Postwar

Closely Observed Trains (1966), gently debunking the core Communist myth of wartime anti-Nazi resistance, was co-written by Josef Skvorecky (author of The Cowards, a novel whose similar theme, gingerly adumbrated, had established his reputation a few years before). But playwrights, poets and novelists—many of whom, Kundera included, doubled as screenwriters in these years—played an even more important role.

In 1966 Ludvik Vaculik published The Axe, a fictional account drawing on his own father’s Communist ideals—and the son’s subsequent disillusionment. In 1967 another writer, Ladislas Mnacko, published a biting critique of Novotny and the Party nomenklatura, loosely disguised in novel form, under the transparent title The Taste of Power. In the same year Kundera himself published The Joke, a neo-existentialist and avowedly autobiographical novel of the Stalinist generation in Czechoslovakia. Those years, ‘the era of building socialism’ as they were officially known, were now fair game for intellectual condemnation, and at the Fourth Czechoslovak Writers’ Congress in the summer of 1967 Kundera, Vaculik, the poet and playwright Pavel Kohout and the young playwright Vaclav Havel attacked the Communist leadership of the time for the material and moral devastation it had wrought. They called for a return to the literary and cultural heritage of Czechoslovakia and for the country to take up once again its ‘normal’ place in the center of a free Europe.

The implied attack on Czechoslovakia’s current leadership was obvious to all— certainly, as we now know, the Kremlin leadership was already watching the situation in Prague with some misgivings: Brezhnev had long regarded Czechoslovakia as the least ideologically reliable element in the Warsaw Pact. It was because they knew this that the aging Stalinists in Prague Castle had tried for so long to hold the line. If they did not clamp down firmly on the intellectual opposition emerging in 1967 it was not for want of trying. But they were held back by two constraints: the need to pursue the recently implemented economic reforms, which implied a degree of openness and tolerance of dissenting opinion along Hungarian lines; and the emerging difficulties in Slovakia.

Czecho-Slovakia (as it was initially known) had always been an uneasy and unbalanced state. The Slovak minority in the south and east of the country was poorer and more rural than the Czechs to the northwest. Released from Hungarian rule in 1918, Slovaks were the poor relations in multi-ethnic inter-war Czechoslovakia and were not always treated well by Prague. Many Slovak political leaders had thus welcomed the breakup of the country in 1939 and the Nazi-sponsored appearance of an ‘independent’ puppet state with its capital in Bratislava. Conversely it was the urban and heavily Social Democratic Czechs of Bohemia and Moravia who had backed Communist candidates in the post-war elections, while the Catholic Slovaks remained indifferent or opposed.

All the same, Slovakia had not done badly under Communism. Slovak intellectuals fell victim to Communist purges, accused of bourgeois nationalism or antiCommunist plotting (or both). And the small number of surviving Slovak Jews suffered along with their Czech confreres. But ‘bourgeois nationalists’, Communists, Jews and intellectuals were fewer in number in Slovakia and much more isolated from the rest of society. Most Slovaks were poor and worked in the countryside. For them the rapid urbanization and industrialization of the first post-war decade carried real benefits. In contrast to Czechs, they were by no means displeased with their lot.

The mood in the Slovak region of the country changed sharply after 1960, however. The new ‘Socialist’ Constitution made even fewer concessions to local initiative or opinion than its predecessor and such autonomy as had been accorded Slovakia in the post-war reconstruction of the country was now taken back. Of more immediate consequence for most Slovaks, however, was the stagnation of the economy (by 1964 Czechoslovakia’s rate of growth was the slowest in the bloc), which hit the heavy industry of central Slovakia harder than anywhere else.

In January 1967 Novotny had been due to begin implementing the overdue economic reforms recommended by his own Party experts. The reform economists’ proposals for decentralization of decision-making and increased local autonomy had been welcomed in Bratislava—though some of the reforms, such as profit- related wage incentives, were hardly calculated to appeal to the unskilled workers in Slovakia’s inefficient industrial plants. But all Novotny’s instincts told him to resist such loosening of Party control, and instead he encouraged amendments to the proposed changes, with the goal of shoring up the institutions of central planning. This not only sabotaged the proposals of Sik and other Party economists; it further alienated Slovak opinion. Slovak Communists themselves now began to talk of the need for federalization and of the difficulties of collaborating with the aging Communist apparatchiks in Prague. Echoing a longstanding complaint of Slovak cleaners, building workers, teachers and shop assistants, they felt slighted and ignored by the Czech majority. There was talk of long-forgotten pre-war indignities, as well as the Stalinist purges of Slovak Communists.

