Sad Summer in Prague
HOPKINS, MARK
MOVING TOWARD 'NORMALIZATION' Sad Summer Pfcl|^UC by mark HOPK1NS Prague Anger and disillusionment, fear and outrage????All the initial emotions that enveloped Prague when Soviet troops occupied...
...Everyone hates Husak," or "This is a Soviet colony...
...For the vast majority of Czechoslovaks, neither the occupation nor the visit of Soviet politicians stirs much thought beyond the obvious facts...
...In March of this year, the Czech Writers Union, also a center of opposition, was undercut when the government seized its publishing house and halted subsidies...
...Prace, the trade-union organ, Mlada Fronla...
...Czechoslovakia, he proclaimed, had politically defeated the "reactionary forces" in the country, and once again was "in firm alliance with the Soviet Union...
...The authorities also discovered 152 illegally possessed guns...
...Those classed as politically unreliable face the bleak likelihood of unemployment, especially if they occupy positions in the government, universities or mass media...
...The Russian diplomatic staff is housed in a commanding, yellow-walled Prague villa atop a small rise set back from the road...
...One argument here has it that in order to survive, the First Secretary must fend off demands to purge the Party of everyone who was the least bit active in reform...
...Now they will ask me to repudiate them...
...Political "purification," together with the Interior Ministry's relentless rummaging for "counterrevolutionaries," has backed the liberals into watchfulness and apprehension...
...I could say that I don't know, I'm stupid...
...a medium-sized refrigerator almost 4,000, and a used Fiat, the smallest model, 36,000...
...In mid-winter, a number of students were arrested, allegedly for being members of a "Trotskyite center," and at least 10 are reportedly still being detained in mental institutions...
...Successive compromises, however necessary and inevitable to adults, have produced youthful dismay and intolerance toward the Czechoslovak leadership...
...Everyone did...
...You have come in a very unfavorable season...
...to obtain a passport, a recommendation from one's place of work is required????which means the Party organization????As well as clearance by the Interior Ministry...
...Their attitude toward the Russians, a Prague journalist agreed, is less hatred than a combination of condescension, ridicule and antagonism...
...The country is subdued, the Party has regained dominance, Czechoslovakia again is a reliable member of the Warsaw Pact, and the economy once more is oriented toward the Soviet Union...
...What troubles them is that the Soviet leadership has come to lean more heavily on the military and has turned increasingly conservative since the fall of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964...
...After all, even today's rallies are evidence of this calming down and of a normalization of our life...
...But because these signs were produced on a letter press, which could easily be traced, some observers were skeptical of their true source...
...Last fall, the governing committee of the Prague Journalists Union was dissolved, while that of the Czech Journalists Union resigned rather than conform...
...A popular postinvasion slogan????to "The Soviet Union came just in time...
...But my articles are what they now call revisionist...
...Added to the sense of confinement, internal policies seem to offer nothing but capitulation to the Soviets, regeneration of the Party machinery, and demands to work harder...
...Such drearily purposeful and repetitive statements leave little space in the press for solid information about what is happening in Czechoslovakia...
...One must jump intellectually from "Occupiers, go home...
...He was subsequently recalled, and only two weeks ago was officially read out of the Party...
...While underground organizations waiting for an opportunity to provoke an incident or reactivate democratization may exist, on the surface the Czechoslovaks strike the foreigner as exceedingly gentle, accepting people...
...For all the official pomp, Brezhnev and Kosygin could not have helped feeling Prague's mixture of indifference and hostility...
...Keep in mind," he added, "that 80 per cent of the journalists were Party members...
...As one taxi-driver, waved away from the Castle by police, joked: "They're afraid to let us get near Brezhnev...
...He still commands admiration among Prague liberals, but they know he is old and that he, too, has accepted the reality and consequences of the Soviet occupation...
...How can I? They were the truth...
...Likely as well would be concurrent measures against lesser reformists in a vindictive sweep of the country, resulting in a suppression of dissenters more severe than at present...
