1968 (9 page)

It was still a very repressive state. The literary magazine
Tvar
was shut down. There were limits to what could be written, spoken, or done. But Czechoslovakians flourished with the small margin of freedom they had been finally allowed. With the West no longer completely cut off, Czech youth immediately tapped into the vibrant Western youth culture wearing
Texasskis—
blue jeans—and going to clubs to hear the big beat, as rock and roll was called. Prague had more young people with long hair, beards, and sandals than anywhere else in central Europe. Yes, in the heart of Novotny´’s Czechoslovakia, there were the unshorn rebel youth of the sixties—hippies—or were they the rebel youth of the fifties, beatniks? On May 1, 1965, May Day, when the rest of the communist world was celebrating the revolution, the youth of Prague had crowned the longhaired, bearded beatnik, visiting poet Allen Ginsberg,
Kraj Majales,
King of May. “Ommm,” chanted Ginsberg, the Jew turned Buddhist, who even while embracing Eastern religion was to many young Prague residents the embodiment of the exciting new world in the West. For his coronation speech he clanked tiny cymbals while chanting a Buddhist hymn. After a few days of following him through the dark, ornate back streets of the center city, the secret police had him deported. Or, as he wrote it in a poem,

And I was sent from Prague by plane by detectives in Czechoslovakian business suits

And I am the King of May, which is the power of sexual youth,

And I am the King of May, which is industry in eloquence and action in amour,

And I am the King of May, which is old Human poesy, and 100,000 people chose my name,

And I am the King of May, and in a few minutes I will land at London Airport. . . .

But as Stefan Dub
ek would have readily pointed out, one is not completely free in America, either. When Ginsberg returned to the United States, the FBI placed his name on a list of dangerous security risks.

For all its repression, despite the mustached men in Czechoslovakian business suits, Prague was becoming popular. In 1966 three and a half million tourists visited the country, a fifth of them from the West. Czech movies such as
Closely Watched Trains
and
The Shop on Main Street
were being seen around the world. Milos Forman was one of several Czech directors sought internationally. Czech playwrights, including Václav Havel, were earning international reputations. Havel, perhaps not the most theatrical but the most politically stinging of the Prague playwrights, mounted plays of absurdist antitotalitarianism that would never have been seen in the Soviet Union. In
The Memorandum,
a bureaucracy prevents creative thinking by imposing a made-up language called Ptydepe. Havel often laughed at the language of communism. In another play, a character burlesques Khrushchev’s habit of concocting meaningless folkisms. The Havel character asserts, “He who argues with a mosquito net will never dance with a goat near Podmokly.”

In November 1967 a small group of Prague students decided to do what they were now hearing of students doing in the West. They held a demonstration. The issue was poor heat and lighting in the dormitories—neither the first nor the last student movement to start on a seemingly banal issue. They discovered, as many students in the West were also beginning to find, that it was fun to demonstrate. They marched in the dark of early evening, carrying candles to symbolize the dim light by which they said they were forced to study. It looked as merry as a Christmas procession when they headed up the narrow stone streets to Hradcany Castle, which housed the government. Suddenly they found their way blocked by police, who clubbed the few demonstrators to the cobblestone pavement and then dragged them off. About fifty needed hospitalization. The press reported simply on “hooligans” attacking the police. But by then people could decipher the code, and word spread quickly of the beatings, creating an even larger protest movement. By the end of 1967 students were handing out flyers and debating with anyone who would engage them on the street, and they looked very much like students in Berlin, Rome, or Berkeley. True, they were being watched by secret police, but so were American and Western European student demonstrators.

During the 1960s both Slovak nationalism and Novotny´’s animosity toward Slovaks grew. In 1967 the Slovaks defied the government and the Soviets by cheering Israel’s victory in the Six Day War. By 1968 the Middle East had become a favorite political metaphor in the Soviet bloc. It was a sign of trouble in Poland that the Poles, instead of showing their loyalty to Soviet interests, thrilled to the spectacle of the Jews defeating Soviet-trained troops. In March 1968, when Romania wanted to assert its independence, it strengthened its ties to Israel.

After January 5, the removal of Novotny´ as Party chief filled Czechoslovakia with hope, excitement, and gossip. One of the favorite stories concerned why Brezhnev had not come to Novotny´’s defense. When Khrushchev was replaced by Brezhnev, Novotny´ had been so upset by the undoing of his Soviet friend—they had even spent vacations together—that he had actually called the Kremlin. Whatever Brezhnev’s explanation, Novotny´ was not satisfied and he angrily threw down the phone, hanging up on the new Soviet leader. Brezhnev had a very long memory.

In 1968 both the Soviet Union and the people of Czechoslovakia put their hopes and trust in a tall, mournful-looking man with a faint smile, a man who had never shown great flair or imagination, which in any event were not qualities the Soviets encouraged. Dub
ek had no foreign experience. Except for the Soviet Union, he had been abroad only twice, both times in 1960, when he had spent two days in Helsinki and had gone to a Party conference in Hanoi.

But Dub
ek and many of his colleagues in the new government were of a unique generation, people who grew up with Nazi occupation, who saw a world of good and evil in which the Soviet Union was the force for good, the hope for the future. Zden
k Mlyná
, who became part of the Dub
ek government, wrote, “The Soviet Union was, in that sense, a land of hope for those who desired a radical departure from the past after the war and who also, of course, knew nothing of the real conditions in the Soviet Union.”

The real question of the time was not why the Soviets accepted Dub
ek, but why the Czechoslovakians did. After twenty years of Stalinism, the nation was hungry for change, and they decided that Dub
ek might deliver it. As Mlyná
pointed out, before 1968 the people of Czechoslovakia never learned very much about the character of their leaders, and so if this new one seemed difficult to read, they were accustomed to that. And by chance he was well suited for the youth of 1968. He was nonauthoritarian, a fact that seemed to be confirmed by his uneasiness in public and his dull speaking style. Young Czechoslovakians liked this awkwardness. In the end it would translate into a fatal tendency to make decisions too slowly, always the weak point of antiauthoritarianism. But in a small group he could be extremely persuasive. Most exciting of all, he was a leader with a habit of listening to others. Perhaps what had been true of Ludovit Stur, the officially outcast Slovak nationalist in whose house he was born, was also true of Dub
ek, as Dub
ek had said in an unorthodox speech three years earlier defending Stur: “He understood all the principal social and economic problems and the tendencies of his period, and he understood that everything must change.”