PRAGUE WINTER

...And so are the Soviet Union's colonies in their Empire Beyond the Land...

...But this profoundly Czech notion was not what animated Lenin or his successors with the possible exception of Khrushchev, who, on an uncharacteristically Delphic and, perhaps, eccentric occasion once said, "The time will come when the present generation of the Soviet people is actually living in communism"—a Czech, a German, an Apostolic, but hardly a typical Russian vision in the world of the terrible Ivans...

...Not when we compare an economy, communism, with a polity, democracy...

...My seven companions in the compartment—this was the Prague Express leaving Munich at noon—were all elderly Czechs...

...It is desperate for political loyalty...

...Twenty-five years ago there wasn't a private automobile to be seen and even the narrow old streets seemed wide...

...But sooner or later everything (jeans and guitars included, but very little dope) crosses the border, frequently to and from dubiously fraternal Yugoslavia (via Austria), and once it is in the domestic post, or over the telephone, there is no stopping it...

...Not at all...

...and the train, behind a well-worn Czech locomotive now, rolls away through the Bohemian Forest toward Prague...

...As the train from Munich approaches the frontier, the Western traveler still throws away his newspapers and magazines on the German side...

...It can't go on like this," says a Marxist historian who was put to menial labor after 1968, "but it can seem to go on like this for a long time—unless the regime makes a very big mistake...

...The two world empires are crumbling...

...I want to bark," said the Czech dog...

...Mm 11 Czechs know that they are IB told nothing or can not believe m m\ anything they are told: nothing about the economic, social, or political conditions or crises, nothing about the Western world or the Eastern world, nothing to explain the spectacular dislocations of the market place—not just a sudden dearth of onions, but an equally sudden glut of pineapples...

...The marching and unmarching millions are being honed to be set at each others' throats, not in the death struggle of ideology, but in the death-struggle-as-usual of empire...

...But even a substantial price increase doesn't mean a "Polish" revolt...

...who is there these days, there or here, to repair cobblestone mosaic...

...We had a burden to discharge in the world, and Jesus Christ left us no room to wonder what it was...

...The grocery clerk knows me of old: She says, "Maybe it all goes to Yemen now...

...The ministry, granting permission, suggested a sample excavation to see if the site would turn up any historically important evidence...

...It can not relax its grip...

...neither the auction nor the launching took place in Prague...

...Why, when they were all traveling legally, hadn't they relaxed before...

...they know it means something they need...

...What do you want to go to Czechoslovakia for...

...We stand and wait...

...Human rights are as much of a mockery in Czechoslovakia today as they were in Mississippi fifty years ago...

...The Party is immobilized...

...There seems to be a threshold beyond which economic— and therefore political—power can not be concentrated without losing its inhibition against exercising itself tyrannically, whether the power is private or public...

...Since jamming has become so expensive for energy-short Czechoslovakia, it is no longer attempted...

...and if socialism is a good plan, its very perversion may still be better than the fulfillment of a bad one...

...Why doesn't it work...

...Marx envisioned—however haz...

...Economists—former economists, that is—all support the popular suspicion that disaster is inevitable...

...Indeed he is—but worse than that...

...The Czechs are the hardest-working, earliest-working, latest-working people alive...

...the five years have become sixty-three...

...Pensioners get travel permits to the West fairly freely, provided that somebody will put up the hard currency they need beyond the border...

...Meeting me at the station in Prague, one of my Czech friends assures me that the police, when I go there tomorrow to have my local address recorded, will stamp the expired visa, as (he assures me further) will the passport control when I leave the country...

...True, the criminal penalties in the communist world are stiff, and stiffly enforced, and a conviction anywhere in a communist country means blacklisting everywhere in the country...

...So the monstrous state—the only saloon in town—becomes a blind monster incapable of moving without trampling, incapable of flexibility, incapable of changing direction...

...You've done it a dozen times, but it's always spooky...

...Nothing like it happened under the Nazis...

...Does the phenomenon have anything at all to do with the social system...

...Is somebody shouting at us through the Curtain...

