As we saw in the last chapter, Havel’s own civic organization, Charter 77, managed fewer than two thousand signatories in a population of 15 million.
Of course, people were afraid to take the risk of openly criticizing the regime; but it has to be said that most Czechs and Slovaks were not actively unhappy with their lot. The Czechoslovak economy, like most other Eastern European economies since the early Seventies, had been deliberately geared to supplying basic consumer goods, and in the Czech case something more. Indeed, Communist Czechoslovakia consciously mimicked aspects of Western consumer society—notably television programming and popular leisure pursuits—albeit in a mediocre key. Life in Czechoslovakia was dull, the environment was deteriorating and younger people especially chafed at the omnipresent and censorious authorities. But in return for avoiding confrontation with the regime and paying lip service to its turgid rhetoric, people were left to their own devices.
The regime kept a tight and even brutal lid on any signs of dissent. Demonstrators in Prague and elsewhere who came out to mark the twentieth anniversary of the invasion in August 1988 were arrested; unofficial efforts to hold an ‘East-West’ seminar in Prague were quashed. In January 1989, on the twentieth anniversary of Jan Palach’s suicide in Wenceslas Square, Havel and thirteen other Charter 77 activists were arrested and once again imprisoned (though in contrast with the harsh treatment meted out to him in earlier years, Havel—now an international figure whose mistreatment might embarrass his jailers—was released in May).
In the course of the spring and summer of 1989 informal networks and groups sprang up around the country, in hopeful imitation of developments in neighboring lands: following the ‘John Lennon Peace Club’ formed in December 1988 there came the ‘Prague Mothers’ protest of May 1989, followed by environmentalist demonstrations in Bratislava the following month. None of these tiny and easily-contained bubbles of civic initiative posed any threat to the police or the regime. But in August, just as Mazowiecki was finalizing plans for his government in Warsaw and shortly before the Hungarian borders were flung open, demonstrators filled the streets of the Czech capital to commemorate, once again, the overthrow of the Prague Spring.
On this occasion, however, the Czech police were decidedly more restrained. The Jakes regime had decided to trim a little, offering at least the appearance of acknowledging the change of mood in Moscow, while altering nothing of substance in its rule. The same calculation doubtless explains the authorities’ hands-off approach to the next major public demonstration on October 28th, the anniversary of the foundation of the Czechoslovak state in 1918 (officially ignored since 1948). But there was still no great public pressure upon the Communist leadership—even the announcement on November 15th that exit visas would no longer be required for travel to the West was less a concession to demand than a strategic imitation of changes elsewhere.
It was this apparent lack of real reforming intent on the part of the party chiefs, and the absence of any effective external opposition—the summer demonstrations lacked common objectives and no leaders had yet emerged to channel discontent into a programme—that lent credence to a widespread suspicion that what followed was in some measure a staged ‘plot’: an attempt by would-be reformers in the administration and police to jump-start the moribund Party in the direction of a Czech
This is not as bizarre as it may sound in retrospect. On November 17th the Prague police officially approved a student march through the inner-city to commemorate yet another gloomy date, the 50th anniversary of the Nazi murder of a Czech student, Jan Opletal. But when the marching students began to chant anti-Communist slogans the police attacked, scattering the crowd and beating up isolated victims. The police themselves then encouraged the rumour that—in a replay of Opletal’s own murder—one of the students had been killed. This was later acknowledged to be a false report; but meanwhile it had the predictable effect of provoking anger among the students themselves. In the course of the next forty eight hours tens of thousands of students were mobilized, the universities were occupied and huge crowds began to gather in the streets to protest. Now, however, the police merely stood by.
If there ever had been a plot it decidedly backfired. To be sure, the events of November 17th and their aftermath dislodged the neo-Stalinist leadership of the Communist Party: within a week the entire Praesidium, led by Jakes, had resigned. But their successors had absolutely no popular credibility and were in any case immediately submerged by the speed of events. On November 19th Vaclav Havel, who had been consigned to virtual house arrest in rural northern Bohemia, returned to a capital city in turmoil, where the Communists were rapidly losing power but there was as yet no-one around to take it out of their hands.
Installing himself—appropriately enough—in a Prague theater, Havel and his friends from Charter 77 formed Obcanske Forum (Civic Forum), an informal and fluid network that metamorphosed within days from a debating society to a civic initiative and thence into a shadow government. The discussion in Civic Forum was driven partly by the longstanding goals of its best-known participants, but mostly by the spectacularly accelerating course of events in the streets outside. The first thing the Forum did was to demand the resignation of the men responsible for the invasion of ’68 and its aftermath.
On November 25th, the day after the Party leaders duly resigned en masse, a crowd of half a million people gathered at the Letna stadium in Prague, not so much to demand particular reforms as to make their presence known, after two decades of cowed public silence: to themselves and to one another. That same night Havel was granted an unprecedented interview on Czech television. The following day he addressed a crowd of 250,000 in Wenceslas Square, sharing a platform with the Communist Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec—and Alexander Dubcek.
By now it had become clear to the emerging leadership of Civic Forum that they were, despite themselves, running a revolution. In order to provide some direction—and to have something to say to the massed crowds outside—a group led by the historian Petr Pithart drew up the ‘Programmatic Principles of Civic Forum’. These contained a brief summary of the general objectives of the Forum and are an instructive guide to the mood and priorities of the men and women of 1989. ‘What do we want?’ the program asks. 1: A state of law. 2: Free elections. 3: Social justice. 4: A clean environment. 5: An educated people. 6: Prosperity. 7: Return to Europe.
The mixture of boilerplate political demands, cultural and environmental ideals, and the invocation of ‘Europe’ is characteristically Czech and owed much to various Charter 77 pronouncements over the previous decade. But the tone of the Programme nicely captured the mood of the crowds in the heady days of November: pragmatic, idealistic and wildly ambitious all at once. The mood in Prague and the rest of the country was also more avowedly optimistic than in any of the other Communist ‘transitions’. This was an effect of acceleration.[303]
Within a week of the bloody repression of the student demonstrators the Party leadership had resigned. One week later Civic Forum and Public Against Violence (PAV—its Slovak
By now the Communists could hardly fail to note events abroad: not only had their colleagues in the former East German leadership been expelled on December 3rd; but Mikhail Gorbachev was sitting down to dinner with President Bush in Malta and the Warsaw Pact states were preparing publicly to renounce their 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Discredited and disqualified by their own paymasters, the remaining members of the Husak group of Czech and Slovak Communists, including Prime Minister Adamec, resigned.
After a two-day ‘Round Table’ meeting (the briefest of all the round tables of the year) the Civic Forum leaders now agreed to join a cabinet. The Prime Minister—the Slovak Marian Calfa—was still a Party member, but a majority of the ministers—for the first time since 1948—were non-Communists: Jiri Dienstbier of Charter 77 (a stoker until just five weeks earlier) was to be foreign minister; the Catholic lawyer Jan Carnogursky of PAV was to be Deputy Prime Minister; Vladimir Kusy of Civic Forum was information minister; and the hitherto obscure free- market economist Vaclav Klaus was to direct the Ministry of Finance. The new government was sworn in on December 10th by President Husak, who then promptly resigned.
The re-emergence of Alexander Dubcek from two decades of obscurity had opened the possibility that he might be chosen to replace Husak as President—in part as a symbol of continuity with the thwarted hopes of 1968, in part to assuage the wounded feelings of the Communists and maybe even mollify hard-liners in the police and other services. But as soon as he began to make public speeches it became embarrassingly clear that poor Dubcek was an anachronism. His vocabulary, his style, even his gestures were those of the reform Communists of the
