1968 - Mark Kurlansky [141]
“What?” muttered his young supporters. “Who? What did he say?”
Cohn-Bendit realized that no one in the courtroom, including the judge, knew who Kuroń and Modzelewski were. He had to explain that they were Polish dissidents, about the open letter and the student movement, and that their trial was this week. By the time it was all clear, the moment had been lost. Nothing kills drama like a thorough explanation, as Abbie Hoffman had pointed out.
“May ’68: the beginning of a long struggle.” 1968 Paris student silk-screen poster.
(Galerie Beaubourg, Vence)
CHAPTER 13
THE PLACE TO BE
Springtime will be beautiful; when the rapeseed is in blossom, truth will have had its victory.
—Czech student slogan, 1968
AS THE COLD, WET DAYS grew longer and warmer, and the sun returned to dark, old Prague, the city’s young people became infected with a sense of optimism that could be found in few places that spring. The Paris talks showed no signs of bringing the Vietnam War to an end; the war in Biafra was starving children; there seemed no hope for peace in the Middle East; the student movement had been crushed in Poland, France, and Germany—but in Prague there was optimism or, at least, determination. New clubs opened, though it took a few demonstrations to get them open, with young men in long hair, women in miniskirts and velvet boots and fishnet stockings as in Paris, and jukeboxes playing American music.
Thousands of people in Prague, especially the young, had taken to the streets on February 15 to celebrate the Czechoslovakian hockey team’s victory over the undefeated Soviet team five to four in the winter Olympics in Grenoble, France—and it seemed they hadn’t left the streets since. They discussed the game for weeks. It was a widespread belief that if Novotny´ had stayed in power, somehow the Czechoslovakian team would not have been allowed to win. No one could explain how Novotny´ would have stopped it. It was simply that with Novotny´ nothing was possible, while without him everything seemed possible. And while the news from neighboring Poland was depressing, the Czechoslovakian press was covering the student movement there with a candor and openness that was exciting, even shocking, to its audience.
The news media—print, radio, and television—were still controlled almost entirely by the government, but to the utter amazement of their readers, listeners, and viewers, the government was using the press to promote the idea of democracy—communist democracy, it was always careful to emphasize. The independent and reform-minded Writers Union, once considered a dissident group, was given permission to start its own magazine, Literarni Listy—Literary Journal—though it did have to struggle to get a sufficient allotment of paper for the weekly. That was often the way things now worked. The top officials would open the way, but lesser bureaucrats would still try to obstruct. As time went on and Dubek purged more and more of the old guard, fewer of these incidents occurred.
The protocol officials paid a visit to the new leader and suggested that Dubek’s shabby hotel room was not an appropriate residence. They showed him a number of houses, which he said were “too big for my family’s needs and my taste.” Finally he accepted a four-bedroom house in a suburb.
For a man of communist training, schooled in a foggy rhetoric left to interpretation, Dubek was turning out to have a startling directness and simplicity to his message. People were finding him not only clear but even likable. He said, “Democracy is not only the right and chance to pronounce one’s own views, but also the way in which people’s views are handled, whether they have a real feeling of co-responsibility, co-decision, whether they really feel they are participating in making decisions and solving important problems.”
The people took him at his word. Meetings became lengthy debates. The Congress of Agricultural Cooperatives, normally a dull, pre-dictable