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By Root 934 0

catastrophic for years, but the Czech lands had started out at a level so far above those of everyone else in the Soviet bloc that it took years before the consequences of mismanagement became devastating. Slovakia, lacking the Czechs’ starting advantage, had been suffering for a long time. But now even the Czechs were experiencing food shortages, and the government had ordered “meatless Thursday.” With the combination of uncertain support in Moscow and unhappy people at home, Novotny´ eased up on the police state. Censorship became less severe, artists, writers, and filmmakers were allowed more freedom, and some travel to the West was allowed.

It was still a very repressive state. The literary magazine Tvar was shut down. There were limits to what could be written, spoken, or done. But Czechoslovakians flourished with the small margin of freedom they had been finally allowed. With the West no longer completely cut off, Czech youth immediately tapped into the vibrant Western youth culture wearing Texasskis—blue jeans—and going to clubs to hear the big beat, as rock and roll was called. Prague had more young people with long hair, beards, and sandals than anywhere else in central Europe. Yes, in the heart of Novotny´’s Czechoslovakia, there were the unshorn rebel youth of the sixties—hippies—or were they the rebel youth of the fifties, beatniks? On May 1, 1965, May Day, when the rest of the communist world was celebrating the revolution, the youth of Prague had crowned the longhaired, bearded beatnik, visiting poet Allen Ginsberg, Kraj Majales, King of May. “Ommm,” chanted Ginsberg, the Jew turned Buddhist, who even while embracing Eastern religion was to many young Prague residents the embodiment of the exciting new world in the West. For his coronation speech he clanked tiny cymbals while chanting a Buddhist hymn. After a few days of following him through the dark, ornate back streets of the center city, the secret police had him deported. Or, as he wrote it in a poem,

And I was sent from Prague by plane by detectives in Czechoslovakian business suits

And I am the King of May, which is the power of sexual youth,

And I am the King of May, which is industry in eloquence and action in amour,

And I am the King of May, which is old Human poesy, and 100,000 people chose my name,

And I am the King of May, and in a few minutes I will land at London Airport. . . .

But as Stefan Dubek would have readily pointed out, one is not completely free in America, either. When Ginsberg returned to the United States, the FBI placed his name on a list of dangerous security risks.

For all its repression, despite the mustached men in Czechoslovakian business suits, Prague was becoming popular. In 1966 three and a half million tourists visited the country, a fifth of them from the West. Czech movies such as Closely Watched Trains and The Shop on Main Street were being seen around the world. Milos Forman was one of several Czech directors sought internationally. Czech playwrights, including Václav Havel, were earning international reputations. Havel, perhaps not the most theatrical but the most politically stinging of the Prague playwrights, mounted plays of absurdist antitotalitarianism that would never have been seen in the Soviet Union. In The Memorandum, a bureaucracy prevents creative thinking by imposing a made-up language called Ptydepe. Havel often laughed at the language of communism. In another play, a character burlesques Khrushchev’s habit of concocting meaningless folkisms. The Havel character asserts, “He who argues with a mosquito net will never dance with a goat near Podmokly.”

In November 1967 a small group of Prague students decided to do what they were now hearing of students doing in the West. They held a demonstration. The issue was poor heat and lighting in the dormitories—neither the first nor the last student movement to start on a seemingly banal issue. They discovered, as many students in the West were also beginning to find, that it was fun to demonstrate. They marched in the dark of early evening, carrying candles