Spectator's Journal/Good Soldiers

...Among those gathered at the Palace of Culture, the only difference of opinion was between those who believed Gorbachev had been a positive force for change at the start, and those who—like Alexander Podrabinek, the quietly energetic publisher of the news-weekly Express-Chronicle, one of the Soviet Union's first and largest independent newspapers—refuse to give him any credit whatsoever, attributing the changes solely to pressure from dissidents...

...Major grievances were addressed to the West, for wallowing and propping up the crumbling corrupt regime...

...as for Czechoslovakia, he confidently predicted that it would become "a normal country" in five or six years...

...and the democratic, pro-Western orientation of the Popular Front of Azerbaijan...

...He said he wanted to change things but realized his efforts were go-ing nowhere because Gorbachev did not really want genuine democratic change...

...The prevailing view was that the ethnic bloodshed of recent months had been instigated by the Kremlin—a view belied by the antagonism between some of the conference panelists, particularly the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis on the predictable Nagorno-Karabakh issue...

...T he underlying idea of the confer- 1 ence seemed to be that the democratic forces of the Soviet Union should be united in preparation for the downfall of the Communist regime, and be ready to govern...

...In the old section of the city, on the way from the Loreto monastery to the St...

...It is only fair to note, however, that the dissident movement had been around for twenty years before Gorbachev, and was at its lowest point when he took power.bigshots...

...And, quite unlike Moscow, Prague has no network of establishments catering exclusively to patrons with dollars or deutschemarks, with the exception of a few hotel shops selling ridiculously overpriced jewelry, souvenirs, and liqueurs...

...Now," she solemnly declared, "it is a hotel for Americans...

...But Russian is not of much use in getting around (nor is English, for that matter...

...A little overconfident, perhaps, but looking more realistic every day...

...With two days left, I decided to take a bus tour of the city, most ineptly organized by the official tourist agency Cedok...

...When the guide, a harried, middle-aged woman in an ill-fitting trenchcoat finally showed up, she was collared by the Washington Times's irrepressible Arnold Beichman, who gave her an energetic lecture on how Cedok should conduct its business to thrive in a new, market-oriented environment...

...Curiously enough, some Soviet media did attend: a group of independent television producers who do a monthly four-hour video magazine for official Soviet TV...

...Election posters are everywhere (though the ubiquitous smiling likeness of Vaclav Havel begins, after a while, to smack of a new personality cult), and street vendors sell not only folk art but also anti-Communist buttons, including a cute one with a skull and a red hammer and sickle instead of crossbones...

...In the USSR, by contrast, the official rate is six to one and the black-market rate can be as high as twenty to one...

...He went on to badger Georgiy Khatzenkov, currently general director of the new Democratic Russia party and formerly an adviser to the Central Committee, asking him to explain his transition from lion to lamb (or is it vice versa...

...The two Azeri delegates, the dark, smooth, pipe-smoking Araz Ali-Zadeh and the silver-haired and dashing Tofik Gasymov, had the particularly tough job of trying to convince everyone that they were not fundamentalist Moslem barbarians...

...A statue of a Russian soldier locked in an embrace with a Czech civilian, it has become, I was told, a gathering place and an ironic symbol for the country's budding gay liberation movement, its pedestal plastered with the movement's leaflets...

...Syndicated columnist Don Feder—in Prague like myself for the "Peaceful Road to Democracy" conference organized by Soviet dissidents and American anti-Communists —noted that East bloc societies seemed eager to emulate those features of modern Western societies he could have done without...

...To him, the benefits of the new regime were already obvious...

...Former political prisoners were rubbing elbows with former advisers to the Central Committee of the CPSU...

...This exquisite city often manages to achieve a misleading look of European elegance, particularly on weekends, Cathy Young is a writer living in New Jersey...

...If it hadn't been for him, we wouldn't have had our democratic revolution"—this was repeated to me time and time again, almost word for word...

...Not included in the tour was the Prague monument to Soviet liberators...

...They are not quite as good yet at emulating such bourgeois frivolities as courteous customer service...

...After one of the panels, Georgian independence activist Tengiz Gudava remarked that he was reminded of the prophecy of the lamb lying down with the lion...

...These findings, the subject of a BBC documentary, were deep-sixed by the American news media...

...German helps...

...There were chuckles...

...The display window of an electronics shop features a nice selection of Walkman radios, cassette players, and other things which in the USSR are traded only on the black market, at mind-boggling prices...

...A nineteen-year-old college student who spoke rather good English explained to me that although Russian had been mandatory in school, many kids were blocking it out...

...Waiters, with few exceptions, are sullen and boorish in a uniquely socialist way—a nuisance mitigated somewhat by the fact that a full dinner at some of Prague's best restaurants costs the equivalent of twelve dollars...

...I lingered to read the Russian inscription commemorating one Comrade Belyakov, a Soviet soldier fallen in the liberation of Prague from the Nazis...

