The New York Review Abroad (32 page)

I tell this story not just from author’s vanity, but also because it illustrates several qualities of the most delightful of all this year’s Central European revolutions: the speed, the improvisation, the merriness, and the absolutely central role of Václav Havel, who was at once director, playwright, stage manager, and leading actor in this, his greatest play. I was only one of many—indeed of millions—to feed him some lines.

Next morning I got a complimentary theater ticket. A ticket to the Magic Lantern theater, whose subterannean stage, auditorium, foyers, and dressing rooms had become the headquarters of the main
opposition coalition in the Czech lands, the Civic Forum, and thus, in effect, the headquarters of the revolution. The ticket changed. At first it was just a small note with the words “Please let in and out” written in purple ink, signed by Václav Havel’s brother, Ivan, and authenticated by the play-wright’s rubber stamp. This shows a beaming pussycat with the word “Smile!” across his chest. Then it was a green card worn around the neck, with my name typed as “Timothy Gordon Ash,” and the smiling cat again. Then it was a xeroxed and initialed paper slip saying “Civic Forum Building,” this time with two smiling cats (one red, one black) and a beaming green frog. I have it before me as I write. Beneath the frog it says “
très bien
.”

In any case, the tickets worked wonders. For nearly two weeks I, as an historian, was privileged to watch history being made inside the Magic Lantern. For most of that time, I was the only foreigner to sit in on the hectic deliberations of what most people called simply “the Forum.” But before I describe what I saw, we must briefly recall—or reconstruct—the beginning of the revolution.

1.

Students started it. Small groups of them had been active for at least a year before. They edited faculty magazines. They organized discussion clubs. They worked on the borderline between official and unofficial life. Many had contacts with the opposition, all read samizdat. Some say they had a conspiratorial group called “The Ribbon”—the Czech “White Rose,” as it were. But they also worked through the official youth organization, the SSM. It was through the SSM that they got permission to hold a demonstration in Prague on November 17, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the martyrdom of Jan Opletal, a Czech student murdered by the Nazis. This began as officially scheduled in Prague’s second district, with speeches and tributes at the cemetery.

But the numbers grew, and the chants turned increasingly against the present dictators in the castle. The demonstrators decided—perhaps some had planned all along—to march to Wenceslas Square, the stage for all the historic moments of Czech history, whether in 1918, 1948, or 1968. Down the hill they wound, along the embankment of the River Vltava, and then, turning right at the National Theater, up Národní Street into Wenceslas Square. Here they were met by riot police, with white helmets, shields, and truncheons, and by special antiterrorist squads, in red berets. Large numbers of demonstrators were cut off and surrounded, both along Národní and in the square. They went on chanting “freedom” and singing the Czech version of “We Shall Overcome.” Those in the front line tried to hand flowers to the police. They placed lighted candles on the ground and raised their arms, chanting, “We have bare hands.” But the police, and especially the red berets, beat men, women, and children with their truncheons.

This was the spark that set Czechoslovakia alight. During the night from Friday to Saturday—with reports of one dead and many certainly in hospital—some students determined to go on strike. On Saturday morning they managed to spread the word to most of the Charles University, and to several other institutions of higher learning, which immediately entered the occupation strike. (Patient research will be needed to reconstruct the precise details of this crucial moment.) On Saturday afternoon they were joined by actors, already politicized by earlier petitions in defense of Václav Havel, and drawn in directly by the very active students from the drama and film academies. They met in the Realistic Theater. Students described the “massacre,” as it was now called. The theater people responded with a declaration of support. This not only brought the theaters out on strike—that is, turned their auditoriums into political debating chambers—but
also, and, as far as I could establish, for the first time, made the proposal for a general strike on Monday, November 27, between noon and 2 PM. The audience responded with a standing ovation.

On Sunday morning the students of the film and drama academies came out with an appropriately dramatic declaration. Entitled “Don’t Wait—Act!” it began by saying that 1989 in Czechoslovakia might sadly be proclaimed the “year of the truncheon.” “That truncheon,” it continued, “on Friday, November 17 spilled the blood of students.” And then, after appealing “especially to European states in the year of the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution,” they went on to list demands which ranged from the legal registration of the underground monthly
Lidové Noviny
to removing the leading role of the Communist party from the constitution, but also crucially repeated the call for a general strike. (Incidentally, within a few days the students had all their proclamations neatly stored in personal computers, and many of the flysheets on the streets were actually computer printouts.)