...The same traveler littered the Dutch countryside in the same way en route to Nazi Germany long ago...

...We would not talk to the Russian soliders in '68, and we won't talk to them today...

...Americans and the Russians—the new Greeks and Persians—partitioned the world, leaving a few scraps of continent here and there up for future grabs...

...Communism and anti-communism are both empty of doctrine nowadays...

...I discover that the passport control at Ceske Ku-bize, the border station, has stamped my entry on the 1978 visa...

...It will be a while yet...

...What Poland revealed, to those rustics who still believed otherwise, is that the dictatorship of Poland revealed that the dictatorship of the proletariat uses the wrong preposition the poletariat uses the wrong preposition...

...Ileaf idly through my newly stamped passport...

...The congregation, given temporary quarters, will move back into its church when the work is finished in a few months...

...Mail to and from the West goes to the censorship, which contributes its mite to the ruin of the country by delaying delivery by a week, a month, or forever...

...The church was declared a national monument—by an atheist government which has paid out millions of Kroner for the renovation and restoration (and for the construction of a new organ by Europe's greatest builder, a Dane...

...they are variously blue-sky types, literary and artistic figures, academics, clerics, and former Dubcek officials, with no real connection to the Czech workers...

...Lederer didn't escape ; he was told that if he didn't leave, his Polish-born wife would be deported...

...it was the day of the National Railwaymen's Celebration and my baggage was not even looked at at Ceske Kubize...

...Their productivity is assumed— there are no reliable figures—to be lower than it once was...

...Armed Forces Network and the U.S.-maintained Radio Free Europe beamed from Munich...

...They"—the Czech communists—"can't go all the way back to where they were before '68...

...This is its fatal affliction...

...The Czech roadbed is so bad—as bad as England's—that the Prague Express wants eight hours to negotiate the 200-mile run...

...But nothing else...

...Pre-literate Albania, yes...

...To be sure, the elapsed time includes a precise forty minutes on the German side of the border while papers of all sorts are processed, and an uncertain hour or more on the Czech side while papers, people, and the undersides of the coaches (to catch CIA agents riding the rods) are all processed, along With the space between the ceiling and the roof of each car (reached via a corridor trapdoor and a ladder and flashlight),plus a passenger count of each compartment as the train pulls in at the border station and again after it pulls out...

...It is the people who do the withering, to the point, at last, where, if they have ever known liberty, they throw themselves under the treads in the mad hope of overturning the tank...

...Is there something in socialism, even in the pretense of socialism, that evokes or preserves a degree of the social spirit that has collapsed so spectacularly in the "free enterprise" society...

...Nonmarxist Czechs agree that the imposition of the Russian model was a mortal flaw, but they advance a much more fundamental case...

...Dissent in post-feudal Poland comes from below, in post-bourgeois Prague from above...

...We aren't listening because we know—oh, how well and truly we know—that communism simply doesn't work...

...In the West, you have queues to get restaurant tables or theater seats...

...The tension won't be relaxed until, an hour or more later, the last baggy-uniform disembarks with his briefcase, passport-stamping machine, collected entry papers, dossiers of Most Wanted Running Dogs, ticketing equipment, ladder, flaslilight, currency bag (into which has gone the modest $14 a day the visitor has to agree to spend in Czechoslovakia and pay in advance...

...Disenchanted Marxists like Le-derer say it is because it was imposed on an advanced country (in the case of Czechoslovakia) by a backward country—a self-evidently valid statement even though the Marxist parties won Czechoslovakia's last free election, in 1948, by an absolute majority as large as Ronald Reagan's in 1980...

...After thirty-two years of socialist fun and games the actual frontier between Germany and Czechoslovakia still presents the disconsoling spectacle of barbed wire stretching out to the horizon, with Czech machine-gun posts along it, on either side of the single-track railroad line...

...The Charter 77 signers are all under surveillance, all of them "brought in"—not arrested—from time to time...

...the dream that occasioned R. H. Tawney's observation: "As long as some people are paid anything for doing no work, those who do any work at all will never be satisfied with their wages...

