Revolution 1989 (59 page)

There was no hiding any of the evidence of brutality. A British journalist, Edward Lucas, watching the riot police laying into the students, was led away by two officers. As they did so, a plain-clothes StB man knocked him, unconscious, to the ground. Philip Bye, a news cameraman from Independent Television News, was beaten up. At around 9.45 the violence stopped, almost as abruptly as it had started. Wounded and bloodied young people picked themselves up from the ground and staggered home, or to a hospital casualty unit. Five hundred and sixty-one were injured. Around 120 were carted off in police vans, where they were beaten again. One young man was left lying on the cobblestones on Národní Street appearing lifeless. He was covered with a blanket and stretchered away in an ambulance.
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This is where the Czechoslovak Revolution enters the murky, looking glass world of Kafka and
Švejk
, spiced with a hint of John le Carré. Rumour travelled fast in Communist capitals and it was generally believed, certainly more so than the official media. Within hours, the word was that the prone body seen lying on Národní Street was that of a mathematics student, Martin Šmíd. It was spread mainly by the dissident Charter 77 activist Peter Uhl, who daily provided information from the opposition underground to journalists from the West. Uhl had been told about the death by a woman calling herself Drahomíra Draská who claimed to be an old friend of Šmíd. Uhl immediately told Radio Free Europe, the BBC and Voice of America, which reported the death of Martin Šmíd as fact. There was public fury throughout Czechoslovakia. The regime denied that anybody had died in the ‘riot’ and the next day managed to produce two Martin Šmíds, both of them alive. One, who had been on the demonstration, appeared on nationwide TV breathing and talking. It did little good. Nobody believed the regime’s denials.

That weekend huge spontaneous demonstrations erupted in Prague on an unprecedented scale. An archway on Národní Street where many of the police beatings had taken place was turned into a shrine visited by scores of thousands of people. Someone had painted a cross on a wall nearby and passers-by lit candles. ‘The news about that death changed everything, not just for us, but for our parents’ generation,’ said Dasha Antelova. ‘They had been silent since 1968, terrified of what they could lose. But now they were as enraged as we young people were. Mothers and grandmothers joined students and ordinary workers on the rallies. It was all good-humoured, and wonderfully exciting, but determined.’ The government could think of no response, other than to arrest Peter Uhl for spreading false rumours.
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The regime was deeply split. The Martin Šmíd story is evidence. The Party’s own ‘sword and shield’ was working against its leadership. Often, conspiracy theories can be discounted, even in Central Europe under communism, where they abounded. But occasionally there really were conspiracies behind the theories. This is an example. The Czech secret service, the StB, faked the ‘death’ of Martin Šmíd in order to create a groundswell of popular anger that would remove Jakes, Prague Party boss Miroslav Štpán and other hardliners and replace them with Gorbachev-type reformers. It seems far-fetched, but evidence which established the conspiracy as genuine, rather than a plot in a spy movie, was provided later in a commission of inquiry set up by a post-Communist government.

The plan was the brainchild of General Alois Lorenc, head of the StB, and a small group of Party reformers who looked at events in Poland and Hungary and thought the only way of maintaining their own positions was to find a means of negotiating from strength with a divided opposition. At the same time, the other essential step in the operation - codenamed Wedge - was to infiltrate the dissident movements and find opposition figures willing to do a deal with reform Communists. It was convoluted, ill-judged and entirely misunderstood the Czech opposition and character, but undoubtedly it was bold. The details were worked out when the StB knew that there would be a big student demonstration on the anniversary of Opletal’s death. A key player was Lieutenant Ludvik Zifcák, a young StB officer who, under orders, had infiltrated the student opposition underground. In a classic ‘provocation’, he was one of the leaders of the main march to the National Cemetery, and when that ended in the afternoon he was one of the students shouting at the top of his voice ‘To Wenceslas Square’. He knew there would be a trap when the students arrived. He kept his head down as far as possible when the violence began. He lay on the ground and pretended to play dead. Drahomíra Draská, who subsequently disappeared, was another agent. She had orders to pass on the news to Uhl that a student had died.

