The New York Review Abroad (35 page)

Civic Forum, Democratic Forum, New Forum—Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany—you can easily lose track; it’s that kind of year. Someone suggests the general strike should be described as an “informal referendum” on the leading role of the Party. Someone else
says “symbolic,” not “informal.” Writers debate a fine point of style. Agreement by mutual exhaustion. Meeting over.

After midnight. Back in Havel’s basement pub, with a wall painting of a ship in stormy seas. Beer and
becherovka
. What do you talk about on the night of such a tremendous victory, when, in just over a week, you have removed the gibbering thugs who have ruined the country for twenty years? In the first instant, on the stage of the Magic Lantern, you may cry, “To a free Czechoslovakia!” But you can’t go on talking like characters in a nineteenth-century play. So you suddenly find yourself talking about cats. Yes, cats. Two cats called “Yin” and “Yang,” whom their owner has not seen for more than a week. Poor things. Victims of the revolution.

So what will happen after the revolution? I ask a beaming Jirí Dienstbier, the star journalist reduced to working as a stoker after signing Charter 77. Quick as ever, he says: Either the counterrevolution or … a Western consumer society. (Just over two weeks later he is appointed Czechoslovakia’s foreign minister. Kindly delete that remark from the record. No, of course you never said that, Mr. Minister. Someone else did. I imagined it. It was a voice from the wall.)

Day Nine (Saturday, November 25). Two Forum statements. One issued after the plenum last night at 11:30 PM (events move so fast they have not only to date but to time the communiqués) describes the general strike as a “symbolic referendum” on the “leading role.” A second, issued at 4:30 AM, expresses dismay at some of the people elected to the new politburo (formally: Presidium) and Central Committee secretariat. The general strike is here described as “an informal, nationwide referendum on whether or not they should go on humiliating us, and whether this country should continue to be ruined
by the leaders of one political party, permanently abrogating to itself the leading role.”

The waiter in my hotel sees me reading
Svobodné Slovo
. “Ah, victoria!” he says, pointing to the blue, white, and red ribbon which he, like so many others, is now wearing in his lapel. Then he leans over and whispers in my ear: “finished communism.” Straightening up, he rubs his shoe across the carpet, as if crushing a beetle. Then he takes my
Svobodné Slovo
, but not my breakfast order, and disappears into the kitchen.

This morning there is, by happy chance, a festive mass in the cathedral on the castle hill, to celebrate the canonization of Agnes of Bohemia. The actual canonization took place in Rome on November 12, just five days before the revolution started. (An old legend has it, so a Catholic friend informs me, that wonders will occur in Bohemia when Agnes is canonized.) In the freezing cold, a large crowd gathers inside and all around the cathedral, and in front of the Archbishop’s Palace. “Frantši Tomášek! Frantši Tomášek!” they chant, a wonderfully chummy way to greet a venerable cardinal. An old woman quaveringly sings patriotic hymns, pausing only to take a swig of vodka between verses.

The Church here is nothing like the force that it is in Poland, for Czechoslovakia has historically been bitterly divided between Catholics (associated with the Habsburg counterreformation) and Protestants (from Jan Hus to Masaryk), while both churches were ruthlessly suppressed in the Stalinist period, and again after 1969. Yet Catholic intellectuals and banned priests like Václav Malý play a crucial part in the opposition leadership. Tomášek himself has become ever bolder as he gets ever older. A petition for religious freedom last year got more than half a million signatures, and was a major factor in
breaking the political ice. And anyway, who could resist the glorious coincidence of this ceremony and the revolution? So there is a goodly crowd here too, some from the countryside and even from Slovakia. And the mass for the patron saint of Bohemia, the king’s daughter who came down to live among the poor, is a further celebration of national renewal. Angels at work. Oh yes, and the whole service is broadcast live on television: so far as I can establish, the first time that has ever happened here.

At 2 PM, in freezing snow, there is the biggest demonstration of all: over half a million people, in the park before the Letná football stadium, just behind the place where the giant statue of Stalin once stood. With the banners and flags and upturned faces vivid against the white snow, it looks like a painting by L. S. Lowry. Whole sections of the crowd jump up and down together, to keep warm. The essential fact is that they are there, at the Forum’s invitation. In a sense, that is all that matters. But of course there is a program.

