1968 - Mark Kurlansky [146]
Václav Havel was not among the literati in Prague that spring because he was in New York, one of five hundred thousand Czechoslovakians who traveled abroad in 1968, since travel for the first time in many years was open to anyone. Havel, thirty-one years old, spent six weeks of the Prague Spring working with Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare Festival in the East Village, where The Memorandum, his absurdist comedy about a new language for offices, was produced to reviews that instantly made Havel a recognized name in Western theater. “Wittily thought provoking” and “strangely touching” were among the descriptions in Clive Barnes’s review for The New York Times. The play went on to win an Obie Award. Meanwhile, Havel may have had one of the more interesting glimpses of democracy in America since Tocqueville, frequenting the Fillmore East and other institutions of the East Village and talking to students at riot-torn Columbia University. He returned to Czechoslovakia with psychedelic rock band posters.
A poll was taken from June 30 to July 10 asking people if they wanted the nation to continue with communism or turn to capital-ism. The Czechoslovakian population responded unequivocally—89 percent wanted to stay with communism. Only 5 percent said they wanted capitalism. Asked if they were satisfied with the work of the current government, a third of the respondents, 33 percent, said they were satisfied, and 54 percent said they were partially satisfied. Only 7 percent said they were dissatisfied. Dubek, walking a precarious line with Moscow, was leading a happy, hopeful communist country at home.
But the Soviets were not happy and by July had settled on a choice of three possible solutions. Either they would somehow get the wily Dubek to commit to their program, or the leaders still loyal to Moscow within Czechoslovakia—and they seem to have overestimated how many remained—would take back the country by force, or they would invade. Invasion was by far the least appealing of the three options. It had taken twelve years of difficult diplomacy to recover from the hostility and anger from the West caused by the 1956 invasion of Hungary. An invasion of Czechoslovakia would be even more difficult to explain, because Dubek had gone to great lengths to show that he was not opposing the Soviet Union. Also, the two nations had a long history of friendship, going back to the 1930s, whereas Hungary had been a Nazi ally and an enemy of the Soviets. The Soviets liberated Czechoslovakia, and the Czechs were the one people who voluntarily voted in communism and welcomed an alliance with the Soviets. As the July poll showed, Czechoslovakia was a nation still committed to communism.
Now at last, just as the faltering economy needed it most, Soviet relations with the West were warming. It was called détente. The Johnson administration had worked hard at improved Soviet relations. After long negotiations, the nuclear proliferation treaty had been achieved. In late July, after ten years of on-again, off-again cold war negotiations, a deal between Pan Am and Aeroflot would establish the first direct air service between the Soviet Union and the United States. These were good beginnings to more important openings.
Still, the Soviets had decided that the one thing they could not risk was letting Czechoslovakia drift out of their orbit, to be followed—they imagined—by Romania and Yugoslavia, with the students then taking over in Poland—and after twelve years, how pacified were the Hungarians? Ironically, in all of Dubek’s statements and writings there is no indication that he ever contemplated leaving the Soviet bloc. He clearly recognized that as a line not to be crossed. But the Soviets did not trust him because he would not run his country the way