CZECHOSLOVAKIA: TOUCH AND GO

...I don't know how many people were injured...

...some of my "influential" friends protested (or told me they did) in vain...

...The non-hero of their modern folk-classic, The Good Soldier Schweik, is named as a Czechici-zation of the German word schweigend, "to keep quiet or lie low...

...Fortified by a sudden show of factory support, the reformers won the first real round at the June meeting of the Party's Central Committee (at least a third of which was considered Old Guard...

...They voted "socialism" into power in the last free election they ever had, in 1946...

...The important thing was that for days afterward little knots of silent citizens stood across the street from the fallen facades...

...They are not revolutionary...

...It is economic...

...The Russians don't understand— much less admire—the New Communism...

...A series of torrential rains hit Prague, day after day...

...Not likely...

...What the regime didn't realize was that the silent Praguer—who don't have time to stand and stare—were staring beyond the broken buildings...

...The Russian satellite system, like ours, has fallen apart...

...The likelihood disappeared altogether last month, when the rulers of the three hard-rock allies (plus Hungary's Premier Kadar) were summoned to Moscow and Kadar pleaded significantly and successfully for restraint against the Czechs...

...If the Russians sit on the application much longer, the Czechs will turn to the West for credits for capital expansion and the revival of the export trade by which they live or die...

...Or partitioned and Catholic and despotic Poland...

...But neutrality between Communism and capitalism or Moscow and Washington—never...

...Censorship was total and totally unaccountable...

...but the Dubcek regime is taking thoughtful measures to restrain its most ebullient supporters and to hold the line on public attacks on the U.S.S.R...

...this last lest they bait the Bear and pull the whole thing down...

...Dubcek & Co...

...and bitterly intensify domestic as well as satellite unrest...

...and Prague's Rude Pravo blandly expressed the hope that the Czechs' exclusion from the meeting did not mean "excommunication...

...Still, it is not impossible that the tanks will roll...

...Maybe it can't be done...

...Win, lose, or draw, the very fact of Prague in the summer of 1968 is a mortal menace to the parliamentary devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism of Washington and the despotic egalitarianism of Moscow...

...The Russian power is not, however, primarily political, still less military...

...are right now locked in struggle to purge the monster bureaucracy in the provinces and reassure the workers...

...Back of it all, however, was something that suggests that what is happening here is not a revolution at all, but a renaissance: the libertarian Czech spirit that goes back to Hus and Com-enius, Christian humanitarian revolutionaries, whose names adorned Czechoslovakia's streets and squares and parks while other peoples were hurrying to change theirs to Franz-Josef Boulevard, Adolf Hitler Plaza, and Karl Marx City...

...Paris" is where the theorists are, and it is "Paris" that has presented the Czechs with the New Communism...

...and they are not oblivious of the consistent Czech reference to "Marxism" instead of to "Marxist-Leninism...

...The intellectuals who started it all—writers, journalists, economists, philosophers, students—are as dangerous to the revolution's excess as they are indispensable to its success...

...was something that suggests that what is happening here is not a revolution at all, but a renaissance...

...Maybe it can't be done because Man (with a capital M) doesn't want to live socialistically—a presupposition of "democratic Communism...

...To see a Czech walk into the new bookshop on Jungamnnova Street in Prague and buy a Western newspaper—Westerners are sometimes sold a copy of one in Moscow, and even that's a hopeful sign—is to see something significant...

...They have none of the sense of political, social, and religious liberty that animates the Czech tradition...

...Poland speaks for itself and East Germany's shaky Ulbricht in demanding force lest the Western imperialists "strangle us one by one...

...The likelihood of direct Russian intervention, if there ever was one, is gone...

...Beneath its thirty years of sullen grime, Nazi and Stalinist, the Golden City is golden still, its palaces and cathedrals skyrocketing above Smetana's Moldau, its music magnificent, its galleries and libraries a step behind Rome and Paris and Florence, its small streets cosy, its parqueted sidewalks rococo...

...Just standing there...

...What it is concerned about —along with the Russians, who have twenty divisions there—is the spread of the Czech spirit to its own intellectual and student elements...

...It is doing some backing and filling—it has had to—but it cannot renege...

...Only Poland, East Germany, and Bulgaria are reliably left—the first two in deep domestic trouble and the third inconsequential...

