THE 'NEW COMMUNISM': A REPORT FROM PRAGUE
Mayer, Milton
The 'New Communism' A Report from Prague by MILTON MAYER This is the first of two articles on Czechoslovakia by Mr. Mayer, who has lived and lectured in Czechoslovakia off and on for several...
...This was too much...
...On the black market, with Czech crowns...
...Under the old regime everyone involved knew where he stood...
...If it falls, it will not be to the pressures of the rambunctious Left or the unctuous Right, but to much stronger forces within the society, or, just possibly, outside...
...In spite of the new government's insistence that it will not allow purchasing power to fall, some unknown, but very considerable, proportion of the workers and peasants are convinced that economic reform is going to hit them hard, either in the pocketbook or the muscles or both...
...The new government has got to resist the extremist pressures and carry the people with it—but no further and faster than they are ready to go, if the program of democratization is to mean anything...
...there's a big difference in any country—was willing to see Novotny go does not mean that the Dubcek government has majority support...
...Tens of thousands of top men, after twenty years, owed their getting or keeping their jobs to their fulsome allegiance to the regime...
...If conduct has worsened everywhere in the past twenty years, it probably worsened faster and further in the East than in the West...
...It has already applied the brakes: There will be no multi-party system with an organized opposition engaged in a struggle for national power...
...But the Dubcek government is aware of the pressures to push it further faster...
...Novotny's successor as Party secretary, Alexander Dub-cek, a Slovak, has promised them federal status...
...Under the new one, no one...
...a secret sampling by the new regime a few weeks ago is said to have shown support for Novotny by twenty per cent of the people...
...But the rising generation has no more interest in Petro-grad's October than ours has in the Meuse-Argonne's...
...Mayer's presentation will appear in the July issue...
...Under these conditions moonlighting—forbidden by law—was irresistible for any man with a skill...
...But the bulk of the rightist pressure is among the unreconstructed elderly, certainly including a large minority, at the least, of churchgoers and clergy...
...The big question mark is the mass of industrial workers...
...But the If is the biggest If in history...
...The regime came down on them with its customary brutality, expelling those of them who were Communists from the Party and placing control of Literarny Novini in the Ministry...
...For a more extended note on Mr...
...Add to that twenty per cent of the middle- and low-level bureaucracy, and remember that government employment in a Communist country means all business, industrial, and service management, and technological and union personnel...
...The next day he telephoned and asked her if she would like to have the installation at once...
...The concluding installment of Mr...
...Stripped of its one and only alibi, namely, that freedom requires free enterprise, it will be seen at last as window-dressing for the war of every insatiable man against every other...
...Featherbedding was phenomenally high in a system that had to find soft jobs for its "deserving Democrats...
...since 1948, with the centralization of the whole economy and polity in Prague, their disaffection had increased enormously...
...It pleads for restraint— without, so far, a word against a government-owned press which now performs in absolute freedom...
...but never as awful as Moscow's...
...But Tuzex bons enter it legally: The visitor buys all he wants with his foreign currency and sells them to every honest Czech he meets...
...Add to these worthies and unworthies the whole ministerial apparatus of purge and persecution (not all of it violent, by any means) during the "terrible twenty years...
...That a majority of Czechs—certainly a majority of informed Czechs...
...The ideological liberalization certainly horrifies the genuine Stalinists...
...As the most "Western" of the Communist countries, Czechoslovakia had the toughest dictatorship of them all, tougher, in some respects, than Russia's...
...And if the employment of the skill required tools and materials, they were the "people's property" that had to be appropriated, i.e., stolen...
...Where do they get the coupons...
...In its highly developed society—unlike Russia's—the ablest men were tainted with bourgeois backgrounds...
...Foreign currency enters the black market illegally...
...The Tuzex stores sell everything, from oranges (when there wasn't a piece of fresh fruit in the market) to motor cars, against coupons bought with foreign currency, a device to bring "hard money" into the Czech treasury...
...The Czech sense of fair decorum was outraged...