...and in part because the center of the ancient city turns up precious historical artifacts at every shovel full...

...Worse, under "Marxist" socialism the concentration of economic power is total (except for permitted garden plots and illegal moonlighting), unlike capitalist concentration which, while it slavers after that concentration and in some areas of natural monopoly actually achieves it, is restrained from its truly totalitarian exercise by legislative and popular antitrustism...

...not just at the edges, either...

...such deadly rags, rarely seen on a tram, are read solely for sports reports, obituaries, and official notices...

...The same day's newspaper that reports a fourth of the world's children starving reports the auction of a pair of diamond earrings (said to belong to the wife of the late Shah) for $6.65 million and the launching of a $14.3 million yacht as a birthday present for the daughter of a shipping tycoon...

...the Russians are lost in Eastern Europe if they don't attack Poland and lost if they do...

...The train comes in to the depressing little border station—they are all depressing, but the East European stations are especially so, invariably adorned as they are with red banners inscribed in gold with banal variants of Viva Socialism...

...ily—the ultimate triumph of a social order whose essence was voluntarism: "We shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all...

...Who wants to make a speech...

...It trusts nobody, and it has, of course, rejected the political free market—along with the economic—so that there is no way for merit to come naturally to the top...

...Even with the increase of consumer goods, there are queues, everywhere...

...With a too rapidly rising birth rate, the cost of children's clothing has been increased by a staggering 200 per cent in the past few years...

...While the state exists"—this too is Lenin—"there is no freedom...

...There are 70,000 of them, five divisions, but they stay away from the towns or come in in mufti and speak a few clumsy words of Croat, transparently saying, T am Yugoslav.' All right...

...They sit stone still now, their travel papers at the clammy-handed ready...

...The few middle-aged passengers on the train were certainly business-traveling Party people...

...but she can retire on full pension at fifty-five or, if she has the care of small children, at fifty-two...

...Their tension is contagious...

...And still the dream abides...

...And the import regulations have been liberalized, along with the consumer goods supply, "to buy us off...

...Escaping from the evils of competitive capitalism, the communists of Eastern Europe have embraced the evils of monopoly capitalism...

...The dream abides, among those without shoes, among those with shoes, too, among the Czechs, among the Americans—the dream of a social order in which one does not have four meals a day while another has two, or none...

...Historical evidence was found in abundance: the remains of eleven previous churches under the present one...

...A stolid, uncomplaining, time-biding people, whose impetuous resistance (or that of their young) to the Russians in the streets on the morning of August 21, 1968, was Polish, Parisian, Iranian, not at all Czech...

...It is ludicrous to try to lock up anything but the bodies of a people as literate as the Czechs...

...A marketing decision based on a dubious payroller's dubious survey or dubious hunch overturns the market all over the country...

...The ministry then suggested that all the modern additions to the church be removed and the original structure restored in detail...

...Since people walk the streets at all hours, there is no crime committed...

...After thirty years and more we still have a senseless consumer economy, just like Russia's...

...And in the middle, between the two empires, is not Catholic, feudal, fanatical Poland, but the Western industrialized Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic (Neville Chamberlain's "small country, far away, of which we know little," when he handed it over to Hitler at Munich...

...The censor has long since made a wretched joke of the periodical press...

...But the regime is obviously afraid of the people...

...The car doors are all opened at once, from the outside, and baggy-uniformed characters come through the corridors saying, "Passengers will"—not "must" or "should," simply "will," with the insolence of the military command everywhere (including the United States)— "remain in the compartments...

...We stop at Jan's house for a kava bez blata—coffee without mud—on our way to the friend's apartment where I am staying...

...Like everything else, the work is marvelously slow (again, as bad as England's), in part because delivery of essential materials from Russia is months, even years, behind...

...Another 100,000—perhaps as many as 150,000—got out of the country...

...Poland was already a tinder box last spring...

...Because," he says, "the second stamper, or the third, would have to be innovative to stamp the right visa, and innovation is not a socialist virtue...

