Czechoslovakia

The chalked signposts for Moscow, 2000 kilometers, have long since been scrubbed off Prague’s walls on Soviet orders. They were put up to point the way home to the occupation soldiers, and the troops will not be leaving for a while. But the signs still symbolize the hopes of Communist liberals here for salvaging at least a part of Alexander Dubček’s reform program.

For the Czechs to look to Moscow now for aid toward that end may seem no more realistic than trying to fight Moscow’s armored divisions in August with protest speeches, poems, and broadcasts. Or was the resistance so futile? Although it is hard to speak of successes or victories of any kind in the gloomy, uncertain atmosphere of this occupied capital, in a sense the poets and writers did prevail against the tanks. Their street campaigns and secret broadcasts brought out an unprecedented display of national unity against the invaders, and this in turn upset the original Soviet plan for Czechoslovakia.

Risks role

The Soviet intervention was set up in two stages: a speedy and overwhelming military operation, and the formation of new, subservient Party and government leaderships willing both to abandon the reform program and to legitimize the appeal for troops.

The first stage went off smoothly, with the advantages of surprise and numerical superiority. Before most people knew what was happening, key buildings were seized, Dubček and his lieutenants were arrested, and the Czechoslovak Army, outnumbered in any case by four to one, was neutralized.

The second stage was a failure from the start. The Soviets, trying to repeat the 1956 Hungarian intervention, could find no Janos Kadar, and as the first days passed, it became more and more difficult for any of the wavering Presidium members to risk the role. Suspected collaborators were quickly identified by the clandestine stations, which were supplied with information directly from the Presidium. Within hours, the names would go up on the walls all over the country.

In the end, the Soviets were faced with the equally unpalatable alternatives of forming an outright military dictatorship or releasing Dubček and the other arrested leaders. They chose the latter.

“It was the broadcasts that did it,” a doctor in Bratislava told me. “The nation was united as never before.

There was not a single gap in our ranks, but the level of unity could be maintained only because the stations kept telling us the rest of the country was with us.”

Toying

Dubček’s restoration hardly meant permanent security for his person, of course, and very little at all for his program of liberalization. The constant dangers to both were made clear while the occupation was in its first months. Prime Minister Oldřich Černík signed an economic agreement tying Czechoslovakia even closer to the Soviet Union, and the Soviets seemed to be trying out a series of alternatives to Dubček. In the fall Moscow pressure forced first one, then another, liberal out of the Prague regime.

The first alternative leader to Dubček with whom the Soviets seemed to be toying was Gustav Husak, Slovak Party chief who is popular in the provincial capital of Bratislava for the way he argues Slovak grievances against the majority Czechs. For a time, Husak’s statements on fulfilling the demands of the occupation powers got bigger play in the Moscow press than Dubček’s. But those who know the fifty-five-year-old Slovak leader do not count him as a potential collaborator. He was, after all, a victim of the Stalinist political trials of the fifties.

Less is known of the motives of the second Soviet favorite, Zdeněk Mlynar, Party secretary and Presidium member. Mlynar seemed to be criticizing Dubček when he hit out in a television address against the “mistakes and neglect of the party leadership” in the eight months before the invasion. He, too, called for a more conciliatory line toward the Soviets, and chimed in with Soviet attacks on the radical journals Literarni Listy and Student, now both banned.

The economic agreement signed by Černík in Moscow bound Czechoslovakia to long-term deliveries of Soviet gas and other raw materials. Details were not made public, but it was clearly another part of the counterattack against the reforms of economic planner Professor Ota Sik. Sik was fired as deputy premier under Soviet pressure. TASS said his ideas were “dragging the country onto the road of capitalism.”

Like other planners in the bloc, including Russia, Sik sought to replace the restrictions of central planning with the flexibility of the market and to use profits as a gauge of efficiency. But he was more outspoken than his neighbors — he admitted that Czech workers were worse off under Communism than they were under capitalism — and he went further, demanding among other things convertibility of the koruna.

Testing

Although the Soviet Union trades more with the West than Czechoslovakia, it feared the growth of Prague’s business ties, particularly with neighboring West Germany, and therefore refused the $400 million hard currency loan Sik wanted so his plants could re-equip with Western machinery. Now it seems likely that a good-sized loan will be granted. Poland, East Germany, and Hungary all got them as a kind of consolation prize for the failure of their revolutions in 1953 and 1956. But payment will be in soft currency, which, like the economic agreement, will serve to re-integrate Czechoslovakia into Comecon.

If past Kremlin history is any indication, the original Soviet scheme turned out to be a blunder that will have to be paid for by someone, and therein lie the hopes of the liberals in Prague. There are no electoral processes in Russia to repair political mistakes of this magnitude, but the Politburo in the past has found the means to shuck off those responsible. It can take time, as in the removal of Nikita Khrushchev two years after the Cuban missile pullout.

