The Atlantic and Its Enemies (57 page)

The Stalinist Novotný went on in office; as late as 1954, several months after the USSR had started to release Stalin’s victims, there was a minor purge trial, and a commission in 1957 even reaffirmed the guilt of the 1950-51 trial victims, though some were released. A huge Stalin statue even went up in 1955, demolished only when Khrushchev insisted, along with the removal of Klement Gottwald from his mausoleum. In an obscure place, much later, there was still a little ‘Stalin Square’. In Czechoslovakia there was nothing like the Polish peasantry, stubbornly stuck in subsistence agriculture; nor was there anything like the Polish Church, the Czechs having inherited a powerful anti-clerical tradition. Opposition to the Communists was enfeebled from the outset because it was itself largely Communist. It talked, and then talked again.

Still, there were signs of trouble in the woodwork, and a Party congress was postponed for several months in 1962. The 1951 purge trials continued to be a cause of unease, and there was a new commission to investigate them. In 1963 it pinned the blame on Gottwald, and by implication his close colleagues, some still in high places. A Slovak journalist - Miroslav Hysko - publicly denounced them, and was not himself arrested: the old trial verdicts were, instead, cancelled. All of this was evidence of much deeper currents. Further evidence came when a report late in 1963 stated that the campaign against Slovak nationalism in 1951 had been unjustified; and from prison there emerged Dr Husák, whom the Russians subsequently chose as their man in Prague. Novotný, an elderly figure recognizably in the Stalinist mode, was careful to dissociate himself from the old guard and only four of them remained; the warhorse Slovak secretary (Karol Bacílek, a Hungarian) was displaced in 1963 by a younger man, Dubček. Slovakia, when he was a child, had been part of old Hungary, and in the capital, Bratislava, Hungarian was still the second language. Anti-Catholicism in the later nineteenth century translated there, as in Hungary, into Communism in the twentieth, and Dubček somewhat resembled Imre Nagy in that he had spent time in the USSR, his parents having gone there; from the age of four until he was seventeen (in 1938) he had lived in Russia, and he attended the Moscow Higher Political School from 1955 to 1958. However, Imre Nagy had been galvanized by Hungarian nationalism, the original sense of the word coming from Luigi Galvani of Verona, who had noticed how a scalpel that had accidentally received an electric charge made the corpse of a frog twitch. Dubček remained something of a dead frog, and even resembled one. His speeches amounted to wooden language, with at most some sense that he opposed bureaucracy. The reformers’ candidate for president was also a veteran of the USSR, Ludvík Svoboda, who had had a role in the Communist takeover in 1948, as ostensibly non-Party defence minister. There was also trouble in the Czech lands. They had been highly industrialized, but were languishing: in 1961-3, economic growth had stopped, even been reversed. A Five Year Plan was abandoned, and in 1963 a team of experts under Ota Šik, who had been in the Politburo since 1958, argued for serious change, such that concerns’ profits should not go to the State, and management should be properly rewarded, with prices that reflected costs. A congress in 1966 approved a new system without parallel elsewhere in that world.

The backdrop was serious movement among the writers - not of course the 630 members of their union, the usual parade of elks, but in various journals, particularly Slovak, which were uncensored. The overall appeal was to the Soviet example, with denunciations of the ‘cult of personality’, and even Novotný tried to come to terms, inviting the writers to the Prague castle. But by the summer of 1967 there was deadlock at a ‘congress of the Czechoslovak writers’, and one was even imprisoned for giving details to an exile in France. Foreign Communists - Roger Garaudy and Ernst Fischer - became involved, as campaigns went ahead against the censorship, or against Czechoslovakia’s policy towards Israel. At the same time there was a burst of creativity, as Czechoslovak film made the rounds, and Milan Kundera surfaced; solemn socialism-with-a-human-face economists appeared, and Youth took a hand, protesting that repairs were not carried out in the dormitories at Strahov or that there had been a power failure. Talk went ahead, and beards nodded; the police behaved absurdly, censoring people for writing that ‘science ends where its freedom ends’ or, as in 1963, dismissing the entire editorship of an historical journal for publishing a review that indicated the gaps in a particular collection of orthodox texts. By the autumn of 1967 there was an atmosphere of crisis within the Party - itself greatly dominated by the proletariat - and there was a secret meeting, at which Dubček spoke, not for repression of the writers and students, but for a more suitable policy as regards Slovak industry. Novotný was pushed out, and the ‘Prague Spring’ burst. There was a May Day demonstration containing the banner headline ‘WITH THE SOVIET UNION FOR ALL TIME AND NOT A DAY LONGER’.