...And there is a great sense of it here...

...Hungary and Rumania—the former very quietly—show signs of supporting the Czechs...

...Will the Czechs make it...

...Yugoslavia (without much internal liberalization) and Albania and now Rumania (with none at all) are broken boldly and impunibly away...

...Their punishment was all the more grueling because they were technologically advanced far beyond the Russians (or any other Communist-governed people...

...But the criticism was all directed against the fallen regime at first...

...Czechoslovakia is popping, and the relaxation is at once exhilarating and a little frightening...

...Joy is unconfined—and I mean uncon-fined—in Mudville...

...Czechoslovakia has got to have Western technological sophistication—it has had elementary computers for only two years—from the bottom up for industrial reconstruction...

...If the Old Guard shows more than the fast fading hope of mass support for its reinvestiture to "save Communism" and calls upon the Russians for fraternal help, the Russians will have to march...

...But when the anathema begins to be carried to the new men and the new program...

...But its economic power is more than matched by the West, and the Czechs are determined to trade with the West (including West Germany, an intolerable prospect to the East Germans...

...Two years later Prague is still a tangle of scaffolding...

...as Czechoslovakia's liberator and protector of its six frontiers...

...And watching, closely...

...When it turned against the U.S.S.R...

...If the Czech renaissance becomes a real runaway westward, the Russians will have to march...

...after all, it was the Russians who invented Russian roulette...

...as the Nazis learned in Denmark...

...Westerners (above all, Americans) need to be reminded that Czechoslovakia is neither Hungary nor East Germany—conquered and occupied fascist enemy countries...

...If euphoria were enough, the answer would be Yes...

...Trade with whoever wants to trade, West or East...

...The regime decided that something had to be done to restore the crumbling capital, and at last it began...

...You didn't "call the plumber" in Prague...

...The restoration of republican liberties (something the Russians have never known...

...A sign of the times: East Germany has blacked out Czech television (and its citizens are seeing it over West German stations...

...But the Soviet government is still (as this is written) publicly silent, allowing its newspapers to attack the rehabilitated President Masaryk of the fallen Czech Republic as "a scoundrel" who schemed to assassinate Lenin —but, after a two-month blackout, compelling those same newspapers to print the policy statements of the new Czech leaders...

...Four-fifths of its furnaces burn soft coal...

...In Prague the opposition still rails against "antisocialist revisionism"—the dead champagne of Stalinism—but in the provinces it is working to whip up the legitimate fear of belt-tightening, speedup, and job dislocation implicit in the thoroughgoing economic reform the progressive economists are fighting for...

...With something like Gallic bravura, Dubcek has asked the Soviet Union for a $300-$500 million loan in convertible currencies...

...At the barbed-wire boiders inspection is cursory...

...life everywhere has its social disasters as the result of social neglect...

...A dozen leading conservatives, including resigned ministers, lost their government jobs...

...True, forcible intervention would no longer impress the Chinese...

...assuming that Man (with a capital M) is capable of anything approaching voluntary Communism...

...The really effective terror is still to be found in East Germany alone...

...It took common sense, not decency, to turn away from the illegal moneychanger who accosted you...

...For the Czechs who preferred to visit you rather than have you visit them, it wasn't play...

...the Czechs themselves resent the Western suggestion that hard currency loans will provoke the Russians to attack...

...Czech student visitors, some of them wearing blue jeans and ringlets (and carrying that most un-Czech of instruments, the guitar) are being turned back at the Polish border...

...Poland is in dubious battle, and the Rus"The new men in Czechoslovakia have taken the cork out of the seltzer bottle . . ." sians have been careful about aggressive support of the Gomulka regime, which is waging a life-and-death battle against its own students, its nationalist (and anti-Semitic) partisans opposed to Moscow's short tether, and an unreconciled Catholic Church mutely cheering the rebels from the sidelines...

...A people which, before ,1945, had never manufactured a spark plug found themselves exporting a spark plug factory to Cuba—and in turn, as they went from shop to shop looking for toilet paper or tomatoes, were offered Cuban pineapples and Cuban cigars in profusion...

...It "Back of it all...

...On two occasions recently East Germany has closed its Czech border—perhaps as a warning to such of their own people who might be tempted to head east to freedom...

