Sixties. He had learned nothing, it seemed, from his bitter experiences, but spoke still of resurrecting a kinder, gentler, Czechoslovak path to Socialism. To the tens of thousands of young people in the streets of Prague, or Brno, or Bratislava he was at first a historical curiosity; soon he became an irritating irrelevance.[304]
By way of compromise Dubcek was elected chairman (i.e. Speaker) of the Federal Assembly. It fell to Vaclav Havel himself to become President—a notion so bizarrely implausible just five weeks before that he had gently dismissed the suggestion when it was first mooted by cheering crowds in the streets of Prague: ‘Havel na Hrad!’ (‘Havel to the Castle’). By December 7th, however, the playwright had come around to the view that his acceptance of the post might be the best way to facilitate the country’s exit from Communism; on December 28th 1989 the same Communist Assembly which had dutifully rubber-stamped the legislation that had hitherto consigned Havel and others to years of imprisonment now elected him President of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. On New Year’s Day 1990 the new President amnestied 16,000 political prisoners; the following day the political police itself was disbanded.
Czechoslovakia’s remarkably expeditious and peaceful exit from Communism—the so-called ‘velvet revolution’—was made possible by a confluence of circumstances. As in Poland, the intellectual opposition was united above all by the memory of past defeats and a determination to avoid outright confrontation—it was not for nothing that the leading civic organization in Slovakia called itself ‘Public Against Violence’. As in the GDR, the utter bankruptcy of the ruling Party became clear so fast that the option of an organized rearguard action was excluded almost from the start.
But the role of Havel was equally crucial—no one individual of comparable public standing emerged in any other Communist country, and while most of the practical ideas and even the political tactics of Civic Forum might have been forthcoming in his absence, it was Havel who caught and channeled the public mood, moving his colleagues forward while keeping the expectations of the crowds within manageable bounds. The impact of Havel and his public appeal cannot be overstated. Like Tomas Masaryk, with whom he came increasingly to be compared, the improbably charismatic Havel was now widely regarded by many as something akin to a national saviour. One Prague student poster from December 1989, in a possibly unintended but highly apposite religious allusion, depicted the incoming President with the words ‘He gave Himself to us.’
It was not just Havel’s multiple incarcerations and his unflinching record of moral opposition to Communism that placed him upon this pedestal: it was also his distinctively apolitical disposition. It was not in spite of his theatrical preoccupations that his fellow-citizens turned to Havel, it was because of them. As one Italian commentator observed of Havel’s emerging role on the Czechoslovak political stage, his distinctive voice allowed him to articulate the feelings of a silenced nation: ‘
In Czechoslovakia such a bridge was important. For all that it was in many respects the most western of the European Communist lands, Czechoslovakia was also the only one with a markedly egalitarian and left-leaning political culture: this, after all, was the only country in the world where almost two voters in five had ever chosen a Communist Party in free elections, back in 1946. In spite of forty years of ‘real existing Socialism’—and twenty years of deadening ‘normalization’—something of this political culture still endured: in the first post-Communist elections, held in June 1990, 14 percent of the electorate opted for the Communist Party. It was the enduring presence of this sizeable core of Communist supporters—together with the much larger penumbra of apolitical citizens not sufficiently dissatisfied to protest their condition—that had led dissident writers like Ludvik Vaculik to question the likelihood of great changes in the immediate future. History seemed to be against the Czechs and Slovaks: ever since 1938, Czechoslovakia had never quite managed to recover control of its own destiny.
Thus, when the people themselves finally seized the initiative in November 1989, the ensuing velvet revolution appeared almost too good to be true. Hence the talk of police plots and manufactured crises, as though Czechoslovak society had so little self confidence that even the initiative to destroy Communism must have come from the Communists themselves. Such skepticism was almost certainly misplaced—all the evidence that has since emerged suggests that on November 17th the Czech security police simply went too far. There was no ‘plot’ to force the hand of the ruling clique. In 1989 the people of Czechoslovakia really did take charge of their destiny.
The Romanian case was another matter. There it seems clear that in December 1989 one faction within the ruling Romanian Workers’ Party did indeed decide that its best chance of survival lay in forcibly removing the ruling coterie around Nicolae Ceausescu. Romania, of course, was not a typical Communist state. If Czechoslovakia was the most western of the Communist satellite countries, Romania was the most ‘oriental’. Under Ceausescu, Communism had degenerated from national Leninism to a sort of neo-Stalinist satrapy, where Byzantine levels of nepotism and inefficiency were propped in place by a tentacular secret police.
Compared with Dej’s vicious dictatorship of the Fifties, Ceausescu’s regime got by with relatively little overt brutality; but the rare hints of public protest—strikes in the Jiu mining valley in August 1977, for example, or a decade later at the Red Star tractor works in Brasov—were violently and effectively suppressed. Moreover, Ceausescu could count not only on a cowed population but also upon a remarkable lack of foreign criticism for his actions at home: eight months after imprisoning the strike leaders in the Jiu Valley (and murdering their leaders) the Romanian dictator was visiting the United States as the guest of President Jimmy Carter. By taking his distance from Moscow—we have seen how Romania abstained from the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia—Ceausescu bought himself freedom of maneuver and even foreign acclaim, particularly in the early stages of the ‘new’ Cold War of the 1980s. Because the Romanian leader was happy to criticize the Russians (and send his gymnasts to the Los Angeles Olympics), Americans and others kept quiet about his domestic crimes.[306]
Romanians, however, paid a terrible price for Ceausescu’s privileged status. In 1966, to increase the population—a traditional ‘Romanianist’ obsession—he prohibited abortion for women under forty with fewer than four children (in 1986 the age barrier was raised to forty-five). In 1984 the minimum marriage age for women was reduced to fifteen. Compulsory monthly medical examinations for all women of childbearing age were introduced to prevent abortions, which were permitted, if at all, only in the presence of a Party representative. Doctors in districts with a declining birth rate had their salaries cut.
The population did not increase, but the death rate from abortions far exceeded that of any other European country: as the only available form of birth control, illegal abortions were widely performed, often under the most appalling and dangerous conditions. Over the ensuing twenty-three years the 1966 law resulted in the death of at least ten thousand women. The real infant mortality rate was so high that after 1985 births were not officially recorded until a child had survived to its fourth week—the apotheosis of Communist control of knowledge. By the time Ceausescu was overthrown the death rate of new-born babies was twenty-five per thousand and there were upward of 100,000 institutionalized children.
The setting for this national tragedy was an economy that was deliberately turned backward, from subsistence into destitution. In the early Eighties, Ceausescu decided to enhance his country’s international standing still further by paying down Romania’s huge foreign debts. The agencies of international capitalism— starting with the International Monetary Fund—were delighted and could not praise the Romanian dictator enough. Bucharest was granted a complete rescheduling of its external debt. To pay off his Western creditors, Ceausescu applied unrelenting and unprecedented pressure upon domestic consumption.
In contrast to Communist rulers elsewhere, unrestrainedly borrowing abroad to bribe their subjects with well-stocked shelves, the Romanian
Petrol usage was cut to the minimum: in 1986 a program of horse-breeding to substitute for motorized vehicles was introduced. Horse-drawn carts became the main means of transport and the harvest was brought in
