http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Prague--spring-in-winter-3907
by John O'Sullivan
October 2008
On the fortieth anniversary of the Prague Spring.
--
Under the glowering gaze of the National Museum at the top of
Wenceslas Square stands a forty-year-old Russian tank. Its fuel tanks
are strapped vulnerably to its rear and its gun aims at nothing in
particular. Tourists and students walk around and past it with mild
curiosity as if it were an exhibit from the distant past like a stone
spearhead or a medieval pike. But behind the tank, pasted to the
Museum walls and staircase, are placards with cartoons and graffiti
of a deliberately crude style that evokes only yesterday. The names
slapdashed down in whitewash give us a more precise fix on what is
being recalled. "Dub?ek-Svoboda," they proclaim.
Forty years ago those names were a slogan and even a chant. Old
newsreels show tanks identical to that outside the museum, manned by
nervous and disoriented soldiers, stationary in the midst of vast
Czech crowds who repeat the names of the leaders of Czechoslovakia's
"reform Communism" as a sort of revolutionary reproof. Troops from
four Warsaw Pact countriesEast Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the
Soviet Union itselfhad entered Prague on August 21, 1968 and taken
up positions in and around the city's main monuments, including where
the tank stands today.
Sloping down from the Museum, on the pedestrian middle section of
Wenceslas Square (which is not really a square but a sort of
boulevard) is an outdoor exhibition of photographs mostly taken on
the first full day of the 1968 invasion. These are the work of the
Paris Match photographer Franz Goess, who had previously photographed
the Hungarian Revolution and the Six Day War. There are a few
pictures of Dub?ek at political events throughout the Prague Spring,
and some photographs of ordinary people debating with puzzled Soviet
soldiers. Most photographs, however, are of rough-hewn cartoons,
slogans, and caricatures calling on the invaders to depart. Such
cartoons had appeared by the dozens, perhaps hundreds, on windows and
buildings up and down the square on the first morning of the
invasion. Soldiers were ordered to remove them by nightfall. But
while this extraordinary exhibition of People's Art was still in
session, Goess preserved it for posterity.
"We don't want borsch, we want freedom and Dub?ek," says one poster.
Another depicts a dove of peace pierced through the heart by a
Kalashnikov. A third shows a boot stamping hard on an outline map of
Czechoslovakia. All of them are angry; few are aggressive. The
dominant theme is "Go home, Ivan, to your families and let us live in
peace with ours." Patriotism is there, but it is a domesticated
patriotism. There is no hint of revanchism (not surprisingly perhaps
since the Czechs had gained from the territorial changes of 1945).
The style of art is rough, unpolished, and with a touch of the
counterculture about it. Many cartoons resemble the artwork of the
"underground" magazines then making their way in the West. That may
reflect the hurried circumstances of their production. Or perhaps the
influence of the West's counterculture.
The invaders had crossed the Czechoslovak borders that night in a
fraternal intervention to save Czech socialism from … well, what? As
the posters and cartoons repeatedly imply, that is a question that
requires some unraveling.
The "Prague Spring" was an attempt to liberalize communism from the
top down with the slogan "Socialism with a human face." Under the
leadership of Alexander Dub?ek and his fellow-reformers in the
politburo, measures were taken to decentralize the economy, abolish
censorship, allow foreign travel, and permit greater political
freedom in general. Mindful of what had happened in Hungary twelve
years earlier, however, Dub?ek pledged to maintain a pro-Soviet
foreign policy in order to deter a Soviet crackdown. Nor did the
Czechs abolish "the leading role of the party" or, less
euphemistically, the communist monopoly on power. The compromise then
seemed just about viable.
In retrospect the Prague Spring looks like a doomed transition. If it
had been allowed to run its course, it would either have evolved (or
collapsed) into a genuine democracy or retreated into a hard
communist shell. After all, the former is what happened to
perestroika in the Soviet Union and the latter to the early Chinese
experiments in reform. When socialism with a human face as a system
was stamped on by the Soviet boot, it was saved as a myth.