...The new government here is a Communist government and means to be, and persuasively iterates its devotion to the Soviet bloc, the Warsaw Pact, and the U.S.S.R...

...Nor was it play for friends to appear not to hear you when you asked them to take you to Thomas Masaryk's grave...

...True, too, it would destroy in one clap the post-Stalin image of the U.S.S.R...

...Will the Czechs go out of control—or achieve under atheist auspicies something like the "Bible Communism" of true community...

...I knew a civil servant who was in prison for perfectly legal acts of office he performed prior to 1948, and a pastor who was in prison because some unassembled radio parts which an American left behind were found in his storeroom...

...They may want to put it back when the jet hits them in the eye...

...and on Communism...

...Mayer has made a dozen extended visits to Czechoslovakia in the last ten years, the latest this spring at the height of the "Nep Communist" revolution there...

...The Czechs are Slavs and allies—and precious allies—of the Russians...

...And in spite of Dubcek's "evolutionary" willingness to postpone an extraordinary Party Congress (which alone can reorganize the Committee), reformist pressure carried the day for a showdown, and the Congress was set for early September...

...The foreigner who had close friends here was not only careful here, but equally careful back home, lest something he said or wrote wing its way back here and compromise them...

...The "New Communism" welcomed domestic criticism as rampant and irreverent as any we know in the West—cartoons and all...

...If in 1946 the Czechs did not expect a bed of Red roses, neither did they anticipate the Cold War and the hardening of the Moscow line (in Prague no less than in Moscow...

...It's up to the Czechs, then, not to the West or the Russians, to win or lose their revolution...

...Bloody revolutions from the bottoms—of Roman slaves, French sans-culottes, brown-shirted Aryans, shirtless Bolsheviks— have all ended with a Napoleon...

...But the Russians did it after Khrushchev pulled the cork at the Twentieth Congress...

...Not speaking...

...The Communists had a huge plurality and, in combination with the fellow-traveling Social Democrats, a slight but absolute majority...

...and its morale...

...it never does) that hotel rooms and restaurants were bugged...

...The West had betrayed them at Munich...

...Maybe it can't be done because the government of "Prague intellectuals" cannot carry the day against the anti-intellectual opposition of the presently privileged Czech industrial workers, against the presently comfortable ap-paratnixi and corruptionists, and against the recently ousted terrorists of "the terrible twenty years...

...These are its promises, and on these promises it laid itself on the line at the outset...

...The likelihood of direct Russian intervention faded last December, when, in the face of mounting pressure against Czech Boss Novotny, Moscow's top men came to Prague and, after hot and heavy debate, informed its faithful friend that it would not try to keep him in power...

...The most significant political—and not insignificant economic—move on which the Dubcek government is still silent is the resumption of relations with Israel after last year's rupture required by the Russians...

...The Communist parties in the Western countries are in fine excitement, and the French L'Human-ite and the Italian Unita are reporting the events here as fully as the non-Communist press...

...But the Danes lay low, too, for five years and emerged in 1945 with their love of liberty intact...

...Radical economic reform to save the crumbling industry of the country...

...A half dozen—including Novotny himself— had their Party membership suspended pending investigation...

...Commercial decentralization, with market fulfillment, management responsibility, and "personal enterprise" (individual or family operations a la Yugoslavia...

...If the student demand for an independent opposition—not just nominal participation by non-Communist parties—makes much headway, the Russians will have to march against the one development that to them means the end of socialism...

...We support you," a student editorial recently addressed the government, "but remember: your maximum is our minimum...

...Neutralist and Third World countries are enthusiastic...

...and those revolutions on the whole stuck...

...All these things and more are significant of the Big Try, the biggest ever in the seemingly hopeless struggle between man's self-interest and his sociality...

...if he turned out to be a police provocateur, your Czech friends might suffer...

...And the West will grant the credits as soon as it is convinced that the new regime is there to stay...

...Liberalization is a frontal attack on their instinct, an affirmation of the Marxist dream and a denial of the Leninist reality...

...Nor may they be supposed to be entirely surprised at the open hostility to Prague of the East German boss, Ul-bricht (who is said to have secretly offered armed support to Novotny last December...

...Once my wife, having entered a one-way street in the wrong direction, was stopped by a shabby civilian who flashed a police card, and the Czechs who were with us were frightened lest he demand their names...