...A second group of citizens, this one including the obligatory mass of schoolchildren, was gathered at Prague Castle, given Soviet and Czechoslovak flags, and primed for cheers...
...The military, too, is undergoing a purge...
...The trouble is not that I wrote articles in favor of reform," one Czech journalist told me...
...Thus the dispatches usually sound alike, as one after another, thev describe the stead} tightening of C/echoslox ak soeietPerhaps as a reaction to the present political monotony, both correspondents and Prague citizens tend to relive the recent past, to recount their own thoughts before and after August 21, 1968...
...For Soviet politicians, it may well be sufficient that the Czechoslovaks remain quiet...
...President Ludvik Svoboda lived his last grand hour in 1968 in Moscow, demanding the safety and release of Czechoslovak leaders seized during the invasion...
...Not official participants in the welcoming ceremonies, these Prague citizens stood silently as the automobiles roared past, slowing only slightly to round a near right-angle corner...
...But in the prevailing atmosphere of suspicion and secrecy such information, however plausible, is simply impossible to substantiate...
...No cheers here, no flags?instead, it was obvious that a sullen citizenry intended to transmit its mood...
...Representative of the current loudspeaker quality of the press arc the reflections of Miroslav Moc, Rude Pravo's editor in chief (who came in when Dubcek went out) on the May Day celebration in Prague...
...the Soviets consent to the arrangement...
...A factory worker's monthly wage is between 1,500-2,000 crowns, and the official exchange rate of 16 crowns to the dollar helps litde in gauging buying power...
...I've decided...
...that Czechoslovakia can't be reported any more in the standard way...
...This despite the fact that at the end of April, "to protect citizens from antisocial elements and criminals," the Interior Ministry had rounded up 4,109 people, nearly 700 in the capital itself...
...The struggle against the influence of opportunism, for cleansing of the Communist party and for international unity," he declared, "is but a struggle for Marxism to maintain its revolutionary ability to acquire experience in fighting...
...These, after all, were the objectives of the invasion, not the gratitude of the people...
...What was actually said at the Bratislava meeting of the Czechoslovak Party Presidium and the Soviet Politburo...
...Kosy-gin and Politburo member Mikhail Suslov were generally rumored to be the doves...
...I find it not suitable to speak to you and to anyone from abroad at this moment," his penned note read...
...But most political graffiti have vanished beneath brushes or paint...
...Since the event, after all, marked the first trip to Czechoslovakia by Soviet leaders following the invasion, neither side was about to gamble with the possibility of a popular anti-Soviet outburst...
...The former First Secretary may have refused to suppress a protest demonstration in front of Party headquarters after the Bratislava meeting because it would be undemocratic to do so, observed one man in Prague, but "tell it to the Russians...
...It is a tragedy...
...and Czechoslovaks have met privately with Russians who opposed the invasion to discuss problems of political and economic reform in both countries...
...A man's suit costs 1,000 crowns, a woman's pants suit 800, a pair of shoes 300...
...And the foreign press did not help????with speculation, for instance, that if there were an election, the Party would be replaced...
...Thus the sight of a Red Army officer in Prague summons up ill feeling, yet one gets the impression that the people do not dislike the Russians en masse...
...That private political discussions consider only the bad or worst alternatives documents as nothing else can the cynicism and bitterness felt by many people????though certainly not in the anti-Dubcek circles...
...Journalists who find themselves incapable of expounding the standard themes of unity, discipline, productivity, allegiance to Moscow, and opposition to all the various enemies of Socialism, drift away or hunt for niches where they can avoid sycophancy...
...With no organizations to fall back on for support, the active reformists are especially vulnerable...
...The predominant and pessimistic opinion is that Husak has yet to consolidate his authority...
...At one of the numerous ceremonies last month celebrating the 25th anniversary of Prague's liberation from the Germans by Soviet forces, Defense Minister Martin Dzur declared: "We are adopting concrete and resolute measures aimed at removing all antisocialist, Rightist opportunist and anti-Soviet forces from the Army...
