Postwar

silencing all dissenting voices and references to the recent past.

Forced underground—quite literally in the Czech case, where many unemployed professors and writers found work as stokers and boilermen—the regime’s opponents could hardly engage in a political debate with their oppressors. Instead, abandoning Marxist vocabulary and the revisionist debates of earlier decades, they made a virtue of their circumstances and espoused deliberately ‘un- political’ themes. Of these, thanks to the Helsinki Accords, ‘rights’ were by far the most accessible.

All Soviet bloc constitutions paid formal attention to the rights and duties of the citizen; the package of additional and quite specific rights agreed to at Helsinki thus furnished Communism’s domestic critics with a strategic opening. As the Czech historian Petr Pithart noted, the point was not to demand some rights as yet un- possessed—a sure invitation to further repression—but to claim those that the regime already acknowledged and that were enshrined in law, thus conferring upon the ‘opposition’ a moderate, almost conservative air, while forcing the Party onto the defensive.

Taking seriously the letter of ‘Socialist’ law was more than just a tactic, a device for embarrassing Communism’s rulers. In closed societies where everything was political—and politics as such were thus precluded—‘rights’ offered a way forward, a first breach in the curtain of pessimism shrouding Eastern Europe in the ‘silent Seventies’, an end to the regime’s monopoly on language-as-power. Moreover the constitutional rights of persons, by their very nature, bear formal witness to the existence of persons as such, with claims upon one another and upon the community. They describe a space between helpless individuals and the all-powerful state.

The movement for rights (‘human rights’), as the young Hungarian theorist Miklos Haraszti conceded, was an acknowledgement that the necessary corrective to Communism’s defects was not a better Communism but the constitution—or reconstitution—of civil (i.e. ‘bourgeois’) society. The irony of inverting Marxism’s agenda and seeking to replace the Socialist state with bourgeois society was not lost on intellectuals in Prague or Budapest. But as Haraszti’s Hungarian colleague Mihaly Vajda explained, the supremacy of the bourgeois looked decidedly preferable to their country’s ‘unbearable historical experience of the tyranny of the citizen’.

The significance of efforts to reconstitute civil society—a nebulous phrase describing an uncertain objective but one widely espoused by the intellectual opposition in Eastern Europe from the mid-Seventies onward—was that they recognized the impossibility after 1968 of trying to reform the Party-state. Few seriously expected Husak in Prague, or Honecker in Berlin (much less the Soviets themselves), to concede the logic of ‘rights-talk’ and take their own constitutions seriously. To speak of rights in theory was precisely to illustrate their absence in practice, to remind observers at home and abroad of just how un-free these societies actually were. Instead of engaging the Communist authorities, the new opposition was deliberately talking past them.

For dissidents like Haraszti, or Adam Michnik in Poland, whose 1976 essay ‘A New Evolutionism’ laid out much of the strategy of the Polish opposition in coming years, this was a radical departure from their youthful engagement with Marxism and its socio-economic priorities. For those who had never been remotely drawn to Marxist debates, like Vaclav Havel, the transition was much easier. The son of a wealthy Prague businessman whose family was dispossessed by the Communist government after 1948, Havel evinced none of the youthful revolutionary enthusiasm of his engaged contemporaries, nor did he play a very active part in their reformist efforts before 1968. Havel’s relationship with the Communist authorities was always antagonistic, thanks in large part to his bourgeois origins, but it had never been political.

In the course of the Seventies and Eighties, as he was harassed, arrested and ultimately imprisoned for his activities, Havel was to become a supremely political figure. But his ‘message’ remained resolutely un-political. The point, he insisted, was not to argue with those in power. It was not even primarily to tell the truth, though in a regime based on lies this was important. The only thing that made sense in the circumstances of the time, he wrote, was to ‘live in truth’, All else was compromise—‘The very act of forming a political grouping forces one to start playing a power game, instead of giving truth priority.’

The objective, as Havel explained in a 1984 essay reflecting on the goals and tactics of Czechoslovakia’s fragile intellectual opposition, should be to act with autonomy, whatever the regime tries to impose on you; to live as if one were truly free. This was hardly a prescription for most people, as Havel well understood: ‘These are perhaps impractical methods in today’s world and very difficult to apply in daily life. Nevertheless, I know no better alternative.’