Havel reiterates the Forum’s dissatisfaction with some of the new leaders, and especially with the survival in office of the deeply unpopular Prague Party secretary, Miroslav Stepán. “Shame, shame!” cry the crowd. And then he says that the only person in power who had responded to the wishes of the people is the prime minister, Ladislav Adamec. “Adamec! Adamec!” roar the crowd, and one trembles for a moment at the ease with which they can be swayed. This is of course a quite deliberate (but high-risk) tactic, worked out in the dressing rooms of the Magic Lantern: to build up the prime minister’s position as a negotiating partner by showing the authorities that he can enjoy popular support. In fact, this is precisely what Adamec asked Havel to do for him a few days ago. Dubcek, who, rather to some people’s surprise, has not yet returned to Bratislava, repeats the same support for Adamec. He also says, rather nicely,
that he is pleased about the canonization of Agnes of Bohemia—Anezka—and that, although he will speak in Slovak, what matters is not how you speak but what you say.

Petr Miller, The Worker, repeats the strike call, stressing once again that it must not damage the national economy. Ballads are sung, including President Masaryk’s favorite song; and students and actors talk. “I speak in the name of Jesus Christ,” says one actor, modestly, “and call upon you to stamp out the devil.” Roars of applause. Then, in the extraordinary way these crowds have of talking back, they given an almost instant response: “The devil is in the castle, the devil is in the castle!” (If you stand in the crowd you see how one man can start a chant which, being taken up by those around him, becomes the voice of half a million.)

7:30 PM. The press conference. Repeating the Forum positions about the compromised leaders, the general strike and so forth. Tomorrow a delegation will meet with Prime Minister Adamec. The agenda is to include the legalization of independent groups, the release of political prisoners, arrangements for further talks, oh yes, and an end to the leading role of the Party. Foreign journalists keep asking about things they cannot possibly know, such as the power balance inside the Party or the relations between the Soviet and Czechoslovak leadership. Jirí Dienstbier gives a good answer to the last question. Of course we feel the Soviet leadership should have some sense of responsibility for the 1968 invasion, he says, but we are certainly not asking for any more international “assistance.”

Television is now clearly opening up to report the revolution. Beside the live broadcast of the mass it shows an interview with Havel: down with the leading role, he says, up with free elections. And the crowds outside grasp that as the essential point: “Free elections,” they chant. As in Poland, in Hungary, in East Germany.…

Day Ten (Sunday, November 26). 11 AM. A delegation led by Prime Minister Adamec, and formally described as representing the government and National Front (uniting the Communist with the formerly puppet parties), meets with a Forum delegation led by Havel. “We don’t know each other,” says the prime minister, extending his hand across the table. “I’m Havel,” says Havel. Just in case you didn’t guess. It’s a short getting-to-know-you session, but they agree to meet again on Tuesday. The prime minister promises the release of political prisoners (several of whom do indeed appear in the Magic Lantern in the course of the day), and also to come to this afternoon’s rally.

2 PM at the Letná stadium again. Adamec arrives before the Forum leaders, and stands around stamping his feet in the cold. How do you feel? someone asks him. “Very nice,” he says, “I think this was necessary,” as the crowd roars, “Dubcek! Dubcek!” I notice his aide trying to suppress a broad grin. Havel delivers a brief speech, describing the Forum as a bridge from totalitarianism to democracy, and saying that it must exist until free elections. Then they give Adamec his chance. But he blows it, talking about the need for discipline, for no more strikes, for economic rather than political change. You feel he is talking as much to the emergency Central Committee meeting that will take place this evening as to the people in front of him. And they feel it too. They boo and jeer.

The crowd again displays an extraordinary capacity to converse with the speakers in rhythmic chant. “Make way for the ambulance,” they cry, or “Turn up the volume.” When a long list of political prisoners is read out they chant, “Stepán to prison.” “Perhaps we should give him a spade,” says Václav Malý from the platform. “He’d steal it!” comes the almost instantaneous response, half a million speaking as one. And then “Here it comes!” Sure enough, there is a spade held aloft at the front of the crowd. “Stepán. Stepán,” they cry as in
a funeral chant, and once again they ring their keys, as for the last rites. (Next morning we have the news that Stepán, along with other discredited members of the leadership, has resigned at the emergency meeting of the Central Committee.)