Letter From Prague: Stirrings & Fears Among Czech Writers
Charbrowe, Leonard
POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE PRAGUE, July 15, 1968, seems different from before. While there are more shops and restaurants, more scaffoldings on the old houses in need of restoration, and more cars...
...In Czechoslovakia there will at least be an economic reform...
...In fact, their insignificance is what has given the major thrust to the developments of the last half year...
...There would be passive resistance...
...THROUGH last winter and most of the spring the workers were noncommittal...
...Despite the average wage being only about 1500 korunas or $60 a month, many workers are afraid of economic competion after two decades of a collective economy...
...Or in a young girl singer at the Reduta jazz club downtown, belting out in a low strong Voice "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight," "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out," and "I Want That Old Time Religion...
...As Vladimir Neff puts it, the power lies in the Word...
...High officials who for years abused the public with impunity have apologized, resigned, and even committed suicide in the face of exposure...
...POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE PRAGUE, July 15, 1968, seems different from before...
...The lifting of travel restrictions was primarily aimed at making more commercial contacts with the West, contacts that would free the economy of its subjection to Russia...
...In the same vein these legitimate resolutions are letters received from workers by Literarni Listi, the Writers' Union weekly...
...That a full implementation of the NEM will now entail a genuine political reform is doubtful...
...They conferred with each other...
...He was pessi mistic because "democracy without opposition is nonsense...
...And many of those currently on the liberal side are mere opportunists waiting for the wind to change again...
...At least such is the opinion of Vladimir Neff, one of Czechoslovakia's foremost novelists and a leading figure in the Writers' Union...
...All Vladimir Neff could say was that the various nonparty groups, more of which were being formed all the time, exchanged opinions...
...Behind the liberalization process, which so far comprises the lifting of travel restrictions and of censorship in all matters except military security, has been the material stagnation of the last 20 years...
...Moreover, a good number are moonlighters who already enjoy private enterprise on top of their security...
...The trade union leaders had long been Party functionaries of the Novotny stamp while the workers themselves POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE seemed to care about bread alone...
...And the lifting of the censorship was primarily aimed at exposing the failures, if not the crimes, of the Stalinists, in order to enlist popular support in the intraparty struggle...
...If Novotny failed to bring off an army coup under General Segna, the army cannot be relied on to crush an alliance of workers and intellectuals...
...The writers have been agreeably surprised, even elated...
...Vladimir Neff tells the joke—"What has changed in Poland since Gomulka...
...A dictatorship cannot be changed to a social democracy without the support and agitation of the workers...
...Still, Czechoslovakia has a stronger democratic tradition than any other East European country, and the popular ferment that has swept through the country, as well as the sophisticated expositions in behalf of social democracy which have appeared in the journals, will surely make it more difficult for the CP leadership to reestablish an authoritarian stability...
...There is little confidence that fundamental changes will be made from the top, and its -own power (a thin, though inflammatory, layer in the middle) is limited...
...At the same time the pessimism is balanced by hope...
...The intelligentsia is still wary, even pessimistic...
...From the start the "Party liberals" have been pragmatists...
...For them the restoration of civil rights has been a means to restoring the economy, not the fulfillment of a political ideal...
...Now that the danger of another Hungary has faded (thanks partly to the Kadar leadership in Budapest supporting the liberalization because it wants to implement an NEM of its own) the fear is of another Poland...
...Of all the economic groups in the country they are in the best position and most reluctant to risk anything...
...Vladimir Neff could say, "The workers are on our side of the barricades...
...The economic situation is the key...
...Only Gomulka...
...but it will probably be solidified and brought to at least a momentary halt during the Special CP Congress in September...
...This question is crucial...
...The New Economic Model or NEM, calling for a full-scale reform that would make the system dynamic by making it competitive, has been the crucial issue...
...On every level of the Party the Stalinist faction, trying to keep its power and privileges, has been resisting a full-scale reform, and this myopic resistance has pushed the liberal faction into an alliance with those in and out of the Party who want real political and cultural freedom...
