Tad Szulc Reports but Doesn't Explain Czechoslovakia
Mayer, Milton
Tad Szulc Reports but Doesn't Explain Czechoslovakia by MILTON MAYER ?7^ very society is a society not of laws, but of men; self-evidently, since it is men who interpret and apply the laws. Less...
...He need not be a very good writer, as Szulc is not...
...Five hundred years ago the Czechs dominated the Continent from the Baltic to the Adriatic (and the brutal Switzers of Basel were terror-struck at the mere sight of them...
...But he needs to be a thoughtful one and to take all the time and space and freedom—and all the risks—that historical speculation involves...
...This one ought to have been called, "The Face of the Political Power Struggle in Czechoslovakia Since 1945...
...He is not a political philosopher except in the sense that politics consists of who gets what...
...Szulc, besides being a first-class newspaperman, is a first-class free-world American...
...Of all these figures we learn what we would learn from the newspaper reports of a first-class newspaperman...
...Jan Masaryk's strange death (so painstakingly explored by Claire Sterling and others) is not the least bit tantalizing...
...a book which says nothing about theology, religion, or the church (churchy) or the Christian-Marxist dialogue (which had its seeds in Prague) ; a book about Czechoslovakia since World War II which does not refer to the great theologian Josef Hromadka, the Christian winner of the Lenin Peace Prize who denounced the Soviet invasion;—a book, in a word, which does not ask, much less try to answer, the question (to plagiarize John Fischer), What makes them behave like Czechs?— such a book is no more durable than a paste-up of news stories...
...there is no hint that there might have been nonpolitical reasons for his murder or his suicide or, indeed, that he had a nonpo-litical life...
...Czechoslovakia is the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation...
...14...
...The planning and plotting are all there—and the details of their fruition in the rise of the Czech Communist Party to the point where, in the 1946 election, it and its Social Democratic stooges between them had an absolute majority of the popular vote—which neither Kennedy had in 1960 nor Nixon in 1968—carrying it to parliamentary power legally and constitutionally in a far freer election than any likely to be held in Mississippi or Chicago...
...The moving finger writes and, having writ, moves on to the next assignment, as it moved on from the last...
...As Communism materialized, the State (said the junior member of the godhead) would wither away...
...On this showing, every Communist society is, and since 1917 has been, primitive...
...Zdenek Mylar, "one of the key leaders of the Prague Spring," is dismissed as having "turned against the progressive cause" when the Soviet occupation was consolidated, and the author, no longer in Prague, but in time to have got the account into the book, could have discovered by superficial inquiry that Mylar's ultimate conduct was handsome...
...It is, of course, of the nature of all revolutions —but there are revolutions which look beyond it to legality or to something even better...
...What isn't there is an explanation, or even a sidelong attempt at one, of the election of the pre-depression Mas-aryk-Benes year of 1925, in which the Communist Party, founded four years earlier in the Catholic city of "Red Kladno," elected forty-one deputies to the 300-seat parliament—"trailing only five seats," as Szulc correctly reports, "behind the front-running Agrarian Party...
...as such it is unexceptionable...
...Freedom is first of all freedom from the arbitrary and unappealable will (or whim) of another...
...a plot by "a group of men" to oppress a people whose democratic roots are as old as any surviving people's in history...
...But for Szulc it begins with General Patton's eastward-ho to (but not through) the gates of Prague in the first days of May, 1945...
...It is the "eastern" outpost of western culture and the western arts...
...An exact and depressing recital of the planning and plotting of a few years is not enough...
...On this showing, Eighteenth Century Prussia was an advanced society...
...It is the most comprehensive account yet published in English of the "terrible twenty years" after 1948 followed by the singular eight months of 1968 and the terrible months (and now years) that ensued...
...But Czechoslovakia was a highly civilized nation, the "Czech lands" of Bohemia and Moravia especially...
...But legal process—due or not, perverted or not, and however dishonored in the breach —is the hallmark of civilization...
...In Czechoslovakia Since World War II, Tad Szulc of The New York Times (briefly its correspondent in Prague) records, or, rather, recites the wretched story of that wretched country under the Party...
...With his deadline dogging him, he has no possibility to walk around and wonder, or to stand in the shopping queues and listen or to get very far from the capital or to spend a few days in an ordinary home...
...But a man who writes a book under so bold a title has the obligation...
...Dubcek and Smr-kovsky are not only national, but human heroes after twenty years of uncomplaining service to the tyranny and its atrocities...
...His not to reason why—his but to do the day-today job...
...The Party in Russia did the same thing, and still does—and, of course, in other Communist countries no more civilized than Russia...
...But a book which nowhere touches on the historical (and historic) relations between the advanced and the backward Slavs, between both of them and the Teutons, between industrialization and secularization...
...The newspaperman necessarily reflects this politicization, all the more so in times of continual political stress such as Czechoslovakia's since 1945...
...The newspaperman, above all the roving reporter, has the mortal deficiency of his calling, and I speak (as W. R. Hearst used to say) as a newspaperman myself...
...It is the thoroughly journeyman work of a thorough journeyman reporter...
...He meets Maritain's definition of the capitalist: "a man who has no time...
...The story has been recorded before...
...Czechoslovakia Since World War II, by Tad Szulc...
...None of these interesting (and in part contradictory) traits is pondered or, except in an ad hoc context, even substantiated...
...In his impressive compendium Szulc does not plunge beneath the surface...
...there are no revelations in the book...