...Now," he told me proudly, "I am my own director...

...Meanwhile, Soviet democrats of different stripes gathered at Prague's mammoth steel-and-chrome Palace of Culture July 4-6 to discuss how the Soviet Union could follow the example of Czechoslovakia's gentle revolution...

...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL GOOD SOLDIERS by Cathy Young Prague Nearly a year after the "Velvet Revolution," Prague offers a remarkable mix of lingering Soviet-style socialism and nascent Western-style democracy...

...Vitus Cathedral, we were led without stopping past a modest gray marble headstone...

...Such signs of bourgeois decadence as posters for Emmanuelle are also in evidence...

...Gudava would not be here at this conference but in a very different place...

...Not that occasional sparks didn't fly...

...She looked bewildered...

...He pitied Gorbachev for his problems...

...In Czechoslovakia, a stereo system sells for just over the average monthly salary...

...This gratitude was apparently unswayed by a report, issued a few months ago by a Czech government commission, that the events that led to the revolution—beginning with a brutal police attack on student demonstrators—were skillfully engineered by the Czech secret service and the KGB, in a joint plot to replace the country's Brezhnevite regime with a pro-Moscow, "liberal Communist" one...

...T he Czechs I spoke to, from college students to middle-aged working men and women, were far less harsh on Gorby...

...One goal was to break the ice between groups of people who rarely get to talk to each other: Armenians and Azerbaijanis, for example, as well as traditional dissidents and those willing to work within the half-freedom of glasnost...

...The cab driver who took me to the airport spoke broken Russian and broken English...

...All the signs in airports, train stations, and many other public places are in Czech and Russian (sometimes also in German and English)—reminders of recent colonial rule...

...The "Prague Appeal" issued by the conference, and presumably endorsed by all the participants, bluntly called for the immediate dissolution of the Soviet Union...

...Black-market currency trading is still carried on by cab drivers and hotel porters, but, interestingly, the gap between the black-market rate and the official one is not that great: the latter is 25 crowns to a dollar, the former only about 30...

...The bus took us past the elegant Forum hotel, which, the guide explained, was once reserved solely for Czech and Soviet Communist party THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 33...

...World chess champion Gary Kasparov, 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1990 a leader of the Democratic Russia party, marveled at the shocked reaction of American campus audiences to his coolness toward Gorbachev, and sneered at the universal willingness to fall for the Gorbachev-vs.-the hardliners scenario, which he (and most other participants) saw as a staged good commie-bad commie show...

...I was left to ponder these great questions after the conference, when the impatient Russians had gone home...

...The headstone was undefiled, the grave well-tended with geraniums planted on it—what more could the spirit of Comrade Belyakov ask for...

...Two minutes to departure time, no one at the Cedok office knew where the bus or the guide was...

...When the Soviets come here, they think they're in consumer paradise, and many wonder what more those damn East Europeans could want...

...They said they had a great deal of leeway in choosing the contents, but they still could not be sure that their interview with veteran dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, one of the stars of the conference, would get on the air, or that their studio would not be penalized by loss of access to the equipment they still have to lease from state-run TV...

...AliZadeh was emphatic about his country's basic secularism—t`How can there be a Moslem fundamentalist movement in a republic where the Koran is not available in the vernacular...

...The ex-apparatchiks and the ex-political prisoners were unanimous in their dislike of Gorbachev, their championship of radical free-market reform, and their opposition to any Western economic aid to the present regime...

...Behind the scenes, some of the Russians, who do not score high on ethnic sensitivity, remained wary...

...If the major U.S...

...when local residents in telltale clothes and shoes clear out for the countryside and leave the streets to tourists...

...media had not, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal, utterly ignored this event, they would have discovered a universe where Mikhail Gorbachev is neither a hero nor a liberator but an impediment to real liberation...

...I am sorry I was in the appamt," concluded Khatzenkov, "but on the other hand I am not, because if it hadn't been for people like myself, Mr...

...If, on the other hand, you go by Moscow standards, you'll be pleasantly surprised...

...Josef Zissels, a Jewish activist from the Ukraine, leaned over to me and sighed, "It's very sad when the leadership of a democratic party is made up of ex-Communists...

...It shows how few true democrats we have in our country...

...Both sides, however, seemed sincerely committed to reconciliation in the face of a common oppressor...

...Khatzenkov, a sharp-eyed, not unpleasant-looking fortyish fellow, said that he had once been expelled from the University of Moscow for political heresy, and had joined the Central Committee staff in 1968, "when we all had illusions about Gorbachev...

...Then things got out of hand and the intended palace coup became a genuine popular revolt...

...Any Czech willing to spend the money can dine at the same restaurant as the American tourist...

...Misleading because you almost expect something European when you enter a store...

...often, even those fluent in Russian were pretending not to be...