...We are not starving, but there is no way to get the things we need, not even when we have money...

...If it is not at all a good plan, then the better it works the worse it is...

...it is not going to make "the Polish-mistake" and raise food prices until it absolutely has to...

...There are no substantial reports of torture and no out-and-out show trials...

...They know"—this is one of the authors of Charter 77—"that they have 10 per cerit of the people behind them, no more...

...They were forced into servile jobs to be "reeducated...

...But we are not Poles, and Czechoslovakia isn't Poland...

...All these imperial colonies—"allies"—are ready to break with the mother country...

...Just as it is crossing from France or Switzerland or Austria (or Czechoslovakia or Poland) into Germany and seeing, abandoned on a small-town railroad siding, a still recognizable little box-car of the Deutsche Reichsbahn of forty years ago: a genuine box-car, short, square, wooden, dark red, with its big side doors that were once shut and locked on human beings packed inside...

...Czech society is closed tighter than it was in the last years before Dubcek: Then a non-communist American and his family could have an invitation visa to live for six months in the state-owned dormitory of a theological school and even (albeit on restricted subjects) lecture to university students...

...the ancient, wonderfully cultured and wonderfully cultivated land that, like its folk hero, Schweik, excels in'the unheroic but increasingly attractive art of survival...

...but a highly literate country culturally, industrially, and commercially a part of Western Europe, no...

...No more...

...We must have shipped a spark-plug factory to the Cubans...

...A bit of oversimplification there: There is very little strong-arm crime for better reasons than that, and for the same reason, inter alia, that there is no political assassination and the communist tyrants of Europe walk around unguarded while the Leader of the Free World has his own bullet-proof limousine flown around the world ahead of him...

...They are unrealistically low...

...But this is an old story, in the end it is why dictatorship is inherently shorter-lived than liberty...

...A uniformed police Officer is hard to find...

...It abides in the great world outside America and Czechoslovakia: There are Russians still alive who grew up in unlighted, even in windowless, and certainly in floorless, huts, Russians who grew up with their feet wrapped in rags in the winter...

...a rise in the price of meat is not the cause, but the spark, of revolution...

...Improvisation, yes— since everything breaks down here...

...Maybe the Yemenese are great crab fanciers...

...This," Lederer goes on, "is the fruit of centralization combined with the reason that totalitarian socialism is an even worse bet than parliamentary capitalism: It can't find competent people whose loyalty it can depend on, so it has to put incompetents in everywhere, right up to the top...

...Six-and-a-half years ago—hear this: six-and-a-half years ago—the small congregation of an impecunious church in one of the older sections of Prague went to the state ministry for church affairs to get permission to paint the interior of the building at, of course, their own expense...

...The people who ladle out the permitted pap are simply one more batch of loyalists whose qualifications are first of all political...

...The state exists everywhere, but nowhere as big and as brutally as in Lenin's Russia...

...Vera is in her early forties, but she no longer stays up late...

...Thirty-two years—sixty-three in the Soviet Union—and the polity works no better than the economy...

...Already at the frontier—the border The Czechs are stolid, uncomplaining station is ten or fifteen minutes ahead—the Czech passengers have quit jabbering...

...Ian and his wife had their cramped little Skoda at the station when I reached Prague...

...It has two Czech visas in it—one, unused and expired, from 1978 and the other visa for this trip in 1980...

...If they are stolen he will have to buy a new car to get new wiper blades: there are none available anywhere in Prague (and if not anywhere in Prague, then not anywhere anywhere...

...nothing like that would be possible today...

...certainly there is epidemic slowdown by way of undetectable protest against their working conditions and the regime, but their native diligence keeps the ragged economy going and, by comparison with Poland (though not with Hungary or East Germany), prosperous...

...Now it is gone, everywhere...

...Censorship is a dreary, daily insult Rude Pravo (Red Truth) may be the world's worst newspaper after the East German Neues Deutschland...

...It happened that one time because the young (and from a distance the tearful old) saw the Prague Spring, "'socialism with a human face," quite literally crushed before their eyes...

