Postwar

imprisonment.

The harsh treatment of the signatories of Charter 77 and the Czechoslovak government’s vindictive persecution of a new generation of young musicians (notably the rock group The Plastic People of the Universe) prompted the formation in April 1978 of a support group, the ‘Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted’ (VONS), with goals similar to those of KOR. The response of the Prague regime to this latest development was to arrest six of the leading figures in VONS, including Havel, and try them for subversion the following year. In October 1979 they were sentenced to prison terms of up to five years.

In the wake of 1968 the Communist regimes had all (with the exception of Ceausescu’s Romania) adopted in practice the approach of Kadar’s Hungary. They no longer even pretended to seek the genuine allegiance of their subjects, asking only that people proffer the outward symbols of public conformity. One goal of the Charter, like VONS—or KOR—was to overcome the resulting cynical indifference to public affairs among their fellow citizens. Havel in particular laid stress on the need to deprive governments of the satisfaction of seeing people heedlessly abase themselves in order to pass unnoticed. Otherwise, he wrote, the regime can count upon an ‘outpost in every citizen’—a theme illustrated in his classic essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’ by the example of the greengrocer who ritually hangs in his shop-window the sign ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’.

Some of the concerns of the dissenting intelligentsia were better adapted than others to this effort to overcome public apathy and fear. The emerging environmental catastrophe, already mentioned in Chapter 15, was one. In Slovakia, according to the regime’s own figures, 45 percent of the 3,500 miles of rivers in Slovakia were ‘dangerously’ polluted in 1982. Four-fifths of the well water in the eastern part of the republic was unusable for human consumption. This was largely due to the over-use of fertilizer on the collective farms of the area, leading to soil-poisoning and crop failures like those experienced in the black soil areas of the Soviet Union.

By the early Eighties northern Bohemia had the worst air pollution in Europe, thanks to the use of (cheap) brown coal in industrial and energy production there. Of 73.5 billion kwh of power generated in the region, 64 billion came from plants burning this high-sulphur fuel. As a result, by 1983 some 35 percent of all Czech forests were dead or dying, and one-third of all Czech watercourses were too polluted even for industrial use. In Prague itself the government was forced to set up a special hospital service dealing with the respiratory ailments of children. Ivan Klima, in a short story called ‘A Christmas Conspiracy’, described stepping out into the streets of the Czech capital: ‘The dark, cold mist smelled of smoke, sulphur and irritability.’

Under Socialism it was the state that polluted. But it was society that suffered, and pollution was thus a subject about which everyone cared. It was also implicitly political: the reason that it was so hard to protect the environment was that no-one had an interest in taking preventive measures. Only effective and consistently applied official sanctions could have enforced improvements, and these would have had to come from the same authority which was encouraging the wastage in the first place. Any factory or farm manager imprudent enough to risk his ‘quotas’ by applying pollution-control measures on his own initiative would have been in serious trouble. The Communist economic system was inherently prejudicial to its environment, as more and more people came to appreciate.[269]

Writers and scholars, reasonably enough, were preoccupied with censorship. The impediments to publication, or performance, varied considerably from one Communist country to another. In Czechoslovakia, since 1969, the authorities were unabashedly repressive: not only were thousands of men and women excluded from print or public appearance, but a very broad swathe of themes, persons and events could not even be mentioned. In Poland, by contrast, the Catholic Church and its institutions and newspapers provided a sort of semi-protected space in which a degree of literary and intellectual freedom could be practiced, albeit cautiously.

Here, as in Hungary, the problem was often one of self-censorship. In order to secure access to an audience, intellectuals, artists or scholars were always tempted to adapt their work, to trim or hedge an argument in anticipation of likely official objections. The professional and even material benefits of such adjustment were not to be neglected, in societies where culture and the arts were taken very seriously; but the moral cost in self-respect could be considerable. As Heine had written a hundred and fifty years before, in terms many Eastern European intellectuals would immediately have recognized, ‘these executioners of thought make criminals of us. For the author… frequently commits infanticide: he kills his own thought-child in insane terror of the censor’s mind.’

