A. J. Liehm: The Past in the Present

When did the Spring of '68 really break out? Some people say that it was at the writers' congress in June of '67. There's some truth to that, and then again there isn't.

When preparations for the congress started a few months prior, it looked asthough it could become a kind of confirmation of the process that had beengoing on on the cultural front for a number of years. I don't know anyone who would have thought then that it was the time for a fierce confrontation, quiteon the contrary. There was a belief in the possibility of consensus and a fluid continuation of the whole democratisation process, of which the writers wantedto be the guardians, but not the authors or the political implementers. More than anything else it was a matter of using the prestige that Czech and Slovak culture had garnered in the nation and abroad, to use it as a support, and to clearlypoint out that there was no way back, only forward. And that every attempt to turn back the progress that characterised the sixties would mean a catastrophe,not only for Czech and Slovak culture, but for both nations as well.

In 1967 however the situation changed and relations between culture and thepolitical powers escalated sharply. The congress however could not be calledoff, although there were attempts. And so in June we went to the National Houseof Vinohrady without any concrete idea about what would happen. Just before thecongress the "Six-Day War" broke out in the Middle East. We put atext in Literární noviny (LiteraryNewspaper), signed by a number of Czech writers – some Jews, some not –protesting against the Soviet and Czechoslovak policy on Israel. We knew thatthe censor wouldn't let it through, but we also knew that they wouldimmediately send it to the Secretariat of the Communist Party CentralCommittee, where it would be read. When the "party group" (congressdelegates and Communist Party members) met on the eve of the congress, thehigh-ranking nomenklatura showed up as well and it came to blows. Neither sideminced words – the issue was the confiscated text and its politicalconsequences. There was not a word about the congress, culture, or literature.And so it became clear that the congress would possibly be the last opportunityto speak out publicly about what was on our minds. Kundera's opening speech,already written and discussed, was the last attempt not to back down onanything, but also not to push things toward an open conflict, in which at thatmoment there would be no hope for victory. Hendrych's reply (a complete escalation of the situation took place in the preceding months under strong Soviet pressure, the source of which was the domestic situation in the SovietUnion) rejected this possibility, and then when Pavel Kohout read Solzhenitsyn'sletter to the Soviet writers and Hendrych slammed the door shut with the words,"now you've lost everything",all suddenly became clear. The most obstinate speeches of the following daywere written or finished that night, the possibility of peaceful developmentwent up in smoke, now it was just about firing off the last round with ourbacks against the wall.

That's my response to those who claimed then and to those who still thinktoday that it was a move that was thought-through, prepared and planned out.The truth is precisely the opposite. The detonator for the crisis that tookplace in November 1967 was the repression that followed the congress. Therewere very few of us who said after the congress that "we are not yet defeated". Just as there had been evenfewer of us two years prior that publicly responded to Novotný's attacks on theSlovaks. There didn't start to be a great number of us, in the end almostuntold amounts, until March of 1968. Historians will one day have to start distinguishingbetween the gangs of 60ers and the mass of 68ers. Because that's what historyis about, every history, in contrast to politics.

There is however another reason that a reminder of the writers' congressbelongs here. On its 25th anniversary (the first big one after the revolution)all was quiet in our print media, and the media in general. Five years latersome public acknowledgement was devoted to it, as well as to some of itsprotagonists. Which was certainly a step forward that bears witness to the factthat history is once again not standing still here, just as it didn't standstill for the last fifty years. Of course it is a relative kind of progress, asalways. Just as in the past, this time too those remembered and cited had tofirst earn new attention, to undergo screening procedures. What is even moreinteresting however is how we never noticed over those 30 years the role thatCzech and Slovak culture played here, how everything else was born out of it,how everyone barricaded themselves against it, all those who were alwaysfrightened of it and desperately tried to push it to the fringes of nationallife, to the role of folk dancers and people who won the beloved Slavík awards.From which it is once again evident today that history does not actually moveso quickly, and its somersaults are not as radical as they seem.