Then and later socialists and social democrats thought that a
valuable Third Way between socialism and capitalismthe gentle
revolution of their perpetual imaginingshad been brutally closed
off. Conservatives were both more skeptical and less surprised. They
saw the Prague Spring as a half-way house to freedom but one the
Soviets would have to dismantle anyway lest the idea spread to their
other colonies. Brezhnev, employing a Marxist version of the same
logic, saw it shrewdly as a drift to counter-revolutionand acted accordingly.
How did the puzzled-looking soldiers in the Russian tanks view it? We
now have an idea of that because some of those soldiers have been
reminiscing on the fortieth anniversary of 1968. Muhammed Salih is
today an Uzbek dissident and the author of twenty books. In 1968 he
was a soldier in a reconnaissance battalion of the Red Army that on
August 21 crossed into Slovakia and drove into Bratislava. His
comrades had been told that their mission was to save the Czechs and
Slovaks from the armed machinations of the Western bourgeoisie. As he
frankly told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in an interview,
however, their main feeling about the forthcoming battle was
exhilaration. Their officers and sergeants would now have to treat
them decently.
Apparently that happened to the extent that they were allowed to
trash the palace where they were billeted in Bratislava. But these
adolescent pranks were soon overwhelmed by more powerful experiences:
At one point someone in the crowd threw a Molotov cocktail at our
vehicle and one of us opened fire in response. A girl was killed and
for quite a while afterwards her body was paraded through the streets
of Bratislava as an example of the bloodlust of the Soviet soldier.
Such incidents are inevitable even in the smallest of wars. The
invasion was such a war in part because the Czech Army had been
ordered to remain in barracks (by a President Svoboda who played a
slightly ambiguous role in these events, protecting his more radical
colleagues but ensuring lack of resistance to the Soviets). Bloodshed
was therefore light. In these circumstances, the main response of
ordinary Czechs and Slovaks was to appeal to the fellow- humanity of
the young Soviet recruits by arguing with them.
Czechs since then have occasionally lamented that, as in 1938 and
1948, they failed to fight for their deliverance. This self-criticism
(and worse) is unreasonable. Fighting would have ensured more
innocent deaths without changing the outcome. But the failure to
fight has wounded the national psyche in various subtle ways of which
the immediate self-contempt of the 1970s is only one. It may also
have led people to over-emphasize anti-heroic and evasive
Schweik-like elements in the Czech character as a sort of
justification. And, indeed, the pacific resistance to the invasion
can provide real justification. Salih again:
Long-legged girls in miniskirts gave us leaflets that said we had
been deceived by our commanders, that we were not liberators but
occupiers… . They [urged] us not to take up arms against unarmed
people. They were really unarmed.
And this disarmed usyoung sentimental soldiers who had come from
afar, leaving our families, just like they said in the leaflets.
Salih was impressed that an unarmed person could stand against an
armed one and drew from this experience what he calls "the freedom of
an unarmed man." He went on to found the National Salvation Committee
which, despite its slightly putschist title, is the umbrella
organization of opposition groups in Uzbekistan.
Many others learned the same lesson. Seven Russian dissidents
ventured into Red Square that same time and unveiled a banner reading
"For Your Freedom and Ours." It was an act of conscience and
self-sacrifice that led them into years of harassment and repression.
Dissident movements throughout the Soviet bloc were inspired by the
velvet resistance of ordinary people to tanks and guns. Initially,
however, Czechs and Slovaks seemed to forget the lesson they had
taught to others.