...But it wasn't a brave new world, or anything much less decadent than the "decadent" West...

...the last time they picked up the paving blocks and threw them was in 1620, and after that they took three centuries of Haps-burg oppression, two decades of democracy handed them by Woodrow Wilson, and seven years of Hitlerist, then twenty of Stalinist, terror...

...The high hopes are out in force—and so are the painted ladies and the sleazies who sidle up to you to buy or sell money...

...Crushing a nation of 14,000,000 is one thing militarily, another thing politically...

...Their landlocked little economy is mortgaged to the Soviet Union, with oil, wheat, minerals, cattle, fish, and fruit exchanged for knowledgeable Czech manufactures (and, incidentally, a half-million-ruble favorable trade balance on the Czech side...

...wasn't all bad: They had a welfare state, and a successful one, in which everybody was well medicated and "healthily" fed...

...I've been coming here regularly since 1958, on extended visits, living not as a tourist but as close to the Czech economy and the Czech polity as a foreigner can...

...The Praguer were ashamed of their once Golden City, now the dirtiest drab to be seen anywhere...

...And then, of a sudden one day, the way the reverberation of a small plane will touch off a ripe avalanche, the baroque gewgaws and gim-cracks and gargoyles began to fall from the sodden cornices of Prague's big old buildings...

...As of now, any of these things could still happen...

...Its once modern plant is even more archaic than England's now— the penalty for not having been bombed out...

...Tito, who has just been in Prague, of course professes happiness...

...Its people are literate, tasteful, and cosmopolitan, its goose-and-dumplings-and-red-sauer-kraut the best, and its Pilsner unbeatable...

...The Editors...

...They can, and do, exercise immense pressure...

...In the postwar reconstruction which saw most of the West and even some of the East rise to flourishing economic heights, the Czech economy stagnated, the consumer market was bare or stocked with monotonous shoddy...

...Chinese denunciation is loud but irrelevant (unless it succeeds in stinging the Russians...

...Nor was it play for Czechs whose children were refused a higher education because of their "bourgeois origin...

...They could have changed much for the worse...

...A revolution...

...To see a full-scale investigation (which may lead right to the Kremlin) of the death of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk when the Communists took power in 1948 is to see something wonderful indeed...

...No one knew who was watching whom or reporting where...

...the Russians had liberated them from Hitler and offered the only protection against a Germany being revived by that same perfidious West...

...Since perhaps ninety per cent of all people everywhere—or is it ninety-five per cent?—identify freedom with ready money and tyranny with its absence, East Germany, whose "little miracle economy" is booming, is not much concerned these days about the brain-and-brawn drain...

...That was not the important thing...

...Send in the tanks...

...after twenty years of the society in which Engels said prostitution would disappear, official figures estimated there were 20,000 prostitutes, and one of every three abortions was illegal...

...In the one-city world of Europe, Asia, and Africa, "the revolution is won in Paris and lost in the provinces...

...Prague The new Czech regime is trying to humanize Marxism...

...But what can they do about it...

...But what they succeeded in doing was bad...

...They emerged under the leadership of something that looks a bit like a Jeffersonian aristocracy of "talent and virtue...

...The new men in Czechoslovakia have taken the cork out of the seltzer bottle...

...and Prague would be a shambles...

...And the new men in Prague dethroned the tyranny—which takes considerably more doing than blackening the bones of the tyrant...

...You can see for yourself," said the optimist over a black beer at Prague's ancient U Fleku garden, "how everybody is smiling...

...China is implacable, on Russia's (and the world's) longest border...

...and even, in one demonstration, against Communism itself, over the state's own loudspeakers, the government a few weeks ago reimposed some not too abrasive restrictions on press and assembly...

...If the likelihood of Russian tanks has passed, the possibility always remains...

...True, the Czechs put themselves into the Stalinist yoke...

...It might even provoke the shattered West to action, though the odds, logistic and historical, are much longer than they were in Hungary...

...And for the "American millionaire," who could go out to a restaurant when he was hungry, an amusing experience to stand half the day in silent queues for meat or cheese or butter or eggs...

...and in Prague, of all places...

...he had plenty of personal reasons for suicide, or, indeed, for being murdered...

...The new regime has got to deliver the new Constitution—a new press law, a new police law, a new travel law, a new electoral law, and a separation of the political commissars from their central role in the army and their domination of the provincial "people's militia...