The thinking in Prague is that when the consequences of Czechoslovakia finally are faced, the victors will be those who opposed the intervention in the first place, and who could be expected to be more permissive of liberalization in the future. It is a view widely held, by journalists, writers, and students. Many of them add this thought, expressed by a philosophy student in Prague: “Even if there is no change at all in Moscow, we’ve tested our strength, and we can’t be stopped.”

Empty victories

These words would ring of empty romanticism if Prague were not in a part of Europe with a cherished, ancient tradition of intellectual engagement. The students on the barricades and the Russians on their punitive expedition behaved not as Communists disputing conflicting interpretations of Marxism but as Central Europeans have always behaved: big powers conquering little powers; little powers using wit, guile, and bravery to make the victories empty ones. Whether the occupiers come in transport planes or Hapsburg cavalry formations, there is the feeling that they have been here before, and that the Czechs, Slovaks, and Moravians have dealt with them in the past and managed to survive.

Because of this background, the Czechoslovakian liberal intellectuals have a position in Prague that their American counterparts never attained in the United States, where the very words “brain trust” make the voters suspicious. From 1848 to the founding of the republic in 1918 by the philosophy professor Tomáš Masaryk, it was the poems, pamphlets, and speeches of the intelligentsia that kept the idea of the nation alive.

Another of those long periods may be starting now with underground journals and illegal leaflets supplementing the news contained between the lines of the official press and censor-approved books.

Despite the high degree of national unity made possible by the intellectuals, not everyone is united in praising their role. In the bitterness that followed the end of active resistance, many voices were raised in criticism. Some resented the fact that the broadcasts stopped the street fighting. Others thought that the writers had too much power in the first place.

Make-believe games

It is true that without the impetus of the rebellious Writers’ Congress of the summer of 1967, or the student protest marches of last October, Stalinism of the Antonín Novotný style probably would have creaked along for another couple of years. Prague’s national museum, newspaper plants, and office buildings would not be pocked with bullet holes, and twenty-five Prague residents, and an equal number in the provinces, most of them young, would not have been killed.

But neither would the nation have had half a year of the kind of freedom unknown for nearly a generation: newspapers that put into type the complaints that people had only been able to whisper, political clubs that argued that the Communist Party ought to go into opposition for a while, books that told of the horrors of the Stalin era political trials, and courts that rehabilitated the victims who still survived. Now, most of the important political gains have been rescinded by the Russians, and even Dubček’s own popularity may wane as he is forced to help carry out further unpleasant measures.

Whatever remains, many Czechs agree that the journalists and writers at least should have become more restrained after the warnings of the Warsaw Letter and Čierna talks in July. But in many ways, the press and broadcast corps in Prague was like a talented football team that had been limited to practicing scrimmages for many years, developing dazzling techniques that the public never was permitted to see. Suddenly the team was allowed to play before an audience and compete for real goals. It was impossible from that point to return to the make-believe games.

At the end of the Bratislava summit, when Premier Černík called the journalists together and told them it had been secretly agreed to reimpose restraints on the press and that attacks on the Soviet Union must stop, one editor asked, “Does that mean you want us to go back to writing about the Bulgarian apple crop?” That, of course, is exactly what the Soviets wanted.

They did not realize that the Prague liberalization process was developing into one of the best arguments for Communism that the system has yet produced. If left alone, it would have been a symbol and example for all the growing currents of leftist sentiment in universities and intellectual circles. The West would have had to produce new arguments to replace the easy ones it has been using. It is questionable whether Dubček and his theorists could have succeeded even without the pressures from outside. Certainly their refusal to put the system to the test of a free, unweighted vote raises the suspicion that it was not full democracy that they had in mind, if it imperiled the Communist Party. But since the morning of August 21, no one will ever know.

Repeat

The Russians attacked because the same liberal Communism that was proving so attractive to the Western radicals was even more attractive to liberals in Moscow, East Berlin, or Warsaw.

The Soviets also were not sure that Dubček could keep control of events, even though he was following a course much more circumspect than the one followed by Imre Nagy in Hungary, 1956. When Dubček failed to shut off the press and the street-corner speakers after Čierna and Bratislava, however, the specter of Hungary must have seemed very real.

After the fighting began in the streets of Prague, the Budapest situation seemed to be repeating itself. Students bounced paving stones off tank turrets. Soviet soldiers fired above and into crowds.