...The performance of the press during the spring and summer of 1968 also is subject to hindsight criticism...
...Rewards are few, and prospects for improvement appear distant, notwithstanding a good deal of fanfare over the latest Soviet-Czechoslovak economic agreement, which promises Russian assistance in building the Prague subway, an atomic generating plant, and new housing...
...Still, it is difficult to tell how widespread these attitudes really are...
...The airport resounded to cheers of 'Long live the Soviet Union,' " Rude Pravo jubilantly reported...
...But the idea of economic decentralization has run up against obstacles, mostly political, in the Soviet Union itself...
...Given the harmonious chorus condemning the Dubcek regime, the current ranking of major politicians remains in doubt...
...Whereas my generation was raised in Socialism and all, this young generation was told that Democratic Socialism was the goal...
...To enforce greater productivity, he pledged "labor law, organizational and other conditions...
...Thus, the most ardently pro-Soviet and authoritarian functionaries????who were ridiculed, exposed and humbled by the reformists?recognize their opportunity to regain control...
...And in Czechoslovakia, the free-market concepts of expatriate Czech economist Ota Sik are regularly condemned as the vehicle for the restoration of capitalism...
...The Husak regime, in concert with the Soviets, expounds the view that a "class divided world" prevails????And now Czechoslovakia is back on the Soviet side of the divide...
...Although receiving less publicity, several professors of the University of Prague philosophy faculty?which had provided intellectual impulses for democratization????Are said to have been expelled from the Party...
...With the Soviet Union forever.' 'Long live the Red Army.' 'Friendship, friendship.' And 'The Soviet Army came in time.' " Husak, accompanied by President Svoboda, exalted the relationship that "has become in the minds of our people the guarantee of their state independence...
...Accurate measures of public opinion are scarce, since the once-flourishing and probing opinion surveys have been halted or turned into self-serving state exercises...
...They have no heroes...
...Nevertheless, it is clear that the few reformists who retain tenuous holds on government positions wield no effective power...
...If Husak can accomplish this feat, he could, as one Western diplomat put it, "begin the reconciliation with the people," and perhaps initiate another economic reform?but this time muted and gradual...
...Soviet dissenters like physicist Andrei Sakharov have earned admiration for their democratic ideals...
...Besides Brezhnev and Kosygin, the Soviet delegation included Petr Shelest, head of the Ukrainian Party apparatus, Byelorussian First Secretary Petr Mash-erov, Konstantin Katushev, secretary of the Central Committee in charge of relations with foreign Communist parties, and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko...
...I hope you can understand my complicated situation...
...There is no talk of protest or open opposition...
...For the photographic record, Brezhnev, Husak, Kosygin, and Svoboda all raised clasped hands in a gesture of solidarity...
...The dimmest has Svoboda retiring on pension, Husak receiving the honorary title of President of the Republic, and the archconservative faction taking over the Party????Assuming, that is...
...The passive resistance and apathy among factory workers continues, despite government claims of a slight economic improvement so far this year...
...Socialist, and pro-Soviet...
...They exchange and check rumors...
...Although formal censorship has not been revived, editorial management is once again plugged into the Party apparatus...
...Brezhnev, too, played his role well...
...Youths along Wenceslas Place approach foreigners with offers of 30, 35 or 40 crowns for a dollar, and black marketeers obviously resell them for even more...
...They have been replayed so often, only to be frustrated when they engendered action, that Czechoslovaks find them almost impossible to sustain...
...And even these sentiments seem reserved for Soviet political leaders...
...Since April 1969, when Gustav Husak replaced Dubcek as Party First Secretary, the former liberal coalitions have been disbanded and dispersed...
...In addition, it was privately reported in Prague that the Ministry succeeded in breaking up an anti-Soviet protest in the planning stage...
...True, he did manage to put one of his staff men, Radko Kaska, in charge of the Interior Ministry, and since the first anniversary of the invasion there have been no anti-Soviet demonstrations...