This was one kind of partial complicity. Silence—the internal emigration of the ‘Ketman’ in Czeslaw Milosz’s Captive Mind—was another. But those who did speak out, circulating their work in illicit carbon copies, faced the gloomy prospect of near-invisibility, of having their ideas and their art confined to a tiny, closed audience—experiencing at best what one Czech intellectual morosely called the onanistic satisfaction of publishing samizdat for the same two thousand intellectuals, all of whom also write it.

Moreover, courage did not in itself ensure quality. The non-conformist, oppositional and frequently dangerous aspect of underground writing conferred on it (especially among its admirers in the West) an aura of romance and a sometimes overstated significance. Original and radical ideas could indeed blossom and thrive in the decaying compost-heap of the Soviet bloc—the writings of Havel and Michnik are the best but by no means the only instances of this, the Fleurs du Mal of Communism.[270] But for many others, being unpublished was no guarantee of quality. There is no ‘muse of censorship’ (George Steiner). Just because the regime didn’t like you doesn’t mean you were talented.

Thus the reputation of even some of the best known opposition intellectuals was to shrivel and shrink when exposed to a free market in ideas. Hungary’s George Konrad—whose rather self-indulgent essays on ‘Antipolitics’ were widely admired in the Eighties—was one of many who would drop from sight after 1989. Others, like the East German novelist Christa Wolf, understood well that it was the very difficulties of being a writer under Communism that furnished her with both subject matter and a certain energy (and public standing). That is one reason why many intellectuals in Communist societies preferred to forego the opportunity of emigration and exile—better to be persecuted and significant than to be free but irrelevant.

The fear of irrelevance lay behind another consideration in these years, the widespread insistence upon the urgency of ‘getting back’ to Europe. Like censorship, this was a concern limited to intellectuals—indeed mostly to writers from the western provinces of the former Habsburg Empire, where the backwardness and under- development imposed by Soviet writ had been especially painful. The best-known spokesman for this sentiment was the Czech novelist and screenwriter Milan Kundera, writing from exile in Paris, for whom the tragedy of Central Europe (a geographical term revived explicitly to make Kundera’s point) was its takeover by an alien, Asian dictatorship.

Kundera himself was not much appreciated in his homeland, where both his exile and his success were resented by those of his peers who had chosen (in their own account) to forego both. But his general thesis was widely shared, particularly in so far as it was addressed to Western readers, accused of neglecting and ignoringthe ‘other’ West to their East—a theme already adumbrated by Milosz back in the 1950s when he remarked that a ‘chapter in a hypothetical book on postwar Polish poetry should be dedicated to irony and even derision in the treatment of the Western European and particularly French intellectuals.’

For Kundera, who was skeptical of citizens’ initiatives like Charter 77, the Czech condition under Communism was an extension of the older problem of national identity and destiny in Europe’s heartland, where small nations and peoples were always at risk of disappearing. The point of intellectual opposition there and abroad, he felt, was to bring this concern to international attention, not waste time trying to change Moscow’s ‘Byzantine’ empire. Central Europe, moreover, was the ‘destiny of the West, in concentrated form’. Havel concurred: Communism was the dark mirror that history was holding up to the West.

Poles like Michnik did not use the term ‘Central Europe’, or speak so much of ‘returning to Europe’: partly because, unlike the Czechs, they were in a position to pursue closer, attainable objectives. This is not to suggest that Poles and others did not dream of one day sharing in the benefits of the new European Community—of exchanging the failed myth of Socialism for the successful fable of ‘Europe’. But they had more immediate priorities, as we shall see.

East Germans, too, had concerns of their own. One of the paradoxes of Ostpolitik , as practiced by Brandt and his successors, was that by transferring large sums of hard currency into East Germany and showering the GDR with recognition, attention, and support, West German officials unintentionally foreclosed any chance of internal change, including reform of Eastern Germany’s polluted, antiquated industrial economy. By ‘building bridges’, twinning towns, paying their respects, and distancing themselves from Western