Gustav Husak's hard-line regime succeeded Dub?ek and imposed a long
winter of "normalization" on the country. People were asked to sign
statements of support for the Soviet invasion and, if they refused,
found themselves unemployed, unfit for further education, steered
into jobs such as stoking and cleaning. Dub?ek himself was reduced to
the status of a gardener by some bureaucrat who never knew that
gardening is a famous recipe for a happy life. For a while, these
suffocating tactics worked. The entire nation seemingly lapsed into a
disturbed sleep of self-contempt and slothful bitterness. When I
visited Prague in the early 1970s, I was struck by the sourness,
depression, inefficiency, and dishonesty of everyday life. After the
goulash gaiety of Budapest, it was like stepping into a home for the depressed.
That depression began to lift with the founding of Charter 77. One of
its signatories, Anna Sabatova, now head of the Czech Helsinki Group,
who spent three years in prison for distributing leaflets, points out
that the Charter had several foundations and a rather complicated
history. Its gradual success in establishing a space for dissidence
arose from the confluence of three developments: the awakening
memories of 1968, the fact that the Czechoslovakia had signed
international rights covenants (which were thus part of Czech law),
and growing support in Europe, the U.S., and Canada for human rights
in foreign policy. Charter 77 was a unique organization, in part
because it was hardly an organization at all. It brought together
people of every ideological stripe (except, obviously, for those
communists who supported the Husak regime) on a basis of equality and
mutual respect. Its rules counseled the avoidance of both ideological
language and divisive positions outside the narrow defense of civil
and political liberties. And it refrained from anything that smacked
of "opposition" activity.
Religion too played a role, though less so than in Poland. Ms.
Sabatova points out that, insofar as there was a Charter 77 ideology
underlying its defense of civil rights, almost all of its members
were influenced by the Christian stress of some founders on forgiving
and overcoming hate. It was this restraint that enabled a wide
variety of ideological actors to cooperate as well as giving the
movement appeal to the wider (and compromised) society. Rather like
Polish Solidarity a few years later, though less spectacularly,
Charter 77 established itself as the real moral authority of Czech
and Slovak society as the 1970s and 1980s wore on.
Why then do we associate Czech dissidents far more with rock music
than with religion? Tom Stoppard's recent play Rock 'n' Roll makes
this link a powerful oneand not without good cause. As Sabatova
points out again, the Husak regime's decision to prosecute the Czech
rock group Plastic People of the Universe was the catalyst that
revived Czech dissidence. It demonstrated even to those who disliked
such music that the ambition of the totalitarian state to control
life and thought was in principle limitless and had to be resisted.
But a secondary effect was that rock music became thereafter
something of a symbol of Czech resistance. That had a further effect:
it guaranteed Czech dissidents a wide sympathetic audience in the
West on the Left as well as among traditional anti-communists. Social
democrats who were deaf to the appeal of John Paul II and a
religion-soaked Solidarity had no inner qualms about supporting the
Plastic People of the Universe.
If rock music was undoubtedly one link between Charter 77 and the
Western counterculture, it wasn't the only one. The Christian stress
on forgiveness underlying the charter overlapped heavily with the
Western Left's Gandhian stress on "peace" and disarmament. It could
be presentednot accurately but plausiblyas very different and even
hostile to Reagan's Cold War intransigence. (Indeed, that is exactly
how the Western "peace movement" of the 1980s did present it.) The
emphasis on the anti-heroic in the Czech self-image also attracted
pacifist Western identification. Even the social style of the Czech
dissidents played its part. It was so relaxed, bohemian, and
seemingly unconservative that Westerners were often amazed to
discover that Vaclav Havel admired Margaret Thatcher as well as John Lennon.
But there were philosophical costs to this ambiguity. When Norman
Podhoretz visited Havel's apartment, he was alarmed to see the poster
of John Lennon decorating the wall. He argued that the
countercultural Left was an unreliable ally against Communism.
Lennon's utopian, hedonist, and Dionysian counterculture represented,
he thought, a very different revolution to the sober bourgeois
liberal democracy sought by Havel. It was a potentially disabling
confusion of ideologies. Yet this confusion came to be encapsulated
in the very idea of 1968.