...Its occupation forces, estimated at 70-75,000, remain discreetly garrisoned in vilAmong the young, on the other hand, disillusionment is perhaps more prevalent than caution...
...It was his opportunity to show that he had Prague under control, while the Soviet leadership, by consenting to sign a new friendship treaty in the Czechoslovak capital, acknowledged its confidence in him...
...Then that ended...
...As the Prague press emphasized, the treaty restates the "internationalist obligations of the Socialist states in defense of Socialist achievements"????that is, the doctrine of "limited sovereignty" advanced to justify intervention in Czechoslovakia...
...Their mood was indicated by one proreform writer, who after first agreeing to meet with me in private, later declined...
...Really, what can I say...
...Schweik...
...For one thing, travel abroad is closely controlled...
...People in Prague either refuse to speak Russian, or do so with obvious discomfort...
...Ironically, it is Husak????A balding, unspectacular man of conservative instincts even during the Dubcek days????who represents the most hopeful alternative...
...Ninety per cent of them...
...And here and there along back streets in Prague, "PALACH"????recalling Jan Palach, the Prague student who immolated himself in Wenceslas Square in January 1969????survives weather and censorship...
...People in Prague found it incredible, bordering on the absurd, that Brezhnev described the agreement to be "based on full equality, sovereignty and independence of the two sides...
...A recent poll in Slovakia, for example, asked 1.304 persons: "Are you ready to help with the construction of Socialism in the forthcoming period...
...That Husak is felt to have gone far toward accomplishing these ends over the past year was confirmed by the recent Brezhnev-Kosygin visit...
...Compelled by selective measures against the most active students to restrict their lages and forests outside major cities and along the Czechoslovak-West German frontier...
...The treaty as a whole provides the structure for continued Soviet hegemony over Czechoslovakia...
...Other yardsticks present a different picture...
...Witness Rumania, they say...
...Or what is your attitude toward the entrance of the Soviet Army...
...Some people believe Strougal could replace Husak, others even suggest Jakes...
...We might kiss him to death...
...The prime incentive for normalization is provided, as everyone is daily aware, by the Soviet Union...
...Few adults, it would appear, will soon commit themselves again to an experiment in Democratic Socialism with the trust and belief equal to 1968...
...I may simply be expelled from the Party without an interview...
...It behaved like a "mad dog," a writer commented, when censorship was abolished and reportors were free to write what they thought...
...Even more tragic and tortuous for those liberals being subjected to political interrogations is the knowledge that they can recant, betray their convictions and at least save their jobs, if not their Party affiliations...
...I'll have to say that we did not need that kind of help...
...According to ctk, the government news agency, the "majority" answered Yes...
...The route was closed to all traffic about a half hour before the curtained cars sped to the Castle...
...Then, at the Party congress (not expected until next year) he must arrange the election of a central committee sharing his sentiments...
...Rightist opportunists" are being systematically dismissed from the Communist party following personal interrogations of each of its 1.5 million members...
...On a university building, the name "DR...
...In any case, both the economic and political futures of Czechoslovakia are currently bound up with the USSR more tightly than before...
...Police were said to have found "thousands" of placards bearing a clenched fist and advocating revolution and Brezhnev's assassination...
...For as Husak said in his May Day address to crowds of voluntary????And involuntary????demonstrators: "Normal, peaceful life was restored over the entire territory of our state...
...Had liberalization been attempted piecemeal, quietly and under control, other Czechs reflect, the Soviets might not have been aroused...
...Yet the leadership could not or did not subject them to Party discipline...
...HUSAK" has been x'd out with black paint...
...It is unlikely, though, that the Soviet leadership worries over its popularity in this case...
...Husak, whose May Day speech was published in every newspaper, was more succinct in his interpretation of the event...
...The "August events" are analyzed over and over again...
...MOVING TOWARD 'NORMALIZATION' Sad Summer Pfcl|^UC by mark HOPK1NS Prague Anger and disillusionment, fear and outrage????All the initial emotions that enveloped Prague when Soviet troops occupied the city in August 1968?are now largely spent...