Much of this was froth. The Slovak Communists wanted federalization, and had used the Prague intellectuals to force the issue, but they warned in veiled language about any repeat of Budapest in 1956, and a Soviet general appeared to say that ‘international duty’ would be done if need be. Courts reopened cases, and there was much foreign applause, but reality lay with Husák, not Dubček. The background was manoeuvres by the Warsaw Pact, though Brezhnev in June still had ‘tears in his eyes’ to the effect that he would not intervene. The fact was that the Party still functioned; though many of the central committee delegates did not appear, in mid-July Soviet language in letters was more harsh. The French Communist Waldeck Rochet appeared to suggest an answer, and on 1 August Dubček met Brezhnev at Cierna nad Tisou, in sub-Carpathian territory on the Ukrainian border (the Soviet delegation steamed back every night to Csap, to the railwaymen’s club). Brezhnev simply did not want to see Czechoslovakia leave the Soviet zone, and did not trust her; the East Germans were adamant that Czechoslovakia must not become an Austria. Dubček was expected to restore the censorship, but the real problem lay with the Slovaks, who pressed for federalism, and would deal with Moscow rather than with a Prague intelligentsia full of its own words. The trick was then to find some old Czech proletarian characters who would collaborate, and that was quite easy. In mid-August the Russians started to use threatening, inquisitorial language. In the night of 20/21 August they moved in, an ‘appeal’ having been got together by the team that would then in effect run the country. Its furniture consisted of old trade union warhorses on the Czech side, and Slovak federalizing Communists on the other, and it was the latter who ran the regime. Gustáv Husák was installed in the presidential villa at Smichov, and Czechoslovakia then hardly disturbed the headlines for the next twenty years.

At any rate, Brezhnev in the 1970s could look on the world with a certain confidence. The West had done nothing about the Prague events, and the Germans especially were now running to Moscow, offering considerable amounts of money; they had in effect recognized East Germany and given it money, too. China was always a question mark, but Mao had left her in a very enfeebled condition, and she was even lured into a war with Vietnam. Now, events in the Middle East did call for action, and at Christmas 1979 came a clumsy lurch, one that was to prove fateful.

The Turkish generals’ coup had happened at a moment of great turmoil in the Middle East. The Shah of Iran had fallen; oil prices had doubled; and the ruler of Iraq, the Stalin-worshipping Saddam Hussein, was planning to fall on Iran, to make himself master of the whole region. Meanwhile, the Americans, under the feeble Carter, seemed to be fair game, and their diplomatic staff in Teheran were taken hostage by a mob of angry students; in spring 1980 a pathetic attempt was made to rescue them by helicopter mission, which went wrong in classic Bay of Pigs style, with sand blocking the engines, and machines crashing into each other. Old men in Moscow chuckled, and moved into Afghanistan.

The last act of the USSR began very professionally, with a mixture of brute force and low cunning. On Christmas Eve, 1979, Soviet troops took over the airport at Kabul, and three days later six Soviet divisions crossed the border. The rulers of Afghanistan knew that power was precarious, and in 1979 the Tadj-Bek palace in Kabul was very well guarded - 2,500 special troops, dug-in tanks and a private guard consisting of relatives of the president. President Hafizullah Amin had himself seized power a few months before, in a coup, and had called in a special Soviet force of 500 men to complete the security system. It had been recruited among Central Asians wearing a uniform that made them resemble local, Afghan, forces. But they were in fact from the KGB and
Spetsnaz
, its ‘special purpose’ troops, men (Uzbeks and Tadzhiks) trained to the highest degree of physical fitness. Amin never thought that they would be a threat. He was quite wrong: there had been 343 flights into Kabul in forty-eight hours and their mission was in fact to overthrow him.

