1968 - Mark Kurlansky [142]
Many inside and outside the country wondered, as did Brezhnev, if Dubek had gone further than he meant to and was now losing control. “Freedom,” wrote Paris Match, “is too strong an alcohol to be used pure after a generation of a dry regime. Dubek is from the elite of the Soviet Union—a Communist, after all. Is it possible that he has gotten carried away with the forces he has liberated? And that he will try, too late, to put the brakes on?”
Having been raised in its hinterlands, Dubek thought he had a deep understanding of the Soviet Union. But he could only guess at the inner workings of the Brezhnev government. He had never been close to Brezhnev and had never felt a rapport with him. Dubek wrote in his memoirs, “It is Brezhnev who always brings to mind the not entirely welcome Russian custom of male kissing.”
The Czechoslovakian people pushed to get as much as quickly as possible, so that it would be too late to go back. But Dubek knew that he had to be clearly in charge of events. He would complain to colleagues that the people were pushing too hard. “Why do they do this to me?” he said more than once to Central Committee secre-tary Zdenek Mlynár. “They would have been afraid to do it under Novotny´. Don’t they realize how much harm they are causing me?” The government continually warned the people that reform must not go too quickly. Dubek’s mistake, as he later admitted, was not understanding that he had a limited time. He thought that by going gradually, he could bring his allies, the Soviets, with him. Dubek was careful, in almost every speech he made, to once again declare the loyalty of Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union, its contempt for the pro-Nazi West Germans, and its admiration and friendship with East Germany. If true, this last was an unreciprocated friendship. East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht was one of Dubek’s harshest critics.
It was difficult to go far with reforms while Novotny´ was still president. But a series of outrageous corruption scandals involving him and his son made it possible to remove him from his second post only months after he was ousted as Party chairman. At the last moment he tried to develop a following, by suddenly becoming a “regular guy,” being seen having beers with the boys in working-class bars. But he was a deeply disliked figure. On March 22, with no other possible choice, he resigned from the presidency.
Dubek did not have a free hand in naming Novotny´’s replacement because it was critical that the new president be someone who would not only work with him, but also please, or at least not enrage, Brezhnev. Various groups wrote letters suggesting different candidates. It was the only open discussion of an appointment for head of government in the history of the Soviet bloc. The students favored forty-seven-year-old Cestmír Cisar, a known reformer and somewhat charismatic television personality whose liberal ideas had met with disfavor in the Novotny´ regime. He was exactly the kind of candidate who would not ease Moscow’s fears.
The intelligentsia and some of the students also liked Josef Smrkovsky, age fifty-seven, whose popularity was enhanced by an attack on him from the East German government. In the end, Dubek chose the least popular of the three top candidates, seventy-two-year-old retired general Ludvik Svoboda, a hero of World War II who had fought with the Soviets. The other contenders were given important but lesser positions. The students in the new Czechoslovakia let their disappointment be known by demonstrating for Cisar. The demonstration, in itself something unheard of, went on for hours undisturbed,