It is still unclear exactly how much the Soviets knew about the plan - or which Soviets. While the riot police were beating up students in central Prague, General Lorenc was dining with the KGB’s head of station in Czechoslovakia, General Gennady Teslenko, and the deputy head of the KG B, General Viktor Grushko, who had arrived in Prague a few days earlier. They then drove together to the gloomy sludge-grey concrete and glass StB headquarters on Bartolomjská Street, not far from Wenceslas Square. But he socialised with KG B officers as a matter of course. That does not prove direct Soviet involvement. It is not the kind of operation that the men around Gorbachev would have recommended. It was far too risky and its main purpose opaque. The plotters had picked out their candidate to take over the leadership: Zdenek Mlyná, who they thought would start Prague Spring-type reforms, which they could learn to support. But Mlyná was no longer a Communist, had lived in comfortable exile in Vienna for some years, and wanted nothing to do with the plot. Seldom can a conspiracy have been so elaborate, so wrong-headed, and turned into such a spectacular failure. The Czechs did not rise up to remove the excesses of neo-Stalinism. They wanted rid of the Communists, and especially the Russians. As the ‘corpse’ Lieutenant Zifák said, he and the other conspirators had tried to save communism. Instead, they hastened its end.
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While a make-believe revolution was taking place in the minds of secret police officers, the real thing was happening on the streets of Prague and in a box-like theatre just off Wenceslas Square called the Magic Lantern. Václav Havel had been at his country house in Bohemia when the students were beaten up. He did not return to Prague until Sunday 19 November. He knew when the Berlin Wall fell that the Czech regime had only limited time left in power, but he did not know when or how it would go. It needed a push. When he arrived back in the city, already there was a group of friends, dissidents and opposition activists at his cluttered but elegant flat on the riverbank with a sweeping view towards the Castle. They were looking to him for leadership. From that moment he took command of the Velvet Revolution. He no longer seemed like a shy intellectual plagued by self-doubts, but appeared a strong and decisive man of authority. He was a formidable political tactician. To most Czechs he was still unfamiliar. ‘Havel was . . . more or less unknown, or known as the son of a rich capitalist, even as a convict,’ said the Czech novelist Ivan Klíma, who had known Havel for years and did not always agree with him. ‘But the revolutionary ethos that seized the nation brought about a change of attitude . . . In a certain atmosphere, an individual suddenly identifies himself with the prevailing mood and state of mind, and captures the crowd’s enthusiasm . . . Within a few days Havel became the symbol of revolutionary change, the man who would lead society out of its crisis.’
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The priority, he told his associates, was to form a unified group, one voice that could represent the opposition and, when the time came, negotiate with the regime about a peaceful transfer of power. The first task was to remove the totalitarian system, Havel maintained. They could all disagree later when a working democracy was established. Havel called Rita Klimova and asked her to translate for him at an impromptu press conference with foreign reporters. It was a shrewd move. He spoke English, but with a heavy accent, and he thought her part New York, part Central European cadences, as well as her wit, would play well to Western audiences. He was right. ‘The ideals for which I have been struggling for many years and for which I have been imprisoned are beginning to come to life as an expression of the will of the people,’ he said. At last the Czechs were beginning to wake from their torpor.

First, they needed a headquarters. The previous day actors had declared a strike - as did students. So the playwright directed operations from a theatre. At ten that night he took up residence at the Magic Lantern. Performances of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s expressionist classic
The Minotaur
were cancelled while the Czechs brought down their government. By midnight they had agreed on a name, Civic Forum, and produced the first of a series of proclamations and demands. The group claimed to be a ‘spokesman on behalf of that part of the Czechoslovak public which in recent days has been profoundly shaken by the brutal massacre of peacefully demonstrating students’. At first there were four demands:

Shortly after it was published, Havel quipped only half in jest that it was time for another Russian invasion - now, he said, the men in charge at the Kremlin would be more on his side than on the regime’s.