...There are more immediate (if less momentous) Ifs involved in the Czech try...
...But the effective instrument in pulling the primitives down was last year's rebellion of the writers and students...
...And ten years of repeated visits to the "socialist countries," including Soviet Russia, tend to confirm Satan's triumphant report to the Lord (according to Goethe): Der Mensch bleibt Mensch, "There's no doing anything with him, Your Honor...
...the old regime placed "men turned Turk" who could erect a reliable local establishment based upon favors given and got...
...that was the way the economy functioned normally...
...It was notorious that white and blue collar workers at all levels did little or nothing...
...The Editors...
...Whether all of them are now threatened doesn't matter...
...And fourth, the Russians "have to do something," challenged as they are by hard-line China, by the Rumanian breakaway, and the persistent disaffection of young intellectuals at home...
...From friends and family abroad, who have no other way of making duty-free gifts...
...The "backward" Slovaks have been disgruntled since 1918 at the monopolization of power by the Bohemians and the Moravians...
...As of this writing, the amalgam that constitutes the opposition to reform— political and economic—is beyond being measured...
...The dream of the New Man died on August 1, 1914, when the German Social Democrats voted war credits in the Reichstag and their French comrades entered a government of "sacred union...
...While the Party provided more than half of them with new housing since the war, it tried to solve the "minority problem," as it did every other, by repression...
...In little ateliers and little theaters (above all, in pantomime) Czech society was continually caricatured in careful symbolisms, to packed houses, and as soon as the Ministry closed one show another opened...
...She called a certain party of her acquaintance who said he'd see what he could do...
...At its congress a year ago the Writers' Union rebelled—not, as in Russia, in the person of a few young heroes, but its leading personages...
...And even then they amount, all of them together, to a small proportion of the putative opposition to reform, though some of them command great influence...
...The corruption extended to the housewife who had to stand in line for an hour or two and then, at the head of the line, be told, "Ne mame," "We haven't any more...
...And it is precisely these "theorists" who have just overturned the old order, beginning with the painful economic reforms advanced two years ago by Professor Ota Sik...
...The ordinary job was so poorly paid that nearly all Czech women of working age had to work...
...Capitalism will be tutto kaputo...
...The people may not rule in a one-party state, but they can...
...And Party sources estimate that forty of the 110 members of the ruling Central Committee are opposed to the Dubcek government...
...And I knew a woman—no seminarian, she—who wanted gas heat installed in her home and knew she'd wait a year or two unless she found a way...
...Assembly President Smrkovsky, who before his election told a howling rally of 18,000 young people to be "revolutionary, not just radical," has joined Dubcek and Premier Cernik in appealing for patience on the part of the students who want an even faster pace than the regime is trying to maintain...
...It was, indeed, already over last fall when Novotny went to Slovakia to talk tough to the Slovak nationalists...
...These thousands and other tens of thousands, in a nation of 14,000,000, have another good reason for their opposition: the reform of the economy...
...But they had bosses who didn't crowd a comrade and exerted no comradely pressure to increase production...
...The candle-carrying was the mildest of protests against the wretched conditions in the dormitories of the University, where the lights (and the plumbing) failed to function for whole days together...
...Second, it threatens the prerogatives (some of them criminal) of the bureaucratic, management, and privileged worker segments of the society...
...The struggle was already over when the defection of Boss Novotny's absconding hatchet-man in the army, General Sejna, delivered the coup de grace...
...They weren't satisfied, any more than the peasants...
...disdainful, yes, unenchanted, yes, but not riotous...
...These are middle-aged and even young people of this sort, born entrepreneurs, who for twenty years have knelt facing West to say their evening prayers...
...That's the way it was when the citizenry was herded, as usual, into the Old Town Square for the great celebration last fall of the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution...
...Either you waited, and waited, and waited, -for a shoe-repair job, or a pork chop, or an automobile, or a foreign travel permit, or you found a way...