Havel’s position was not without precedents, even in recent times. Ludvik Vaculik, addressing the Fourth Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union in June 1967, had recommended a similar ‘as if’ strategy to his colleagues even then. We should, he told them, ‘play at being citizens… make speeches as if we were grown-up and legally independent.’ But in the more optimistic atmosphere of the Sixties Vaculik and others could still hope for some accommodation and adaptation from those in power. By the time Michnik or Havel were espousing similar arguments, circumstances had changed. The point was no longer to advise the government how to govern, but to suggest to the nation—by example—how it might live.

In the circumstances of the Seventies, the idea that Eastern European intellectuals could ‘suggest to the nation’ how it should comport itself might appear more than a little ambitious—most intellectuals were in no position to suggest much of anything even to one another, far less to their fellow citizens at large. The intelligentsia in Hungary and Poland especially was largely ignorant of conditions and opinion in the industrial centers, and even more cut off from the world of the peasantry. Indeed it might be said that thanks to Communism—a political system which, in the words of the Hungarian dissidents Ivan Szelenyi and George Konrad, put ‘intellectuals on the road to class power’—the old Central-European distinction between ‘intelligentsia’ and ‘people’ (more applicable in aristocratic societies like Hungary and Poland than in plebeian ones like Czechoslovakia, but artificially instituted even there after 1948) had resurfaced in an acute form.

The first to bridge this gap were the Poles. In 1976, following a series of strikes protesting at sharp increases in the price of food, the regime struck back hard, beating and arresting workers in the industrial towns of Ursus and Radom. In a response that broke quite deliberately with the mutual indifference of worker and intellectual protests a few years before, Jacek Kuron and a few colleagues announced the formation in September 1976 of KOR, an acronym for the Committee for the Defense of Workers. The object of KOR, and a Committee for the Defense of Human and Civil Rights (ROPCiO) founded a few months later, was to publicize the assault on workers’ civil liberties, assist in their legal defense, and form a common front. Three years later, in December 1979, the intellectual leaders of KOR—some Jewish, some Catholic, some former Communists, others not—would be responsible for the framing and publication of a ‘Charter of Workers’ Rights’.

The creation—or, rather, the assertion—of an autonomous civil sphere in Poland thus grew out of a social confrontation. Across the border in Czechoslovakia, in even less promising political circumstances, it was born of a legal opportunity. In January 1977 a group of Czechoslovak citizens signed a document (initially published as a manifesto in a West German newspaper) criticizing their government for its failure to implement the human rights provisions of the Czechoslovak Constitution, the Final Act of the 1975 Helsinki Accords, and United Nations covenants on political, civil, economic, and cultural rights, all of which Prague had signed—and, in the case of Helsinki Decree 120, formally incorporated into the Czech Legal Code.[268]

The signatories of this document (‘Charter 77’ as it became known) described themselves as a ‘loose, informal, and open association of people… united by the will to strive individually and collectively for respect for human and civil rights in our country and throughout the world.’ They took care to emphasize that Charter 77 was not an organization, had no statutes or permanent organs, and ‘does not form the basis for any oppositional political activity,’ a stipulation intended to keep their act within the bounds of Czechoslovak law.

Charter 77 was always the work of a tiny network of courageous indivuduals who represented no-one but themselves: 243 people signed the original document, and they were joined by just 1,621 others (in a population of 15 million) in the course of the next decade. The Charter’s first spokesmen were Havel, Jiri Hajek (the country’s foreign minister under Dubcek) and the elderly Jan Patocka, Czechoslovakia’s leading philosopher, all of them isolated intellectuals without public standing or influence; but this did not stop the authorities reacting furiously to their manifesto, ‘an antistate, antisocialist, demagogic, abusive piece of writing’. Individual signatories were variously described—in language drawn verbatim from the show trials of the Fifties—as ‘traitors and renegades,’ ‘a loyal servant and agent of imperialism’, ‘a bankrupt politician’ and ‘an international adventurer’. Retaliation and intimidation were deployed against the signatories, including dismissal from work, denial of schooling for their children, suspension of drivers’ licenses, forced exile and loss of citizenship, detention, trial, and