...But the realists in the provinces—especially in the organized factories— will decide the fate of their country...

...a rupture profoundly unpopular in Czechoslovakia...

...NATO countries are hopeful, hungry, and "correct...

...Rumors are denied but persistent that the Russians are holding back wheat shipments and that the Czechs are threatening to buy Middle Eastern oil at lower prices (but higher transportation charges) than Russian...

...The Russian divisions in Poland, Germany, Hungary, and the homeland surround the Czechs, and in mid-June a Russian army division was reported heading for a post twenty miles from Prague for "routine exercises" of the Warsaw Pact armies...

...In the year the Wall went up in Berlin, and all Western broadcasts were jammed, I received The New York Times (by mail subscription) on exactly thirteen occasions during six months in Prague...

...not an uprising...

...dreadfully exciting...

...neither the present exaltation nor, I suppose, history will be fair to the Stalinists, some (maybe, most) of whom meant (like some of the Nazis) to do great good things...

...But 1968 is not 1948...

...To see a huge picture of Thomas Garrigue Masaryk in the window of an old bookshop on National Avenue, and the masses of fresh flowers placed on the window-sill by passersby —is to see something spectacular...

...There is more than a little of the classic Czech Reformation in the New Communism in Prague...

...And maybe it can't be done because the Russians won't stand for it...

...If they have no hope of counterrevolution, they have considerable hope of checking the present pace, in part by political support of the still to be measured opposition to the Dubcek team (whose members are attacked by unsigned leaflets as "bourgeois revisionists" and its advisers as "a mob of Jews...

...The East Germans are worried, and justifiably so, about Prague's amicable intentions toward West Germany...

...Playing with hardship and playing with fire are nevertheless playing...

...And all these heady and headstrong adventures "as a free partner [of the Russian alliance] proceeding in the sovereign interest of its own people...

...You may say that they are not heroic...

...Then, two years ago, something happened which an imaginative regime would have seen as the handwriting on the wall...

...It was exciting to be here...

...and the republic of 1918-38 had not been able to solve the problems of a country that grows only three-fifths of its food and had to export nearly all of its manufactures to survive...

...By the time of the 1948 election, the Communist-led coalition government had had two years in which to reward its friends and punish its enemies, American style, and the fate of the Czechs was sealed...

...Only don't forget," said the pessimist at the table, "that we've been smiling for twenty years...

...and one assumed (it didn't matter if it were true...

...And the Czechs took it and took it...

...After twenty years the Czechs have emerged as bloodlessly as they were submerged...

...The Russians are waiting...

...They didn't rise (any more than they fell) as a mob...

...For discussions of the sort we have on the street at home, one went for a walk in the woods...

...And Prague isn't Budapest, where, when Communist Imre Nagy lost control of the '56 revolution, the Horthy restorationists moved in and provided the occasion for Russian intervention...

...Exhausted householders banded together "like good socialists" (and like good bourgeois) to cope with the disaster as best they could...

...It won't be easy to do...

...Their country was falling to pieces, its roads and houses and stations...

...I know that two were killed...

...We have to go back to the medieval revolu"Czechoslovakia is popping, and the relaxation is at once exhilarating and a little frightening . . ." tions brought on by the elite of church or state to find a parallel...

...Not every Czech believe.s that he was murdered by the Czech or Soviet secret police...

...An Ulbricht spokesman has denounced the Czech program as an instrument of West German re-vanchism...

...But the Czechs aren't Russians...

...The inner rebellion, the slow culmination of accumulated disillusion, had begun...

...Short of such mortal extravaganza, the Russians have to go right on learning how to be less heavy-handed than they would like...

...Ten years ago I did not find a Czech in Czechoslovakia who thought that things would change much for the better...

...Something more than facade was falling down...

...Der Mensch bleibt Mensch: The historic cards are stacked against the shortcut to kingdom come, Icarus soaring to the sun on wax-pinioned wings...

...Their obvious fear that the winds may blow hard enough out of Prague to raise the dust in Moscow doubtless explains their clamping down harder than usual on the isolated eruptions of dissent at home, though the explanation certainly lies in part in the hydra-headed rebellion against their man Gomulka in next-door Poland...

...Everybody plays dominoes now...