...It is easier to estimate the government's immense support in Prague than it is in the factories, the mines, the fields, and the villages...
...First, Prague's New Communism emanates from the top of the social structure, and no one knows how deep it goes or can go...
...Mayer please turn to the Office Memo on the inside front cover...
...The human record argues pretty persuasively against the possibility of democratic socialism with man as he is and men as they are...
...The process drove a deep wedge between the Worker, with a capital W, and the intellectual, with a small i. The latter (even if he was a Marxist) was and still is the scapegoat of the primitives, just as Roosevelt's brain trust was...
...There were 188 votes for him...
...a Czech gag has it that Marxism means, "To each according to his relatives...
...The new cabinet, composed without exception of capable men (many of them victims of the purges), has just begun the replacement of deputy ministers, and it is beyond that point, in the middle and lower ranks, that the survival power of the revolution will be tested...
...Best of all was to have Tuzex coupons—at any price...
...The welter of denunciation, fabrication, and secret process reached right to the top...
...In spite of the usual news blackout, word went through the city and the country...
...In a secret ballot (something new under the Communist sun) sixty-eight members of the National Assembly voted last month against the election of Josef Smrkovsky (who was in jail under Novotny) as its president...
...Bosses, managers, incompetents, feath-erbedders, moonlighters, purgers, persecutors, householders, housewives, black marketeers—add them all up in a nation of 14,000,000...
...It is a government of very tough idealists...
...Sik's inoculation of the rigidified economy with the serum of consumer demand had as its ineluctable and, incidentally, Marxist, consequence a consumer demand in the rigid-ified polity...
...Being Czechs, Czech students are not...
...The Czech Stalinists consciously cultivated the mistrust of the elite—how effectively we shall see in the months ahead, when the workers and peasants are heard from...
...They were thrown into the tumbrels and their places given to true-red proletarians who made a cruel travesty of government and reduced the economy to a shambles...
...but the ordinary Czech knew better than to lodge a complaint...
...Respectable Czechs argue that they had to be involved in corruption if they were going to survive at all...
...riotous...
...or stick around until Christmas and you'll find buyers at eight...
...The Dubcek government is squeezed...
...and if only the big offenders are to be brought to book, the little offenders still can not feel secure in the face of fearless reform...
...I stood there myself once, a few years ago, with the whole Comenius Theological Faculty, and marveled at the endurance of my non-Marxist colleagues...
...She said yes, and the payoff was arranged, and within twenty-four hours the installation was finished, with men and materials diverted from, perhaps, a seminary...
...The legal value of a Tuzex coupon is two and one-third crowns, the universal selling price five...
...what all of them must be is uncertain of their being able to convince the new regime that they were secret opponents of the old...
...The non-verbal arts were even less repressible...
...The pressure on the Left is represented (though not confined to) the students who took to the streets to protest the National Assembly's pro forma confirmation—a handful of abstentions, no nays—of Old Hero Ludvik Svoboda as the new President of Czechoslovakia...
...The ranking Czech writers simply refused to write for it any longer, and the ferment spread through the other arts and the academic world...
...and if it moves too fast, the cumbersome centralized system will collapse and the people will rally behind the old guard and dump the reformers...
...Their placards read: No More Comic Opera Elections...
...Turning over the dungheap is a delicate process...
...And in little periodicals—and in one big one, Literarny Novini, the organ of the Writers' Union...
...Waiters, elevator men, multilinguists who follow prospects as they emerge from the hotels offer twenty-eight crowns for a dollar, instead of the legal sixteen...
...Among the "expected" participants in last fall's tub-thumping were the students of Prague's Charles University...
...Third, both radical extremism and conservative restoration may succeed (with contrary objectives) in inducing a runaway tempo to the reforms, with consequent chaos and repression...
...Mayer, who has lived and lectured in Czechoslovakia off and on for several years, most recently during the past month...
...It has got to move fast, both to deliver on its promises and to prevent recon-solidation of the old guard...