Unfriendly, unprovocative

At about this time, the appeals of the secret stations began. Two Soviet tanks had been burned out, but hundreds remained. The street crowds were urged not to try to defend the radio building. The only result could be another Budapest, and in any case, secret transmitters were already operating elsewhere. It was the start of the second phase of the resistance, with the broadcasters in control.

Listening to the clandestine stations was a moving experience even without being able to recognize more than a few words. To avoid detection, the half-dozen stations operating at any one time would take turns coming on the air. They would broadcast news, appeals, and warnings, call in another station, then disappear. Their basic message was a call for national resistance by every nonviolent means possible. “Plaster the streets with ‘Russians go home’ signs. Paint over direction signs on highways, or change the destinations from Prague and Brno to Moscow and Kiev; unscrew the enameled red and white street signs from buildings; take off the house numbers; disconnect the wires on the Soviet-controlled loudspeaker systems in the cities; make speeches, debate the Russian soldiers on street corners, but be neither friendly nor provocative. Above all, do not lift a stone, or allow your children in the streets with even a toy pistol; the result could be another battle of Budapest and another occupation government.”

The street slogans and posters went up overnight. Villages had hundreds, cities tens of thousands. One short downtown block in Brno had 576 different signs in its show windows and on buildings. Some were dramatic, such as the map of Czechoslovakia with daggers thrust into it from five different directions. Some were ingenious — a Hitler mustache on Brezhnev’s picture, a swastika inside the Soviet star. There were some excellent artistic efforts, including a collage depicting a fat Russian gnawing on a pork chop out of a Czech road map, and a pop art enlargement of an eye and a single huge tear. But most simply stated and repeated a simple message: aggressors, occupiers, go home.

There would have been a resistance movement without the direction of the journalists who went into hiding and kept up the broadcasts, of course, but the results might have been different. There is evidence that the whole job of coordination and direction was planned in advance, at a time when no one else seriously believed that the Russian troops would attack. It seems clear that the excellent communications facilities of the Czechoslovak Army provided the technical means, although government jamming stations and some amateur equipment also may have been used.

In the view of some Czechs and Slovaks, it was an effort that should have been put to better use. If there had been a real fight, this argument goes, the Soviets would have had their hands burned and would be easier to deal with now.

“This country didn’t fight back at Munich, or in the 1948 coup, or this time,” a Brno engineer observed. “These are heavy moral burdens. The loss of life would have been terrible, but it would have done something for the country.”

In most conversations, however, the emphasis is on the futility of armed resistance. The deaths might have run into the hundreds or thousands. Prague’s treasured streets of baroque buildings, Bratislava’s Renaissance squares would have been rubble. Refugees would have poured into Austria by the tens of thousands, as in 1956.

New age of suspicion

It is true that a new age of suspicion has descended on Prague. Rumors speed around hotel lobbies; unpopular waiters are pointed out as Soviet agents; Party and government officials never seem able to keep appointments or answer questions. The atmosphere, in short, is back to what it was under Novotný, and the writers’ talk of continuing liberalization, with or without changes in Moscow, seems remote, impossible, crazy.

At such times, it is reassuring to recall that it was also under Novotný that the theory and aims of the Prague reforms were conceived. The Writers’ Congress and the student marches were the immediate impetus for the advent of Dubček, but they did not just suddenly happen.

Vaclav Havel’s satirical theater was founded, under enormous difficulties, ten years ago, and in up-anddown battles with the censors he was able to prepare the ground for reform with plays showing up the stupidities of the system. The critical writings of Ladislav Mnacko and others performed the same function, as did the famous Czech films.

These and other acts of protest were possible because of the dilemma of every repressive regime, Soviet, Czarist, or Austro-Hungarian. It needs plays that people will go to see and books that they will read as much as it needs censors. Sometimes the censor prevails, sometimes the poet. In Czechoslovakia, the weight is sure to be on the side of the censor for some time to come, but just as surely, it will eventually have to shift. — Donald Shanor

France

“These are hard days for authority. Current custom attacks it and legislation tends to weaken it. In the home and in the factory, in the state and in the street it arouses impatience and criticism rather than confidence and obedience. Jostled from below whenever it shows its head, it has come to doubt itself, to feel its way, to assert itself at the wrong moment; when it is unsure, with reticence, excuses and extreme caution; when it is overconfident, harshly, roughly and with a niggling formalism.”

Charles de Gaulle wrote these observations on the French scene back in the 1920s, in the aftermath of the First World War. They first appeared in print in 1932 in The Edge of the Sword, a slim volume of his essays on the problems and application of power which remains basic reading for any appreciation of the General and how he operates. The events of last May and June accurately mirrored the picture of hard days for authority drawn by De Gaulle of France forty years before. In the wake of those events, the French President acted completely in accordance with the principles he laid down in The Edge of the Sword.