It was only at ten o’clock on Sunday evening (Day Three), after the students and actors had taken the lead, proclaiming both their own and the general strike, that the previously existing opposition groups, led by Charter 77, met in another Prague theater. The effective convener of this meeting was Václav Havel, who had hurried back from his farmhouse in Northern Bohemia when he heard the news of the “massacre.” The meeting included not only the very diverse opposition groups, such as the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS), the Movement for Civic Freedoms, and
Obroda
(Rebirth), the club of excommunicated Communists, but also individual members of the previously puppet People’s and Socialist parties. The latter was represented by its general secretary, one Jan Skoda, who was once a schoolmate and close friend of Havel’s, but
who had carefully avoided him throughout the long, dark years of so-called normalization.

This miscellaneous late-night gathering agreed to establish an
Obcanské Forum
, a Civic Forum, “as a spokesman on behalf of that part of the Czechoslovak public which is increasingly critical of the existing Czechoslovak leadership and which in recent days has been profoundly shaken by the brutal massacre of peacefully demonstrating students.” It made four demands: the immediate resignation of the Communist leaders responsible for preparing the Warsaw Pact intervention in 1968 and the subsequent devastation of the country’s life, starting with the President Gustav Husák and the Party leader Miloš Jakeš; the immediate resignation of the Federal interior minister, František Kincl, and the Prague first secretary, Miroslav Stepán, held responsible for violent repression of peaceful demonstrations; the establishment of a special commission to investigate these police actions; and the immediate release of all prisoners of conscience. The Civic Forum, it added, supports “with all its authority” the call for a general strike. From this time forward, the Forum assumed the leadership of the revolution in the Czech lands.

Over the weekend there had been tens of thousands of people, mainly young people, milling around Wenceslas Square, waving flags and chanting slogans. Students had taken over the equestrian statue of the good king, at the top of his square, covering its base with improvised posters, photographs, and candles. But the popular breakthrough came on Monday afternoon. For now the square was not merely teeming; it was packed. Dense masses chanted “freedom,” “resignation,” and, most strikingly, a phrase that might be translated as “now’s the time” or “this is it.” And neither the white helmets nor the red berets moved in.

As in East Germany, when the authorities woke up to what was
happening, it was already too late. In East Central Europe today, with Gorbachev in the Kremlin, the kind of violence that would be needed to crush such masses of people just does not appear to be an available option. (But the then prime minister, Ladislav Adamec, went out of his way to emphasize that martial law would not be declared, thus implying that the option had been considered.)

On Tuesday, Day Five, the demonstration—at 4 PM, after working hours—was still bigger. And the publishing house of the Socialist party, under Jan Skoda, made available its balcony, perfectly located halfway down the square. From here the veteran Catholic opposition activist, Radim Palouš, a dynamic banned priest, Václav Malý, and then Havel addressed the vast crowd, repeating the Forum’s demands. Next morning the first edition of the Communist party daily,
Rudé Právo
, had a headline referring to a demonstration of “200,000” in the square. The second edition said “100,000.” Someone made a collage of the two editions, xeroxed it, and stuck it up on shop windows next to the photographs of Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, the mimeographed or computer-printed flysheets, and the carefully typed declarations that this or that shop would join in the general strike, declarations signed by all the employees and often authenticated with a seal or rubber stamp.

On Wednesday and Thursday, Days Six and Seven, there were yet larger demonstrations, while first talks were held between Prime Minister Adamec and a Forum delegation, which, however, at the prime minister’s earnest request, was not led by Václav Havel. The prime minister, Havel told me, sent word through an aide that he did not yet want to “play his trump card.” At the same time, however, Havel had direct communication with Adamec through a self-constituted group of mediators, calling itself “the bridge.” “The bridge” had two struts: Michal Horácek, a journalist on a youth paper, and Michael Kocáb, a rock singer.

The revolution was thus well under way, indeed rocking around the clock. And its headquarters was just a hundred yards from the bottom of Wenceslas Square, in the theater called the Magic Lantern.