...Whoever doubts that something cataclysmic has just happened in the Communist world needs only to know that just before its death in January the government mobilized an anti-Vietnam demonstration of "Czech youth" in front of the American Embassy, and, the leaders of the student and youth organizations having told their members to boycott it, something less than a hundred "youth" showed up—most of them arriving by automobile...
...Prague's popular press was awful...
...Twenty years of hard-rock Stalinism entrenched "political reliables" at desks and machines from which competent unreliables were turned away...
...Prague If the Czechs succeed in pulling it off-—in combining Communism with liberty—they will have achieved the neatest trick of any week since the first...
...My wife and I lived in a seminary one of whose boilers broke down in August, and it wasn't until December that the repairmen arrived (and shut off the heat for two weeks...
...Some of the perpetrators are dead, and some are small fry, but even those who are not in line to lose their heads or their liberty must imagine that they are in line to lose their jobs...
...It is hard to believe that even a large minority of Czechs were wholly outside this procedure, either on the consumer or the producer end...
...The government has already lifted restrictions on students entering seminaries and is expected to "rehabilitate" dismissed clerics, including 1,500 priests now working in factories...
...And it is not incapable of restraining...
...galleries and concert halls kept jumping with modern painting and music of the highest order of "bourgeois decadence...
...Where do they really get the coupons, which they are forbidden to buy with Czech crowns...
...The Ministry of Culture never did succeed in breaking the back of the great Czech film studios...
...Some of them showed up solemnly carrying candles— nothing more—and the police went into violent action...
...If the young are impatient with the tempo of the New Communism, those elements on the Right which would like to go back, not to Masaryk, but to Haps-burg, are hopeful that extremism will push the door far enough open to send the Communists through it and out and restore the dream of private ownership and private profit...
...The reaction to the police assault on the students has to be understood in connection with the occasion—not with what it celebrated, but the insulting fact of these celebration-demonstrations from which "socialist" citizens dare not absent themselves...
...and no recollection of the liberation of their country by the glorious Red Army in 1945...
...Democracy, says Dubcek, will be made to function within the Communist Party, just as it succeeded within the Party in changing the government...
...and if they were unskilled, paid them a guaranteed wage plus every kind of welfare coverage...
...They hated Novotny, a limited and narrow, if dedicated, man...
...If she knew a clerk at the grocery or the clothing store, or could bribe one, there might be something under the counter for her and she might not have to stand in line on her aching feet when she came home from work...
...it took two salaries to keep a household going...
...Import and quality export goods are sold legally to Czechs who have the coupons...
...The demand was insatiable and rewarding...
...if it is done too fast or too crudely, it starts burning at the bottom...
...It probably took the efforts of a total of five to ten thousand men to put away, into pension, factory, prison, or grave, the 30,000 to 50,000 Czechs wrongfully convicted (or never even tried) for political offenses...
...Czech intellectualism never could stomach the "socialist realism" borrowed from an unsophisticated culture which could stomach the idiot idiom that converted all communication into a banal combination of hard sell and good news...
...a month ago a Supreme Court judge, in charge of one investigation of official malfeasance, hanged himself after a newspaper accused him of participation in one of the purges of the 1950's...
...Genuine religious freedom will whet some atavistic appetites...
...There is no immediate sign of real dissidence among the young, but they insist publicly that they want such goodies as a genuine multiparty system in place of the old National Front (in which the three small non-Communist parties played a meaningless role...
...Apart from their dislike of the theorists who fed them plans instead of potatoes, they have sunk their own self-esteem and initiative in a system which, if they were skilled, paid them higher wages than a doctor's or a lawyer's (and much higher wages than a clergyman's) and didn't push them too hard...
...Now, the Czechs have an abiding and respectful (if sometimes amused) affection for their fellow-Slavs to the north, and they don't much mind being "expected" (that is, they'd better) to turn out en masse and listen to the annual oratory which goes on for hours, sometimes in the rain and the cold...
...For this is no change of government, but of a kind of government...
Vol. 32 • June 1968 • No. 6