...The "Czech character" is often referred to: "compromise and conciliation," "unpredictable," "predilection for political opportunism," "nonconformity and imaginative daring," "maddening gifts of concession," "extraordinary gifts of imagination and improvisation," "strong sense of premonition," "pragmatic," "sentimental...
...A newspaper reporter hasn't the time, or the space, or the free hand...
...Tomas Mas-aryk is a statue...
...Why in Czechoslovakia and nowhere else...
...After a half century in Russia and a quarter century elsewhere, that goal is absurdly remote...
...He is dangerously dependent on his native informants...
...Nazism removed the judge from Berlin by making a Party factotum of him, and in high matters of state ignored even the pretense of process...
...The Czechs" are fourteen million homogeneous, undifferentiated featherless bipeds who happened to be in that place at that time...
...Less self-evidently (but just as ineluctably) men high and low, good and bad, Reagans, Daleys, Roo-sevelts, Wilsons, Kennedys, would like to do their own will and not be subject to the law's restraints, and they frequently find ways to do it...
...Husak is a menacing fog, Cernik foggier still...
...But it is just that...
...The Party in Nazi Germany disposed of men—and of millions of men—with never a thought of resorting to legality...
...His not to reason why, but to fulfill the journalistic canon of history as what happened next...
...Szulc recognizes that nothing like the Prague Spring of 1968 "had been experienced before in a Communist country...
...Beneath the turbulent surface of immediate occasions and immediate personalities lie the causes which the historian and the philosopher try (whether or not they fail, as in part fail they must) to discern and assess...
...The book is a masterly piece of reporting, masterfully organized, and an indispensable reference work to events...
...This was of the essence of the Nazi revolution—a revolution which ended only with the end of Nazism...
...Reinhold Schneider once said that the singular curse of our time is the politicization of all thought, all art, all feeling, all action...
...When Frederick the Great attempted to silence a windmill that disturbed him, and the court held for the miller, Der grosse Fritz expressed his mixed astonishment and gratification (in French, as always) that il y encore un juge en Berlin—"There is still a judge in Berlin...
...We are told that in 1945 "a group of determined men planned and plotted a return to oppression for Czechoslovakia, this time in the name of the Marxist-Leninist faith...
...Would we begin to understand Szulc's "lone man of Europe," the most recent of a long line of poor-little-Belgians...
...So unpleasant, apparently, that the inevitable perplexity is left in midair and is never reverted to...
...480 pp...
...one of the world's highest, by any reckoning...
...It is the Fifteenth Century home of Hussite socialism with a human countenance...
...Szulc speaks of his "Czech employes...
...The Viking Press...
...A "special political alchemy" will satisfy the running reader...
...But there is no indication whatever, anywhere in this 500-page book, of the nature or genesis of that special alchemy, no real reference to "the nation's whole experience," no key (nor so much as a hairpin) to that "astounding unity...
...Neither is an exact and timber-shivering recital of the dreadful series of show-trials and no-trials in which the revolution devoured its children, its parents, its hangers-on, and even its onlookers...
...Its goal was, in the words of its godhead, "an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all...
...But there, too, the Party (i.e., its successive leaders or leader) has done the same thing ever since it took absolute power in 1948...
...The jacket blurb of Czechoslovakia Since World War II informs us that the author of this "eye-witness" document has reported for The New York Times from forty (count 'em, forty) countries—and Szulc is far from being an old man...
...The planners and plotters were doing pretty well in Czechoslovakia twenty years before Szulc finds them planning and plotting on the eve of their takeover...
...a book which dutifully mentions the names of Hus and Kafka and Capek and says not a word about Chelcicky, not a word about Come-nius...
...The Bolshevik revolution was one of them...
...Not only has the State not withered away (quite the contrary), but a parallel and sovereign institution has matured alongside the State and independent of its sanctions...
...There are a few slips, but very few...
...He has been too many places too short a time, talked to too many of the "right" people who in little or no degree reflect the spirit, or even the mood, of the place, and made too many notes to be sorted too fast...
...A more adequate picture of the comparative mildness of the Husak regime and its resistance to the hard-hard-liners was foreclosed by the book's publication date...
...The actual leader of the revolution said that "as long as the State exists, there will be no freedom...
...Study of these figures" —the precipitate rise and decline of Party membership immediately after 1948—"inevitably raises the perplexing question of the political opportunism of the Czechs, unpleasant as this subject may be...
...a. book which says not a word about music, painting, drama, poetry, architecture (except with reference to politics) ; a book wh/ch says nothing about science, technology, medicine (and medical care) ; a book which says nothing about education...
...Freedom was the goal of the Communist revolution...
...There is no real delineation of even the leading personalities, much less of "the Czechs...
...There was in Czechoslovakia "a special political alchemy...
...Svoboda is alternately a Party stick, a national hero, and a broken old man (a few weeks after he stood alone against his furious captors in the Kremlin...
...No society is primitive which forbids the citizen to sit in judgment in his own cause or execute such judgment, and no society is advanced which does not...
...It is the one republic in that part of the world which held on to its republicanism through the depression of the 1930s...
...At the publisher's price it had better be...
...A curious political alchemy was operating in Czechoslovakia, drawn from the nation's whole experience, and it seemed to explain the astounding unity during that first week"—of the Soviet invasion of August—"as well as during all subsequent events...
...So much for "the Marxist-Leninist faith," a social doctrine that has overturned the modern world...
...The story of the land whose Golden City—"the Paris of the East"—towered over the baroque world cannot be told in terms of what happened next, only in terms of why what happened a thousand years ago happened then and there...
...There was in August "an extraordinary, imaginative kind of passive resistance" —but why...
Vol. 35 • July 1971 • No. 7