Meanwhile, and for the first time in years, there was a hint of troubles of yet another order. On October 31st 1967, a group of students from Prague’s Technical University organized a street demonstration in the district of Strahov to protest electricity cuts at their dormitories: however, their calls for ‘More light!’ were rightly interpreted as extending beyond local housekeeping difficulties. The ‘Strahov Events’, as they were later dubbed, were efficiently and violently suppressed by the police; but they added to the charged atmosphere of the moment, all the more so because they seemed to suggest that a Communist state might not be immune to the student mood in the West.

Novotny , like Gomulka in Poland, was uncertain how to respond to such challenges. Lacking the anti- Semitic option, he turned to Brezhnev for help in dealing with his local critics. But when the Soviet leader arrived in Prague in December 1967 he offered only the rather obscure recommendation that the Czechoslovak President do as he saw fit: ‘It’s your business.’ Novotny’s colleagues seized the opportunity: on January 5th 1968 the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party elected a new First Secretary, Alexander Dubcek.

The new man was young (at 47 he was sixteen years Novotny’s junior), from the reform wing of the Party and, above all, a Slovak. As leader of the Slovak Communist Party for the past three years he appeared to many to be a credible compromise candidate: a longstanding Communist apparatchik who would nevertheless support reforms and appease Slovak resentments. Dubcek’s early moves seemed to confirm this reading: a month after his appointment the Party leadership gave its unstinting approval to the stalled economic reform program. Dubcek’s rather artless manner appealed to the young in particular, while his indisputable loyalty to the Party and to ‘Socialism’ reassured for the time being the Kremlin and other foreign Communist leaders looking anxiously on.

If Dubcek’s intentions were obscure to observers, this is probably because he himself was far from sure just where to go. At first this ambiguity worked in his favor, as different factions competed for his support and offered to strengthen his hand. Public rallies in Prague in the weeks following his election demanded an end to censorship, greater press freedom and a genuine inquiry into the purges of the fifties and the responsibilities of the old guard around Novotny (who remained President of the country even after being ousted from the Party leadership). Carried on this wave of popular enthusiasm, Dubcek endorsed the call for a relaxation of censorship and initiated a purge of Novotnyites from the Party and from the Czech army.

On March 22nd Novotny reluctantly resigned the presidency and was replaced a week later by General Ludvik Svoboda. Five days after that, the Central Committee adopted an ‘Action Program’ calling for equal status and autonomy for Slovakia, the rehabilitation of past victims and ‘democratization’ of the political and economic system. The Party was now officially endorsing what the Program called ‘a unique experiment in democratic Communism’: ‘Socialism with a human face’ as it became colloquially known. Over a period of time (the document spoke of a ten-year transition) the Czechoslovak Communist Party would allow the emergence of other parties with whom it would compete in genuine elections. These were hardly original ideas, but publicly pronounced from the official organs of a ruling Communist Party they triggered a political earthquake. The Prague Spring had begun.

The events of the spring and summer of 1968 in Czechoslovakia hinged on three contemporary illusions. The first, widespread in the country after Dubcek’s rise and especially following publication of the Action Program, was that the freedoms and reforms now being discussed could be folded into the ‘Socialist’ (i.e. Communist) project. It would be wrong to suppose, in retrospect, that what the students and writers and Party reformers of 1968 were ‘really’ seeking was to replace Communism with liberal capitalism or that their enthusiasm for ‘Socialism with a human face’ was mere rhetorical compromise or habit. On the contrary: the idea that there existed a ‘third way’, a Democratic Socialism compatible with free institutions, respecting individual freedoms and collective goals, had captured the imagination of Czech students no less than Hungarian economists.