The affair was, militarily, very well prepared. The palace had been studied with a view to assault, but much care was taken to disguise the Soviet intent. The night before, the Soviet forces attended a banquet with the Afghan defenders. President Amin was extremely careful as to what he ate, but he did trust his own cooks, who were Soviet Uzbeks. On 26 December 1979, in the middle of the dinner, all who had touched the food began to roll around in extreme pain. Soviet doctors were summoned, and revived Amin with injections and a drip-feed. But they were soon followed by Soviet assault troops, who blasted their way, with foul language, through the defences, hurling grenades into the private rooms and even the lifts. Amin wrenched himself from his bed, and, in his underwear, with tubes dangling from his body, went down to the main hall to see what was happening. His five-year-old son, crying, rushed up to him, clutching his father’s legs. One of the Soviet doctors said, ‘I can’t look at this.’ Amin was killed shortly afterwards. The affair was all over by midnight, and at 12.30 a.m. on 28 December, a telephone call came through to the new Afghan leader, Babrak Karmal, from the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov. Soviet troops were coming in to reinforce Karmal’s position. They were already in control of the airports and the main roads into Kabul, the capital. All very easy: but in the next twelve years Afghanistan was wrecked as a country, and so, too, was the Soviet Union itself. Almost no-one in a senior position in Moscow seems to have recognized that this would happen. On the contrary, the decision to invade Afghanistan was taken quite casually, and was hardly even minuted. Old Brezhnev, Andropov and the senior military simply went into ‘country A’, as it was called. Other Politburo signatures, willing or unwilling, were collected afterwards.

They thought that they had the measure, not just of Afghanistan, but of Central Asia in general. The whole area was very backward, and when the Russian Revolution happened, the Bolsheviks found that they could rely on some elements within the Islamic world, including even the Chechens in the northern part of the Caucasus. The USSR was progress. It freed the education system from obsolete nonsense - a teacher who did not know Arabic (let alone early medieval Arabic) forcing, with terrible punishments, rote-learning of the Koran on small boys who had no notion of what they were having to memorize. Women were emancipated, and local languages were given some encouragement; customs such as month-long fasting, or circumcision, were discouraged (or worse). It was true that, as time went by, Moscow found itself relying on local power-wielders. The tribal system was tenacious, and there were also religious orders (
Sufi
) with a leader,
Sheikh
, who exercised a great deal of informal authority. When, after Khrushchev, the Russians started to deal through locals rather than Russians, these informal networks came into their own, together with a corruption that oiled the wheels. When the USSR finally collapsed, the last generation of Communist bosses quite easily took on national dress, and religion, to become presidents of the new Central Asian republics. At any rate, no-one in Moscow seems to have thought that running Afghanistan would be especially difficult. As regards her foreign affairs, the country was a sort of Asiatic Finland. Her ruler had been grateful for support against the British, and had recognized the Bolsheviks early on. He then initiated a modernization drive not unlike Atatürk’s in Turkey, and since the USSR was also modernizing backward Central Asian tribal peoples, there was much over which to collaborate. In the sixties aid came from the USSR, the usual cement and chemical works, and a gas pipeline took two thirds of Afghan natural gas to the north.

Even its considerable internal problems were familiar, in the sense that, with every Islamic society, you feel you are dealing with the same pack of cards, though the distribution of suits and honour cards greatly varies. Here, in a population of 15 million, modernization brought about the usual troubles. There was a Persian-speaking upper class, which was eroded by population growth and the de - localization of politics. Women’s emancipation in a Sunni Islam context of, in places, considerable conservatism was not straightforward: in Herat the men used henna as make-up (the Turkish slang for ‘homosexual’ is
pusht
, from ‘Pushtun’, the more accurate version of the English ‘Pathan’, the dominant group) and the women had to wear the clumsy
burka
, which hardly showed even their eyes. There were troubles between Pathans, semi-Iranian Baluchis and Turkic Uzbeks of the north, each with a different language; tribal matters counted as well, and even divided the Communists (the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), set up in 1965) into two rival groups. There were also secular army officers who sympathized with Moscow, where many of them had been trained, and despised the native traditions. The party in effect depended upon university students, the intelligentsia and some administrators for its membership, and these, vain and isolated from society at large, split. On top of everything else, the Pathans were not confined to Afghanistan. In 1947, when Pakistan was established, 6 million of them lived there, and accounted for several Pakistani leaders; there was agitation for a ‘Pushtunistan’ that would have caused secession, and the Pakistanis tried to control their neighbour’s affairs. Militarily speaking, Afghanistan was so mountainous that only a genius could conquer it; the northern and southern parts were even cut off from each other until a great tunnel was driven through, at 12,000 feet, in 1964, with Soviet aid, to connect them in winter.