...Now they are anti-Communist...
...And Hungary...
...while engaged in internal reforms, refrains from broadcasting them to avoid provoking Soviet apprehension...
...So much was written that was against the interests of the state...
...much as they conform to expectations and logic...
...Would the Soviets intervene...
...In these unhappy circumstances, only conservatives and ultraconservatives are able to vie for power...
...Today, the many liberals who two years ago rallied behind Aleksandr Dubcek and democratic reform confess to anxiety and despair...
...To be sure, these thoughts seem rather academic now...
...said one...
...Why were the tanks and paratroopers finally ordered into Czechoslovakia...
...But it is eminently clear to them that the Soviets are in their country for an extended stay, whatever the words used to characterize the occupation...
...the youth newspaper, and all the others speak largely in concert...
...High up on the gray plaster wall ot an apartment house, one can see "DUBCEK" painted in white letters...
...It is not the 'correct answer.' But that is what I think...
...Not only are politics coursing in another direction, away from democratization, but enthusiasm and idealism have been sapped...
...To be sure, this required considerable play-acting on everyone's part...
...This was used against journalists later...
...During its four days in Prague, the Soviet delegation remained in the Castle for the various receptions and ceremonies...
...Among the official chants that greeted First Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, Premier Aleksei Kosygin and other ranking Soviet politicians when they arrived in Prague this past May 5. There are, of course, some who hope they can take safe refuge in silence...
...the consequences continue to work against the spirit of social revolution...
...At one major intersection, around 400 people gathered alongside the soldiers and security police...
...which conducts a relatively independent foreign policy, but by maintaining Party authority enjoys Moscow's tolerance...
...The 20-year friendship treaty forecasts, to quote Vasil Bilak's words in Nova Mysl, that for the "next two decades Czechoslovakia is insured of close cooperation with her proven and trusted friend, the Soviet Union...
...Personal and political Mark Hopkins is an Alicia Patterson Fund award winner now on leave from the Milwaukee Journal...
...The incident was reminiscent of the cache of American rifles discovered in 1968 and publicized in the East German press as incontrovertible evidence of foreign collaboration with Czechoslovak "counterrevolutionaries" (except that the rifles were in bags ostentatiously marked "USA," and preserved in a lubricant made in East Germany...
...That is the brightest prediction for the immediate future...
...This solid ultraconservative base provides a strong consensus for such men as Premier Lubomir Strougal, Party Presidium members Vasil Bilak and Alois Indra, and Milos Jakes, chairman of the Party's Central Control Commission, now handling the exchange of Party cards and the political interrogations...
...The entire performance, as televised, photographed and described in the press, was flawless...
...At the same time, Premier Strougal lamented in a recent speech that in engineering enterprises only 70-85 per cent of work time is actually spent in labor, and 55-70 per cent in the building industry...
...Others believe their past has so compromised them that it is but a matter of time before they are dropped from the Party register...
...One Party member, who like many thousands of others underwrote the Dubcek democratization, explained in anticipation of his interview: "They might ask questions about my attitude toward former political leaders...
...Rude Pravo, the Party newspaper...
...Czechoslovak authorities assembled reliable and properly briefed crowds at Ruzyne airport, but at the old terminal where the scene could be isolated and better staged...
...Although price and wage controls have been instituted to halt inflation, the cost of living remains high, and the standard low...
...Whatever the case, most analysts agree that Husak's staying power appears shaky...
...For the moment, Czechoslovaks seem little inspired to work very hard...
...After the brief release of 1968, the knowledge that the Soviet leadership again has ultimate control over Czechoslovak internal and foreign policies is the most debilitating condition of all...
...salvation lies in convincing declarations against counterrevolution, antisocialists and anti-Soviet elements, and an equally persuasive commitment to solidarity with the Soviet Union...
...To some observers, in fact, Brezhnev's public display of affection for Husak last month seemed to convey Soviet satisfaction with his leadership...
...But official Czechoslovak politics clamors these days for utmost fealty to Moscow and exemplary purity in "building Socialism"????extremism in the cause of "normalization" is no vice...
