1968 - Mark Kurlansky [143]
This was in March, when in neighboring Poland students were being clubbed to the ground for demanding freedom of speech. Dubek was at home when he was told of the student demonstration. He reacted as though this were the normal way things were done here in the Communist People’s Republic: He went over to Party headquarters to talk to the students. He tried to explain his choice to them, saying the other candidates were needed in other places in government, and he assured them that Cisar would have an important role in the Central Committee. One student asked Dubek, “What are the guarantees that the old days will not be back?”
Dubek responded, “You yourselves are the guarantee. You, the young.”
Was it possible to have a communist democracy in the Soviet bloc? Some were daring to hope. But the students took Dubek at his word, that they were the guarantors, so when Svoboda was installed as president, as protest, and perhaps also just to say that the students of Czechoslovakia could have a sit-in, too, they staged one that lasted for hours.
When spring, with all its promise, came to Prague, not everyone was happy. In the month of April there was an average of a suicide a day among politicians, starting with Jozef Brestansky, the vice president of the Supreme Court, who was found hanging from a tree in the woods outside of the capital. He had been working on a massive new project attempting to undo miscarriages of justice from the 1950s. It was believed the judge feared that his role in the sentencing of several innocent people was about to be revealed. Such revelations were surfacing every day, and television was playing a prominent role. Victims were being interviewed on television. Even more shocking, some of the perpetrators were interviewed on television, with viewers across the country watching them squirm as they gave their evasive answers. Camera crews also traveled throughout the country, filming the points of view of ordinary people. What resulted was a national debate about the injustices of the past two decades under communist rule.
The mass rallies and public meetings that began in the winter became widespread in the spring, and many were shown on televi-sion. Students and workers were seen challenging government officials with tough, even hostile, questions. In a country where most officials were gray bureaucrats little known to the public, the officials who played best to cameras and spoke best to microphones—like Josef Smrkovsky—were now becoming national media stars.
If, as some suspected, Dubek hoped to satisfy the public with a small taste of democracy, that was not what was happening. The more they got, the more they wanted. Increasingly the demand was heard for opposition political parties. The Literarni Listy frequently championed this idea, as did playwright Václav Havel and philosopher Ivan Svitak, who wrote an article contending that there had been no reforms, just a few measures that had slipped by because of a power struggle. According to Svitak, the entire Party apparatus had to be uprooted. “We must liquidate it or it will liquidate us.” The press, both print and broadcast, were in the vanguard of political reform. They were well aware that although the state censors were not censoring anymore, they still had their positions. The press wanted a law that banned censorship. One radio editor said, “We have press freedom only on the promise of the Party, and that is democracy on recall.” Dubek warned of excesses. Though he did not say so, he must have understood that Brezhnev would never tolerate relinquishing the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.
In April Dubek issued the Action Program of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, which spoke of a “new model of socialist democracy.” At last the official positions of the Dubek regime were stated, declaring the equality of Czechs and Slovaks, that the aim of government was socialism, and that personal and political beliefs could not be