...the rest of the populace is confined in the consumer-goods ghetto...

...Everything Czechs know—and they know everything—they know from foreign sources or by marvelous word of mouth or from the hand-to-hand publications of the illegal "petlice"— padlock—"press...

...Turgeniev tells us of the two sons who, their father's body still warm, fight to the death over his boots...

...Like all able-bodied Czech women, married or not, she works, and, unless there's a mother or mother-in-law, she comes home to take care of the children, cook and clean and mend and sew, and, if the family has a vegetable patch outside of town, she works in it Saturdays...

...What do you think...

...Why is there so much crime where there is so much affluence (grotesquely distributed, to be sure) and so little where there is (by our standards) so much more need so much more equally distributed...

...There are no labor-saving devices except a small washing machine—no dryer— made in Finland, for which there are no spare parts unless she can get Tuzex coupons, sent (or given) legally by Western friends or bought on the black market...

...We 'said, and did not.'" ¦ The communists of Eastern Europe have embraced the evils of monopoly capitalism...

...There are Russians, and two-thirds or three-fourths of the world with them, who just don't care about First Amendment freedoms: Like my "ex"-Nazi friend in Ger-many, a shop clerk, who, when I pointed out that Hitler had given him many goodies but taken free speech from him, said, "Who wants to make a speech...

...Those 10 per cent are, of course,,Party jobholders, but I'd guess not more than half even of those...

...A dreary, dailyJnsult to a sensitive people...

...It is Saturday night...

...The whole country has excellent reception of the Western channels...

...in one morning Pan-Slavism died, and the acceptance of Soviet communism on the basis of the Red Army's liberation of Prague from the Nazis was wiped off the books...

...the Prague Spring of Dubcek was a restoration, not an innovation...

...Western television transmission is very poor because of the mountain barriers, but Party officials with a supposed need-to-know have access to high antennas, and their neighbors in the same apartment building hitch on...

...There is no crime news in the Czech press (except, of course, for crimes against socialism...

...the Western traveler, old Czech clammy-hand though he is, comes down with it...

...The censorship is an abomination and, in a country like Czechoslovakia, a silly abomination...

...We failed...

...And that isn't likely...

...Under the Austrians they were banked for 300 years before 1918...

...We get out of the Skoda and Jan removes the windshield wiper blades to take them upstairs...

...When there is freedom, there will be no state...

...People see a queue, any queue, and get into it...

...The income spread between the lowest-paid worker in Czechoslovakia and the highest-paid executive is nowhere more than 1:10...

...They don't dare try, and now, with the news of Poland, the Catholic churches are crowded in this 'Protestant' country as they haven't been in thirty years...

...Is somebody somewhere trying to tell us something...

...the government would not be unhappy if they stayed abroad and relieved it of responsibility for their pensions and medical care...

...It is an in-ter-esting time to be alive," said the late Josef Hromadka of Prague in his beautiful deep Czech accent, a "ver-ry dangerous time, yes, but also ver-ry in-ter-esting...

...The Skoda costs up to six months' wages, but it is easy to finance and not too hard to find the money for, with rents, utilities, food, and entertainment (including $1.50 concert tickets, with half-price for students) all low and every medical service fully insured...

...Who, like the Czech dog at the Polish border, wants to bark...

...and around the blocked off intersections, the center city tied into knots by the interminable construction of the new subway, two of whose five short lines are at last in service...

...Twelve years after the Prague Spring, the Czechs are stolid, uncomplaining, time-biding, and unforgetful...

...the Tuzex shops sell imported and top-quality Czech goods for hard—that is, Western—currency coupons...

...London and Paris newspapers used to be available, in the bad old Stalinist days, off and on at the luxury "foreign" hotel newsstands...

...Twenty years ago, an elderly Czech returning from the West with utilitarian articles would have been violently rebuked by a Party-line customs man at the border for being unworthy of socialism...

...The Christian Voice movement in California says that homosexuality is the cause of communism...

...the worst excesses of Stalinism are, up to now, avoided by a regime that is fearful of both its masters and its subjects...

