The Struggle Continues in Czechoslovakia
Holesovsky, Vaclav
AS OF LATE JUNE the Czechoslovak democratic revolution has managed to survive the first attempts at its liquidation. It has become clear that the revolutionary process cannot be brought down...
...The intellectual spokesmen of the revolution seemed unsure as to whether the working class understood its stake in the reconquest of democratic freedoms...
...After having tasted the fruits of freedom, they seem to be enjoying it, together with the rest of the population...
...This uncertainty seems to have been fed by the attempts of conservative Communists to provoke a little pogrom against intellectuals among factory workers...
...Of our own free will for the first time...
...What it isreally doing is publicly accepting the consequences of its breakdown...
...By tolerating the disrespect of censorship, by stating that the Party would nolonger interfere with the management of factories, by proclaiming that the task of the unions is to defend workers' interests, by promising a speedy investigation and revision of political trials, the new leadership creates, moreor less, the illusion that it is busy dismantlingthe totalitarian power apparatus...
...The reconstruction of a free and authentic trade union movement, within or next to the ruins of the totalitarian pseudo-unions, has been a good sign...
...The prosecutor of the show trials of the fifties, Urvalek, is being subjected to interviews on his role...
...3) Dubcek has weapons of counterpressure and blackmail at his disposal and can use them efficiently...
...legislation forbidding unsupervised associations remains on the books...
...Unshackeled journalists have been uncovering details on the secret machinery of the totalitarian state...
...4) Czechoslovakia is in for a war of nerves that may continue for a number of years...
...The spontaneous exuberance of the May Day parade, with happy improvised exchanges between the marching men and the main reviewing stand, was profoundly symbolic...
...Because I did not obey I was accused ofunreliability and fired...
...Grizzly experiences of citizens, victims of the secret police, are being told for the first time...
...The possibility of sudden reversals is still a real one...
...read one banner...
...During early spring there was uncertainty as to workers' attiudes...
...It has become clear that the revolutionary process cannot be brought down by Soviet military threats...
...Whatever the subjective mood of the Dubcek leadership, the decisive factor for the future will remain the strength of the democratic transformation of social institutions...
...Don't let it freeze over...
...However, there are signs that in the course of this process the leading actors have been playing their role more and more willingly...
...After years of struggles and suffering I was bitterly disappointed to see the injustices being perpetrated on the population...
...legislation governing publications has not been abolished...
...It is entering the next stage, marked by struggle for legal and institutional consolidation of de facto democratic conquests...
...The Dubcek leadership has not yielded to any "persuasion" Kosygin used during his peculiar Karlsbad cure last May...
...Here is a typical story from a flood of "letters to the editor": After the war I returned to Czechoslovakia, having served in the Czechoslovak Army unit in the Soviet Union...
...Meanwhile, the revolutionary process in Czechoslovakia begins to follow a historical pattern...
...2) the Dubcek leadership has been sufficiently involved in the revolutionary process so that he and his allies now find their future dependent on the democratic forces...
...True, there has been relatively little interference with freedom of expression on the printed page and with the upsurge of political activity outside the established framework...
...The raw and boundless political energy of the population has so far prevented any backsliding toward even partial reconsolidation of the old oppression, and not any decision of the top government officials...
...It is leaving the initial stage of spontaneity and the massive release of pent-up tensions...
...Those who worked there, behind a door without a handle, bound by a strict vow never to reveal what they knew, called it the "special room...
...In 1951 I had to hand my farm over to a state farm, and declare that I was giving it up voluntarily...
...What has free speech been free about these last months...
...The population is asking for guarantees for the unhampered -exercise of basic democratic freedoms...
...No doubt, the spring events created a crisis in the thinking of workers, confused by 20 years of exploitation combined with flattery about being the "ruling class...
...Special it was—until March 26...
...This trend is apparent in the practical elimination from power of the old trade-union confederation, strengthening the independence of industrial and craft federations, founding of completely new tradeunion federations by representatives convened from the entire territory of a state, and a series of well-organized local strikes for well-defined objectives...
...THE QUESTION has often been asked whether Alexander Dubcek is an apparatchik hoisted by the force of historical circumstances into an essentially uncongenial role, or a bona fide democrat and revolutionary, hatched by the apparat and deliberately subverting the totalitarian system from his position within that system...
...Zemedelske noviny, April 2, 1968...
...In a long perspective, the issue in Czechoslovakia has been the reconquest of political democracy by society, i.e., the legal state—a necessary prerequisite for the solution of society's problems at other levels...
...called an unknown marcher...
...When I was on duty guarding prisoners, for instance, I received the order to push a prisoner off the window sill while he was cleaning windows and to report his fall as suicide...
...It is apparent that the call for liberty has not been a general slogan but a multi-level and practical operation, conducted by society for the elimination of instruments of terror...
...However, the censors have not been fired...
...Only one major topic has been taboo, or almost taboo: international ties to Warsaw Pact countries, and to the Soviet Union in particular...
...Readers of the tradeunion daily Prace (May 4) are treated to an exact description of mail inspection: Employees called it the X-ray room...
...AS OF LATE JUNE the Czechoslovak democratic revolution has managed to survive the first attempts at its liquidation...
...Rude pravo, the Party organ, requests a full investigation not only of past crimes but of the current number and status of political prisoners and penal institutions, with the aim of abolishing the notion of political crime altogether...
...They see that freedom and safety for Communists is inseparable from the freedom and safety of everybody else...
...Then, after a lengthy search for a job I was given a farm for which I had to pay 15,000 crowns...
...The right answer may be that he has gone through a transformation from the former into something resembling the latter...
...As if to dramatize its resistance, the Central Committee of the Communist party was busy suspending Antonin Novotny and a few of his followers even as Soviet army units were entering Czechoslovakia, ahead of schedule, for Warsaw-Pact maneuvers...
...Otherwise, every aspect of past and present is being reexamined...
...Soon I was made to understand, by insinuation, that I hadfought in the Soviet Union only in order to save my life...
...That day marks its disappearance down to the small window, covered by a black wooden screen, under which four employees of the secret department of the post office passed to unknownhands behind the wall as many letters as thehands asked for...
...the future political role of non-Communists—who have created a network of "Clubs of Committed Non-Party Men"—is being handled gingerly and with obvious embarrassment on the part of Communist officials, including the "liberals...
...his answers are taken apart and can be compared with the memoirs of Rudolf Slansky's wife...
...I took a job with the State Security Police in Kosice...
...Right now one can conclude that 1) the Soviet Union finds a quick and brutal suppression unsuitable...
...The former stage, that of a tool of historical circumstances, has been well summarized by Paul Barton, writing in New Politics: The extent to which the Dubcek leadership asserts its authority depends entirely on its recognition of the breakdown of the Party apparatus...
...Dubcek, using his hand as megaphone, called back: "How could we, as long as you keep stirring it up...
...Nevertheless, the response of labor to the suspension of totalitarian controls was the classic one: a powerful drive for the reestablishment of autonomous organizations fitted to the specific interests of the workers...
...What is happening in Czechoslovakia is but another in the long chain of revolts and revolutions, from Kronstadt 1921 through the present, which has been the labor of oppressed humanity seeking to unblock the road to progress from the consequences of the October Revolution...
...The horrors and monstrosities of the defunct system are being uncovered, case by case...
Vol. 15 • July 1968 • No. 4