At the time very few people thought that the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia and the student manifestations against de Gaulle in
Paris were really different examples of the same thing simply because
they happened in the same year. Among those who saw them as entirely
separate were the leaders of the international student Left. Indeed,
they saw them as opposites. Tariq Ali, "Danny the Red," and other
student leftist leaders met in London that summer to great media
interest and some mockery. Private Eye ran on its cover a photograph
of the leaders in front of Marx's grave in Highgate cemetery. They
are shown as singing "There's No Business Like Show Business" while
the bust of Marx throws out an aside: "Kindly leave the stage." But
when a British journalist innocently asked if they were not seeking
the same "liberalization" as Dub?ek in Prague, he was shouted down.
Liberalization was the last thing they were seeking. What they wanted
was socialism. Of course, they wanted socialism without Soviet tanks,
namely the democratic socialism that Solzhenitsyn would later deride
as "boiling ice." But, whatever their positive ideas, they had little
sympathy with the reformist methods or the rightwards direction of
the Prague Spring. As 1968 evolved from a year into a myth, however,
it blended almost all the upheavals of then and later into a single
revolutionary upsurge of a vaguely radical kind. Anti-Vietnam demos
outside the Pentagon, student attacks on the Paris police, assaults
on universities from Columbia to the LSE, sit-ins, teach-ins, and
factory occupations, the classical invasion of South Vietnam by the
North's professional army all were alleged to be symptoms of a
world-wide discontent with capitalism (plus, to please the
sophisticated, bureaucracy) that would shortly usher in a new world.
It ought to have been impossible to fit the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia into this radical framework. But somehow it happened.
Prague became another example of how the revolution had been unkindly
snuffed out by bureaucracy. On programs celebrating the fortieth
anniversary of 1968, Tariq Ali himself could be found regretting
wistfully that the only real prospect of establishing a popular
democratic socialism in Europe had been prevented by Soviet tanks
that summer. Because the fit was a poor one, however, the Prague
Spring played a diminishing role in the heroic mythology of 1968 as
time went on. And because the Western counterculture had influenced
Czech opinion, this blend of mistaking and forgetting 1968 has even
spread to Prague itself.
Earlier this year, in a session of the Prague Writers' Festival about
1968, a largely American panel devoted itself almost entirely to a
discussion, soaked in self-congratulatory guilt, of Vietnam and the
U.S. anti-war movement. It was left to the sole Russian panelist to
point out that at the very time the Soviets were supplying the North
Vietnamese with the sinews of war (and helping them to shoot down
John McCain), they were also sending tanks to within yards of where
the panel was sitting that day. Some of the other panelists were
simply baffled by this observation, but the chairmanTariq Ali, who
seems to have become the guru-to-go-to for 1968demanded to know if
the Russian panelist was for or against the Vietnam war. The Russian
replied mildly that he was simply putting the U.S. role in Vietnam in
the geopolitical context of 1968. This only baffled the Americans
further. As it happens, however, the central and eastern Europeans of
1968 and later were strongly in favor of the U.S. effort in
Vietnamas liberal Americans visiting Prague and Budapest in those
days were distressed to find. They had a stronger grip on
geopolitical reality than American liberals of those daysand than
some Czechs today.
When the Writers' Festival was in session, the Franz Goess exhibition
had not been erected. In the same space there was, however, an
exhibition of sorts. A small tent protected tables on which petitions
against the stationing of a U.S. missile defense system in the Czech
Republic were presented for signature. This is a contemporary dispute
in Prague. The Czech government strongly favors deployment of this
defensive system and has signed a deployment agreement with the U.S.
government.
Throughout the summer, though, the opinion polls had suggested that
about two-thirds of the Czech people were opposed to deployment. No
referendum was required to endorse the agreement, but the
calculations of the conservative Czech government were that any
parliamentary vote would be close. A narrow victory was likely, but a
defeat possible. The petition displays were therefore playing to a
sympathetic Czech audience.