...Jan informs me that there isn't a Western periodical to be had, not even, since Afghanistan, a Western communist paper...

...Lenin's "war communism" was to have lasted as long as five years after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia because "suppression is still necessary during the transition from capitalism to communism...

...True, too, there is a high proportion of ununiformed, but unarmed, officers and officials on the street...

...Outside the government apparatus—since official figures are unbelievable—nobody knows how close the country is to that absolutely-has-to point...

...Our masters in Prague are not as unsubtle as their masters in Moscow...

...Perhaps a half million were expelled from the Party after 1968, mostly professional people...

...Too bad about my having thrown my newspapers and magazines away on the German side of the frontier...

...Prices are low not only by Western standards—in spite of doubling of the Czech crown against the dollar in the past five years—but by Czech standards, too...

...now a parking place anywhere near the city center is impossible to find...

...For years canned Russian crab was a modest luxury obtainable everywhere...

...The economy is managed by lurch...

...The Czechs are the truest of West Europeans: They love their towns, once-glorious Prague above all, and they struggle, against the awful odds of shabby, shoddy modern conditions and shortages, to preserve them and recover their past in them...

...Commodities disappear all at once, always without warning or explanation, sometimes in mid-season (as was the case with potatoes last August...

...Now each of them is left with exactly one, not three or two reliable colonies, but one, in the form of half the recently malign and malodorous Germany, ostensibly communist (Theirs) and anti-communist (Ours...

...When an actually readable essay appears in the press, readers know that it was written under the counter by a journalist blacklisted after 1968...

...we are . . . well, sullen, and our sullenness does not wear off at all...

...Offending pieces are simply "lost," including registered items which the toothless International Postal Union insists be delivered or returned...

...It is impossible to jam them all...

...The fires are banked...

...linguistically isolated China, yes...

...So...

...Only thirty-five years ago, the Milton Mayer, The Progressive's Roving Editor, has been a frequent visitor to Czechoslovakia since World War II...

...Jan's wife Vera has come to the station with him to meet me...

...He plays it safe on behalf of his Czech friends and removes their names from his address book...

...Altogether Czechoslovakia lost a good half of its most highly talented people, cut its own head off, overnight converted itself into what the French communist poet Louis Aragon called "a spiritual Biafra...

...Thirty-two years of unchallenged communist rule (except for the eight months of the Prague Spring), and the Czechs have undergone what Jiri Le-derer, editor of a Dubcek-era literary magazine, callsrussification: "We have become patient herds—we radical individualists...

...Voila...

...It is always the same, crossing into hard-line Czechoslovakia from the West...

...We know we live with a gun at our heads under a government which would not be so terribly bad if it didn't have a gun at its head...

...The Germans are, as it happens, neithers Ours nor Theirs, but they are remarkably well suited for ostensibil-ity, and ostensibility is the name of the game...

...There is no way for Mom-and-Pop to change the Big Three into the Big Four, but neither is there any way for General Motors to change them into the Big One, nor is there any way for Safeway or the A&P to drive Mom-and-Pop (or each other) out of business altogether...

...Czech socialism—Czech communism—has a tradition dating back to the radical wing of the Hussites in 1420 who established a genuine communist community on the Bohemian hilltop of Tabor five years after Huss (Luther's predecessor by a century) was put to the stake for heresy...

...said the Czech dog...

...Capitalism," said the late Duke of Bedford, "is not at all a good plan...

...During the stupendous events in Gdansk last August, the official Czech press never once used the word "strike:" Like some of the other horrors of totalitarianism, censorship has its salubrious side...

...Meanwhile, year after year the Pra-guer plod through their charming little cobblestone streets (in terrible disrepair...

...The Hussites of Tabor emulated the Christians of the Pentecost, Christ's own congregation, by bringing their belongings together in the marketplace for all to take what they needed...

...Czech women all bake, but they buy their dough ready-made these days...

...in part because there is no Czech unemployment, and foreign workers, Poles especially, can not be got to work as hard as Czechs...

