1968 (42 page)

In April Dub
ek issued the Action Program of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, which spoke of a “new model of socialist democracy.” At last the official positions of the Dub
ek regime were stated, declaring the equality of Czechs and Slovaks, that the aim of government was socialism, and that personal and political beliefs could not be subject to secret police investigations. It denounced abuses of the past and the monopoly of power by the Communist Party.

Articles in
Pravda
in Moscow made it clear that the Soviets were not pleased.
Pravda
wrote of “bourgeois elements” undermining socialism and by summer was writing of anti-Soviet propaganda on Czech television. One of the problems was that efforts to investigate crimes of the past kept ending up on trails that led to Moscow. There was the mystery of Jan Masaryk, for example. Masaryk had been the Czech foreign minister and son of the founding father, who two days after the communist coup in 1948 jumped, fell, or was thrown from a window to his death. The subject had been untouchable for twenty years, but the Czechs wanted at last to resolve what had happened. On April 2 the Prague weekly student paper carried an article by Ivan Svitak demanding the case be reopened. He noted evidence connecting a Major Franz Schramm to the case. Schramm had gone on to become a liaison officer between Czechoslovakian and Soviet security police. Both Czechoslovakian and foreign press discussed the hypothesis that Masaryk was murdered on the direct orders of Stalin. In some stories, Soviet agents had pulled Masaryk from his bed, dragged him to the window, and thrown him out. Investigations into injustices of the 1950s also led to the Soviets. But this was not a time when the Soviet Union was prepared to review the crimes of Stalin, since the two top figures, Brezhnev and Premier Aleksei Kosygin, had been not insignificant figures in his regime.

May Day in most of the communist world was the occasion for a very long military parade displaying very expensive weapons and even longer speeches. But in Prague a touch of the ancient rite of spring had always remained. Three years earlier Allen Ginsberg had been crowned King of May in Prague, shortly before being expelled. This May Day people poured into the streets and passed before the official reviewing stand carrying signs and flags. Some carried American flags. Some carried Israeli flags. If it was forbidden last year, it was fashionable this year. Among the signs:

Fewer monuments more thoughts

Make love, not war

Democracy at all costs

Let Israel live

I would like to increase our population but I have no apartment

The official guests on the reviewing stand were becoming uncomfortable. The Bulgarian ambassador left in anger after seeing a sign stating that Macedonia, which Bulgaria claimed, belonged to Yugoslavia. The crowd surrounded Dub
ek. Hundreds of people tried to shake the hand of the tall, smiling leader. The police stepped in to rescue him, and then, remembering that police force had been used the year before, a Prague Party official went to the microphone to apologize and explain that too many people had crowded the first secretary. The police had not been violent, and the crowd seemed to understand. But the representatives of other Soviet bloc countries were shocked by how things were done here. That night demonstrators marched to the Polish embassy to protest Poland’s treatment of students and the anti-Zionist campaign that was continuing to drive Jews from their Polish homeland. Two nights later there were more protests against Poland. Then, abruptly, Dub
ek left for Moscow.

The lack of explanation produced considerable anxiety in Czechoslovakia. Nor were the Czechs calmed by a communiqué from Dub
ek saying that it was “customary among good friends not to hide behind diplomatic politeness” and so the Soviets had been forthright in expressing concern that “the democratization process in Czechoslovakia” was not an attack on socialism. He seemed to be saying that their concern was a reasonable one, and he added that the Czechoslovakian Communist Party had often warned against such “excesses.” The statement did not in the least reassure his people, and the trip did not appear to calm the Soviets.

It was not easy to grab world attention on May 9, 1968. Columbia and the Sorbonne had been closed. Students were building barricades in the streets of Paris. Bobby Kennedy won the Indiana primary, securing his place as a contender for the nomination. Peace talks opened in Paris. Investors went on a buying spree. Competing with these stories was a rumor that huge numbers of Soviet troops stationed in East Germany and Poland were heading for the Czechoslovakian border. Reporters who attempted to go to the border region to confirm this were stopped by Polish roadblocks. The day before, Bulgaria’s Zhivkov, East Germany’s Ulbricht, Hungary’s Kádár, and Poland’s Gomułka had met in Moscow and issued a communiqué on Czechoslovakia that was so intricately worded and evasive, even by communist standards, that no one could interpret what it was attempting to convey. Had they decided on invasion?

The following day the Czech news agency reported that these were normal Warsaw Pact military maneuvers about which they had been forewarned. No one inside or outside the country completely believed this, but at least the crisis seemed to be over—for now.

With the new freedom in Czechoslovakia came an explosion of culture. Thin young men in blue jeans with long hair sold tabloids with listings of rock, jazz, and theater. Prague, which had always been a theater city, had twenty-two theaters offering plays in the spring of 1968. Tad Szulc of
The New York Times
asserted enthusiastically, “Prague is essentially a Western-minded city in all things from the type and quality of its cultural life to the recent mania for turtleneck sweaters.” He observed that not only artists and intellectuals but bureaucrats in the ministries and even taxi drivers were wearing turtlenecks in a wide range of colors.

May Day parade in Prague, 1968.

(Photo by Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos)

It is true that Prague, with its blend of Slavic and German culture, has always seemed more Western than other central European cities. It is the city of Kafka and Rilke, where German is a common second language. This has always been one of its profound differences with Slovakia, whose capital, Bratislava, is not German speaking and is clearly central European.

The leading jazz club in Prague that spring was the Reduta, near the sprawling green mall known as Wenceslas Square. The Reduta was a small room that could comfortably seat fewer than one hundred but always had more crammed into it. Before the Dub
ek era, this club had been known for the first Czech rock band, Akord Klub. Havel used to go there and wrote, “I didn’t understand the music very well, but it didn’t take much expertise to understand that what they were playing and singing here was fundamentally different from ‘Krystynka’ or ‘Prague Is a Golden Ship,’ both official hits of the time.” When Szulc went there in the spring of 1968, he reported a group doing variations on Dave Brubeck “with a touch of bossa nova.”

Among the theater offered that spring was
Who’s Afraid of Franz Kafka?,
which had first opened in 1963 when the works of Kafka, previously banned as bourgeois, had become permissible again. The title was intended to resemble that of Edward Albee’s
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Another theater presented Frantisek Langer’s long-banned work,
The Horseback Patrol,
about Czech counterrevolutionaries fighting Bolsheviks in 1918. Another drama appearing that spring was
Last Stop
by Jiri Sextr and Jiri Suchy, considered two of the best playwrights of this 1968 renaissance. Their play is about the fear that the Dub
ek reforms could be undone and Czechoslovakia could go back to the way it had been before January.