At the same time they had an almost antique feel to them, displaying
as they did the signs and slogans of the Western counterculture of
1968 and later. Even the arguments were seemingly recycled. Roger
Scruton, speaking to a private meeting of Czech conservatives
involved in the missile defense debate, described the underlying
local argument of missile defense opponents as "Defense Equals
Aggression"much the same logic that the peace movement in the 1980s
used to obstruct the stationing of Cruise and Pershing missiles in
Western Europe while remaining largely silent about the Soviet SS20
missiles in the East. Twenty years after the Velvet Revolution, such
neutralist inversions plainly appealed to large section of the Czech
public that had forgotten geopolitical realities and embraced an
outlook rooted in the Western counterculture and a certain wounded
national self-image.
A young contemporary dissident from Belarus, Pavel Sevyarynets, drew
a distinction in an RFE/RL talk between Paris and Prague in 1968 that
echoes Podhoretz's unease over the Lennon poster in Havel's apartment:
Freedom demanded in Paris was anarchic, hippie-like, with an element
of the sexual revolution, a rebellion against morality, with a
denunciation of patriotism. It was a call for freedom from order,
rules, and in the end from God.
The freedom demanded in Prague was moral and patriotic; it was
freedom from dictatorship, violence, and militant atheism.
That second freedom inspired Czechs and Slovaks in 1968 and 1977. As
we have seen, the Czech dissident movement initially had a strong
religious foundation. Also, since 1989, former dissidents in and out
of office, in particular Havel, have taken strong positions in
defense of Western values, Atlantic institutions, and dissidents
needing help in Cuba and other despotisms. The present Czech
government represents those conservative sections of Czech opinion
that still remain robustly Atlanticist and suspicious of Russia. Over
time, however, the countercultural strain in Czech political opinion,
with its hedonism and utopian visions of universal and European peace
had risen in influence and even begun to predominate. Today,
Pavyarynet's lyrical description of Czech freedom sounds more like
the Polish freedom inspired and guided by John Paul II. With the
threat of Soviet aggression no longer palpable, the Czechs had begun
to feel that their liberty could be enjoyed without cost, without
commitment, and without defense.
Just two weeks before the fortieth anniversary of 1968, however,
Russia sent in the tanks againthis time into Georgiaand seized two
provinces of the invaded country. Within hours of this news, the
atmosphere of Prague and of Czech politics changed sharply. Franz
Goess and the other exhibitions suddenly became contemporary
warnings. The sour mood of countercultural isolationism evaporated.
It became the conventional wisdom that the missile defense agreement
would survive parliamentary debate. Czech politicians settled down to
the traditional task of working out what alliances they would need in
this new world of geo-economic realpolitik. And Czechs had the
opportunity to reflect on the lessons of someone else's invasionand
of their concept of freedom.
Less than five minutes walk from the other end of Wenceslas Square is
a small Franciscan friary. It is currently housing another exhibition
of photographs of Russian occupiers. This modest display, however,
shows the soldiers preparing to leave Czechoslovakia in 1990
following the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. The
same kind of young men away from home are depicted as in the
photographs from 1968. Like their earlier comrades, some of them are
clearly homesick. They are not sorry to be leaving. But in these
photographs they are disconsolate rather than puzzled. The
accompanying pictures of broken tanks and ruined barracks give off a
sad whiff of defeat, failure, and retreat.
After they have seen the Goess photographs, Czechs and Georgians
should both visit this exhibition. It would remind them that the
strongest hostile powers can be humbled. But that requires a spirit
of liberty that is watchful and robust rather than utopian and
hedonistunless, of course, the hostile powers in question are
obliging enough to issue the kind of unmistakable advance warning
that Russia delivered over Georgia.
--
John O'Sullivan is an editor at large at National Review.
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