...Truer: there is a tradition of lawfulness in a country like Czechoslovakia, just as there once was in Germany—but why does it abide in communist Czechoslovakia and disappear in capitalist Germany...

...of 15 million Czechs, perhaps a million or two have Western connections that provide occasional coupons...

...I ask him how he knows all these things...

...Here, we have queues to get bananas or shoelaces...

...We are learning," says Jan, "to be a nation of petty thieves, like starving India...

...The passengers had of course all brought their sandwiches andpivo with them for lunch, and it is now 4:30 or so—but only now do they break out their fragant fodder and fall to...

...there were still true believers then...

...My friend Jan is a professional man employed at a white-collar level in light industry...

...They serve as swear words...

...Each of them is economically strangled, and politically despised, as a result of having advanced into a quicksand too far, employing the obsolete imperialist tactic, in Vietnam and Afghanistan respectively, of invading a "primitive" country, assassinating the rulers, and installing puppet regimes...

...The thousand signers of "Charter 77," a public plea to the government to observe the civil liberties guaranteed by the Helsinki agreement, have all been driven out of their normal occupations in the past two years (those who were still in them) and some of them, like Lederer, out of the country...

...We aren't listening...

...Jammed into the baggage racks, and under the seats, and in the corridors, besides the well-worn baggage, were great cartons of disposable diapers (unobtainable in Czechoslovakia) for their grandchildren and soap powder (of an unobtainable quality at home) for their grandchildren's mother...

...so persistently insulting that, were nothing else hopeless about the system, the censorship alone would guarantee the settled resentment not of some, or of most, but of all of them except, of course, the Party pork-choppers, probably numbering a million...

...But the Czech tradition of democracy is just as old...

...And in the absence of political liberty and a free press, who knows how much day-today or night-to-night social disorder there actually is in a country like Czechoslovakia...

...Is he worried about their being stolen...

...so unrealistically low that you don't meet a Czech who doesn't believe that the regime is fanatically bent on keeping the populace quiet...

...Nothing like it is likely to happen soon again...

...But the Charter 77 people pose no likely threat to the government in any case, in spite of all the hopeful notice they receive in the West...

...Not at all...

...I want to eat," said the Polish dog, "but what do you want to go to Poland for...

...The economy is ridiculously out of kilter...

...The Express—forgive the term— between Munich and Prague consists of three dirty old Czech coaches and, incongruously, a diner, unoccupied except for a scattering of patrons (from the nearly empty first-class section of the coaches) having a PilsenerprVo or a kava z blata ("coffee with mud," the Turkish-coffee-drinking Turks having got as far as Vienna and the Viennese having got as far as Prague...

...Spooky...

...Czechs—probably all Czechs—listen regularly to the powerful West German, Austrian, BBC broadcasts, as well as to the U.S...

...Unless he himself is caught dealing in drugs or buying illegal Kroner on the street, the worst that is likely to happen to him is to be insulted and thrown out of the country, but the friends he leaves behind may receive unpleasant attention...

...The dream abides, and it isn't Marx's dream: "It is we, we Christians, we Christians alone, who are responsible for atheist communism," said Prague's Josef Hromadka, holder of the Lenin Peace Prize...

...The French pulled out of the American Empire Beyond the Seas twenty years ago, and now the British Labor Party embraces unilateral nuclear disarmament, the Japanese flatly reject our demand that they remilitarize, even the subservient Germans will increase their NATO contribution by only two-thirds of the amount the United States requires of them (and the puny Dutch and Danes will not increase theirs at all...

...Spending soars, saving plummets, the Russian supply line is both spastic and sclerotic...

...There are no suggestion boxes in our country...

...a classic, and mortal, error of parti-tioners...

...Since there is no crime news, people assume that there is no crime and walk the dark little streets alone at all hours...

...He need not get up at 5:30 tomorrow morning to be at work from 7 to 3:45 (with fifteen minutes for lunch at the factory canteen, and no coffee breaks...

...But not innovation...

...And just to make sure, an armed soldier stands on either side of the track and another one on a foot bridge above it...