...Though Dubcek and his colleagues have largely resisted these pressures, there is a suspicion they welcome the leverage the Russians give them against the intelligentsia...
...More important than the farmers, however, are the army and police...
...But the farmers remain silent...
...Any choice at all, if only between personalities, would be better than nothing and might lay the basis for larger victories later...
...Needless to say, the other "parties" in the government are only shadows of the CP and offer anything but opposition...
...With five daily papers, a TV channel, and a radio station in Czechoslovakia, the end of censorship means one can read two papers in the same day without dying of boredom...
...Partly it is in the mass media...
...With gratitude Vladimir Neff took out one which had arrived just that morning, a handwritten letter filled with errors in spelling but also with anxiety that the democratization movement would be stopped short of its goals...
...There is a lightness, even gaiety in the air...
...No, the difference is in mood...
...Yet perhaps the lift is only in the visitor's mind...
...But the two "workers' resolutions" protesting Novotny's dismissal from power turned out to be frauds drafted by CP officials...
...Only—is there such an alliance of groups outside the Party ready to resist a suppression once the intraparty struggle is over...
...For the economic situation may force the "Party liberals" under Alexander Dubcek to go further than they really want to...
...As always, the real revolutionary power is at the bottom...
...Or in an art historian, at the complex of Hradcany Castle, from where the Stalinists ruled so arbitrarily for two decades, talking with as much pleasure about the politics of the present as about the art of the Baroque...
...On the other hand there is a small chance for elections to be reorganized so that some choice is given within the framework of the present system...
...Several hundred letters of like sentiment (as against almost none opposing the movement) have come in from workers...
...The intelligentsia assumed the proletariat to be indifferent, if not hostile, to both economic and political changes...
...The writers' newspaper is too sophisticated for the average proletarian, but the idea of free expression has been getting through...
...And if the writers' newspaper were ever censored again, publication would cease altogether...
...For one thing, the "liberal" faction in the Party is Communist first and democratic second...
...But these officials have merely been replaced by others...
...They already enjoy the cooperative form of enterprise that the NEM would extend through the rest of the economy...
...Since Novotny's ouster the liberalization process has remained fluid enough for further reforms...
...The extent to which opposition is contained and institutionalized at the Party Congress depends on the extent to which the forces demanding it are mobilized...
...So the most likely immediate result is something like another Yugoslavia, where economic competition exists among units of a statified economy, but without political choice or competition...
...In any case, the workers have moved closer...
...Further, the liberals aren't that strong...
...Is one just imagining it all...
...One already intuits this at the border points...
...Perhaps it is in the customs officials who are giving so casual a salute...
...For another, Russian military and financial pressures are still intimidating...
...Something more is needed...
...And more recently legitimate workers' resolutions supporting freedom of expression have been passed...
...Yet the workers, especially in the coal fields where mines have been shut down over the last year, are also suspicious of the NEM...
...Speaking over coffee at the Writers' Club on Narodni Street near the Moldau, this active man of letters, now in his sixties, expressed the fear that the new party leaders would succeed in damming up all nonparty opposition...
...While there are more shops and restaurants, more scaffoldings on the old houses in need of restoration, and more cars in the streets, these changes say little...
...It will probably try to institute economic competition without political competition...
...So where does the power lie for carrying the democratization forward...
...The old guard is not only still strong in the Central Committee, it is even more so in the lower echelons...
...Dubcek, though a sincere nationalist and a shrewd politician, cannot be relied on to make an electoral reform himself...
...Perhaps one saw and heard similar things a year or two ago, yet not with the same POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE elan...
...Hopes are up, everything is tinged with promise...
...Nor can the police, which is not backed by the army...
...and there is no chance for an opposition party...
...And while economic competion could be institutionalized without political competition, political competition could never be institutionalized without economic competition...
Vol. 15 • September 1968 • No. 5