...On the base of a fountain in a small square are the Russian words, "Go Home...
...Said one Party member in Prague: "They have taken Lenin, and I think he was a great man, and turned his thoughts into????well, this is a sharp word????something like fascism...
...In retrospect, some Czechoslovaks fault Dubeck for permissiveness, even though they supported reform...
...The people I spoke with privately all agreed that weariness and resignation have overtaken the country...
...Alethargic economy may eventually compel the Soviets to accept another effort at some reform...
...Even the "public manifestation" after the treaty was signed was staged in a courtyard in the heart of the Castle for maximum security...
...The youth are apathetic now," one Prague informant concluded...
...From there it monitors political trends and popular opinion to assess the Husak regime's success in restoring Party authority, reviving a sagging economy, and dispersing the liberals...
...It's material for a novel, not a news report...
...It has shown the whole world that Prague is as we want it, that it is Red, Czechoslovak...
...But only the once most hopeful and therefore deeply disenchanted seem to react that strongly...
...Tuzek stores are stocked with foreign cigarettes, liquor, canned goods, clothes, watches, perfume, auto parts and antiques, all at lower prices than Czechoslovaks pay on the open market...
...hostility to private conversation, the young muffle their dissent...
...Remaining aloof from Czechoslovak internal politics, he eulogized the 25th anniversary of Prague's liberation, and predicted that the new 20-year Soviet-Czechoslovak treaty of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance would "promote further development of fraternal relations...
...Among the latter, the Ministry reported, were 253 persons who had been "sentenced in the past" and 180 long-term unemployed...
...Furthermore, in a new theme among Soviet treaties with Eastern European states, the document also commits Czechoslovakia to aid the USSR in the event of an attack by any country ????A clause inserted, presumably, with Red China in mind...
...Entrenched in the Alcron and Esplanade hotels, where some of them have lived for months owing to a critical housing shortage, and because Prague authorities scarcely encourage their staying, the newsmen fight off boredom and frustration...
...What better proof than such printed material would ultraconservatives want to show even severer suppression of liberals was necessary...
...Dubcek was one, but he turned out to be an illusory hero...
...A package of American cigarettes, for example, costs the equivalent of $1.50 in hotels, but only 50 cents in Tuzek stores...
...Foreign correspondents from non-Communist countries plod through the Prague papers, watch television and scan ctk's daily run of translations and bulletins for news...
...Even in chance encounters in Prague with Czechs of no particular authority or political involvement, one collects comments like "The people are for Dubcek...
...Off stage, meanwhile, Czechoslovak troops were stationed 50 feet apart along the 10 miles the caravan of black Chaika limousines and Tatra security cars would travel, and plainclothesmen were interspersed roughly every 200 feet in the city proper...
...Because the major vehicles of public opinion, the mass media, have been subverted by the regime, the liberal Prague journalists who poked into Czechoslovakia's political past, challenged its leadership, and discussed the shape of Socialist democracy, no longer have a forum...
...If another attempt at liberalization occurs, the argument concludes, it must be more expertly managed...
...Along with Svoboda, he continues to resist the ultraconservatives' hunger for revenge, Were they to have their appetites satisfied, Dubcek and others might well be brought before tribunals and convicted of treason...
...Consequently, for the time being central economic planning and work discipline are the main operational guidelines...
...Thus, when asked his opinion of the 1968 Soviet military action, one man whose business still allows him to travel out of the country replied: "What can I say...
...Everyone here is aware that known opposition to the Soviet-led invasion automatically throws one into the "Rightist opportunist" camp, but the only alternative is an Orwellian confession to past ideological errors...
...And the month before, the Party Central Committee purged itself of reformists, including Dubcek, who had already been sent abroad as ambassador to Turkey...
...Better quality merchandise is available in Tuzek stores, which sell only imported goods and deal only in foreign currency and special coupons that can be obtained from banks for foreign money...
Vol. 53 • July 1970 • No. 14