For the next six days vast demonstrations filled Wenceslas Square every evening. Most people went after work. As in East Germany, it was a well-ordered revolution and well-mannered. When professional footballers called a strike, they made sure they continued ‘working’ for ninety minutes on Sunday afternoon, so supporters would not miss matches. ‘Each day people felt stronger and stood up straighter,’ said the musician Ondej Soukup. ‘It was as though the weight of the previous twenty years was being shed. We Czechs had not felt good about ourselves. We had been so submissive. But now we were beginning to feel proud. It was extraordinary.’
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The police took no action as the numbers grew. There were at least 300,000 on Monday 20 November, in the freezing cold. The odd snowflake fell, which did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm or the good humour. People talked to each other with trust about their hopes and dreams for the first time in two decades. Occasionally speeches were made, more often there was music. A rock band formed by the hugely popular Czech artist Michael Kocáb, a friend of Havel, set up a loudspeaker system. When the music stopped the most commonly heard sound was the shaking of keys, which frequently echoed around Wenceslas Square and through the whole of central Prague. Addressed to their Communist masters for the last forty years, it meant ‘Goodbye, it’s time to leave’. Similar huge demonstrations were taking place in towns and cities throughout the country, like Brno and Ostrava, where there had been almost no opposition political activity for the past twenty years. In Bratislava, Charter 77’s sister organisation, VONS, the Committee in Defence of the Unjustly Persecuted, had existed since the late 1970s, but with a minuscule membership. It became Civic Forum’s central branch in Slovakia, where Alexander Dubek again emerged as a political figure. When he sent a message of support to the demonstrators in Wenceslas Square, cheers erupted around the whole city.

In the Magic Lantern there was a constant hum of excited activity. It was a varied crowd. As Timothy Garton Ash, who spent many intense hours of conversation and laughter there said, ‘The room smells of cigarette smoke, sweat, damp coats and revolution.’ Havel had managed to bring together people of entirely opposed views with one purpose: to remove the totalitarian regime. There were Trotskyists, reform Communists, environmentalists, feminists, right-wing Catholics, Calvinist pastors and rock musicians who wanted to make the music they liked. People in jeans or overalls would come into the Magic Lantern for a while at lunchtime or early evening and then return to their paying jobs. During the Prague Spring they had been lawyers, published writers, Communist Party officials or academics. They had been fired. Now they were part-time political activists, and full-time factory workers, electricians or minor office clerks. One of the leading figures in Civic Forum, the trim, sparklingly original Jií Dienstbier, had been among Czechoslovakia’s best-known journalists, a campaigning foreign correspondent, until he was fired in the autumn of 1968. He had since found a job as a janitor. Every now and then he left meetings at the Magic Lantern to stoke up the boiler at the building where he worked.
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The Czech Communists divided into chaos. Jakes, the Prague Party boss Štpán and old Stalinists like Jan Fojtík wanted to continue with tough police action. They considered imposing martial law on the morning of 19 November. At first the Defence Minister, Jaroslav Václavík, suggested a ‘military solution’ that involved moving tanks to key locations on the edges of cities. The Czech air force would be put on high alert. But it was not a realistic prospect at this stage. No soldiers were ever ordered out of barracks during the Velvet Revolution. Jakeš held a series of meetings of the hardliners at which the threats they made sounded bloodcurdling, but no strong action followed. ‘Force has to be met by force,’ Jakeš said to his colleagues. ‘We cannot helplessly watch the activities of groups acting . . . outside the law and incited from abroad. Attempts to manipulate . . . sections of Czechoslovak youth could lead society into a crisis with unforeseen consequences. ’ One of the other old Stalinists said later that ‘we looked at what had happened in Berlin. They sat on their hands and took no action - and we could see what followed. Some of us were determined we had to do something.’ But the Party was disintegrating.
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