1968 (7 page)

But Masaryk enjoyed great popularity among not only the Czechs but the Slovaks. At the end of World War I, he traveled to America and gained the support of Woodrow Wilson; then he moved to Paris, where in October 1918 he formed a united Czechoslovakian government, managed to get it recognized by the allies, and returned two months later to a newly created nation in which he was the national hero.

From the beginning there was the “Slovak problem.” The Slovaks demanded that the new nation be called Czecho-Slovak and not Czechoslovakia, but the Czechs refused to grant that small hyphen of separation. This was the first of many arguments the Slovaks lost.

Little Alexander had almost no memory of childhood in Slovakia except a tame deer that lived behind the church and a St. Bernard dog that it grieved him to give up. He would be seventeen the next time he saw Slovakia. If Slovakia was backward, it was not nearly as underdeveloped as Kirghizia in the Soviet Union, where the Dub
eks moved voluntarily in 1925 to raise their children on an agricultural cooperative.

Soviet Kirghizia, now called Kyrgyzstan, was four thousand miles from Slovakia, near China. It was not enough in the Iron Age to have metal for plowshares, and nearly the entire population was illiterate, since Kirghiz was not a written language. The Dub
eks never reached their original destination. After traveling twenty-seven days, the rail line ended in a barren place called Pishpek and there they stayed, living in decrepit, abandoned military barracks. They helped build a farming cooperative, bringing in tractors. The local people, who had never seen one, ran after them, shouting, “Satan!” In the early years, there was so little food that Dub
ek remembered eating raw sparrow eggs in the shell. From there they went to the Russian industrial center of Gorkiy. Stefan did not bring Alexander back to Slovakia until 1938, when Stalin decreed that foreigners had to take Soviet citizenship or leave.

Alexander was now seventeen, and the exciting new Czechoslovakia was twenty years old and full of disorder and disillusionment. He had inherited his parents’ ideology but for a long time, it seemed, not their rebellious natures. He was an orthodox, Soviet-educated communist. During World War II he was a partisan in a band of guerrilla fighters known as the Jan Ziska Brigade, named after a fifteenth-century fighter. They fought a rear guard action against the Germans. Years later his official Party biography made much of this wartime experience. He was wounded twice in the leg. His older brother was killed. In 1945 his father, Stefan, was deported by the Germans as a communist to Mauthausen concentration camp. There he found one Antonín Novotny´, a prominent Czech communist who had also been deported. Novotny´ vociferously vowed that if he survived, he would never again have anything to do with politics.

In 1940, in a house where his father was being hidden, Alexander met Anna Ondrisova, about whom he said, “I think I was in love at first sight.” In 1945 Dub
ek married her and remained in love with her until she died in 1991. Rare for such an orthodox communist, Dub
ek married her in a church. When in 1968 Dub
ek became leader of Czechoslovakia, he was the only chief of a European communist country who had been married in a church.

Czechoslovakia is the one country that became communist by a democratic vote. Unfortunately, as often happens in a democracy, the politicians were lying. In 1946 Czechoslovakia, newly liberated by the Soviet Red Army, voted for a communist government that promised there would be no collectives established and that small businesses would not be nationalized. By 1948 the communists had complete control of the country, and in 1949 the government began taking over the economy, nationalizing all enterprises, turning farms into state collectives.

Alexander Dub
ek was a hardworking, serious-minded Slovak Party official carefully sidestepping the issue of Slovak nationalism. He was Slovak enough to be acceptable at home, but not so much that it would be of concern to the Party leadership in Prague. In 1953 he became regional secretary for an area of central Slovakia. That year Stalin died and Khrushchev began dismantling the most rigid excesses of Stalinism—everywhere but in Czechoslovakia. That same year Frozen Face Novotny´ was appointed first secretary of the Communist Party. Novotny´ was poorly educated and his career had shown little promise until he displayed a flair for fabricating evidence in Stalinist purges such as the campaign against the number two government figure, Party secretary-general Rudolph Slansky. Slansky was a brutal member of the dictatorship, probably guilty of many crimes, but he was tried and executed for Zionism. It did not matter that Slansky, far from being a Zionist, had disagreed with the Soviet Union’s early support of Israel. The word
Zionist
was being used not to designate supporters of Israel but to refer to people of Jewish origin, which Slansky was.

Before the Slansky trials, Novotny´ and his wife had once been invited to the home of Foreign Minister Vladimir Clementis, and Novotny´’s wife had admired the Clementises’ porcelain tea service. After Clementis was executed in the Slansky purges, with the help of Novotny´’s doctored evidence, Novotny´ bought the porcelain for his wife.

Paper pulp for construction was made from millions of library books full of dangerous Western ideas. The people of Czechoslovakia were listened to and closely watched by a tight network of secret police agents and neighborhood snitches performing their patriotic duty for the revolution. The citizenry had almost no contact with the West and only limited connections with the rest of the Soviet bloc.

Dub
ek’s job was developing the backward Slovak economy. He stood by patiently while the simplest of ideas were rejected. He and other leaders in his town of Banska Bystrica meekly approached Party leaders to suggest that a new cement factory be relocated to a spot that would not only avoid pollution in the town, but also had plentiful limestone deposits, since cement was made from limestone. The town had even offered to cover the expenses, which, he could demonstrate in his carefully detailed plans, would not be great. The proposal was rejected as the meddling of “narrow-minded bourgeoisie of Bystrica.” Industrialization was too important to be left to a bunch of backward Slovaks. The cement factory was built by the original plan, showering the town, like so many Slovak towns under the industrialization program, with dust, while the entrance to town was marred with an overhead cable railroad to transport limestone.