coming from Moscow, he was very aware that Novotny´ and Khrushchev were not saying the same things. Dub
ek was careful not to express his animosity toward Novotny´, though Novotny´ made no effort to hide his animosity toward Slovakia. According to Dub
ek, Novotny´ was “particularly ignorant about almost everything that concerned Slovakia and Czecho-Slovak relations, which was, of course, depressing for me.” In 1959, changes in the constitution dismantled the few remaining vestiges of Slovak self-government. While the Slovak people were enraged, the Slovak leaders were anxious only to please Novotny´ and serve Prague.

Dub
ek had disdain for the special recreation area Novotny´ had built for Party officials to spend their weekends. “The place itself was very nice, located in a charming part of the Vltava River Basin,” he recalled. “But I detested the whole idea of it—the isolated luxury enjoyed by the leadership under police protection.” His enduring image of Novotny´ was his passion for a card game called “marriage.” The bureaucrats looking for advancement were eager to be invited to play marriage with Novotny´, who dealt out the deck inside a huge beer barrel he had built in front of his house for the purpose of hosting these card games. Dub
ek did not play and instead spent the periodic obligatory weekends at the retreat playing with children or going for long walks in the forest.

Occasionally he had open conflict with Novotny´. “These confrontations,” he later wrote, “arose when I dared to offer differing opinions first on investment priorities in Slovakia and later on the rehabilitation of victims of the 1950s repressions.” But as a second-rung figure, Dub
ek could do little to change government, and he said and did very little. He was a Communist Party careerist.

In the early 1960s, Dub
ek served on the Kolder Commission, which looked into redressing government abuse in the 1950s. This work made a lasting impression on him. “I was dumbfounded,” he later wrote, “by the revelations of what had been going on in Czechoslovak Party circles in Prague in the early 1950s.” It is still not certain if he really had not known of these abuses before. But he did seem deeply shaken by the revelations of the Kolder Commission, and so did many other officials. Novotny´ came under tremendous pressure to reorganize his government. In 1963, when because of the commission’s findings the Slovak Central Committee was able to remove the first secretary they regarded as a Novotny´ quisling, it was the quiet Alexander Dub
ek they chose to replace him. This was done over the shouting of Novotny´, who stormed out of the session and never again attended a meeting of the Slovak Central Committee.

In the mid-sixties, life became more difficult for Novotny´. His friend Khrushchev was replaced in 1964 by his plotting protégé Brezhnev at the same time that the Czechoslovakian economy had taken disastrous turns. The economy had been catastrophic for years, but the Czech lands had started out at a level so far above those of everyone else in the Soviet bloc that it took years before the consequences of mismanagement became devastating. Slovakia, lacking the Czechs’ starting advantage, had been suffering for a long time. But now even the Czechs were experiencing food shortages, and the government had ordered “meatless Thursday.” With the combination of uncertain support in Moscow and unhappy people at home, Novotny´ eased up on the police state. Censorship became less severe, artists, writers, and filmmakers were allowed more freedom, and some travel to the West was allowed.