The Czechoslovak Spring didn't start until autumn of 1967. After thewriters' congress heads rolled. Literárkywas put under forced military administration, people stopped buying the paper,shopkeepers practically spit on those who asked for it, the circulation of"Lžiliterárky"(Lie-terary Newspaper),as it started to be called, fell like a rock. Sometime in September or OctoberI met with Josef Smrkovský, who I hadn't known before, at Lumír Čivrný's place.Not only did I meet a good, upright person, but I also finally understood howthe Party leadership had irreparably degraded a large portion of the CentralCommittee membership when it forced them to vote for the reprisals against thewriters, their newspaper and organisation. And that these degraded CentralCommittee members would revolt next time. It also occurred to me that thanks tothe Slovaks they will even make up the majority before Christmas.

The meeting with Smrkovský also gave rise to the question that was thenspread by Dubček and others all the way to Gorbachov: how, in spite of Stalin,Brezhnev, Gottwald, Novotný, the KGB, StB and whoever else, to get good, honestpeople, with a large dose of natural intelligence and conscience, to thehighest committees of the Communist Party, where they could actually play therole that they played. This is also a question for historians once they startthinking about the past fifty or eighty years as historians and not asideologists.

It took a while after Christmas for Czechoslovak society, from the topdown, from right to left, to recover from the shock that was unexpected, let'sadmit it, even for those who, one way or the other, consciously or not,prepared it. In my opinion the genie wasn't let out of the bottle until VáclavSlavík (from whom we also didn't really expect it) publicly asked in thecommunist paper Rudé právo, with theauthority of a Party Central Committee member, how we actually imagined it then,and whether we don't happen to think that the straw-man had just been changedagain and everything would carry on as it had before. The genie was out of thebottle and there was no putting him back. Shortly after that, those who hadbeen expelled half a year before returned to Literárky (renamed Literárnílisty so that it would be easier) and almost overnight hordes of radicalreformers and revolutionaries appeared on the scene, all desperately trying tocatch up with what they had missed so far. Many of them in their sudden fervourdid more harm than good, but that's how it generally goes in such situations.

What is sure is that the Czechoslovak Spring did not have a programme. Justas the Hungarian uprising didn't have one in '56, nor the Polish one beforethat, to say nothing of Khrushchev. As with the others, the Czechoslovak Springwas not aiming for a return to pre-war conditions, and it didn't want manyother things either, based on who you asked . It just rolled around like a tidalwave, taking everything that stood in its way, and in the end, after just undereight months, it accomplished just one thing: in January the still quite timidspring from which it flowed had the whole state and party apparatus, thepolice, and the army against it. But by August there was no longer any forcethat could stand up to this tidal wave. As opposed to say Poland, where duringthe years of Solidarity Jaruzelski could still count on the army, the police,the apparatus.

The programme of Spring '68 was, I think – and I still see it the sameyears later – a run to the fore. The hope that the Soviet leadership wouldunderstand the necessity of deep reforms just as something like a laboratoryexperiment in a small satellite country disappeared very quickly, as did thehope for support from the country's neighbours, near and far, including Yugoslavia.The Poles, in whom Spring '68 had ignited a new flame of revolt (namely amongstudents), which the regime quickly extinguished and tacked on a new wave ofanti-Semitism, told us sceptically: "There'sa problem with you Czechs. In your history, in your historical experience,there's a hole, a gap. You're missing at least one Russian occupation. Oncethat gap is filled, you'll be normal." As for the Hungarians, thedirector Ján Kadár once told me in New York: "At the start of autumn 1956 I was in Budapest and I told myHungarian friends: be careful, this won't turn out well. They laughed at me:you've already caught it. You're careful, timid like the Czechs. What couldhappen? Everyone can see that we just want to get rid of the legacy ofStalinism. – In June 1968 the same friends came to the festival in KarlovyVary: be careful, they said, this won't turn out well. Learn from ourexperiences. – But please, I said, what could happen? We've learned from yourexperiences, we're doing everything in order not to repeat your mistakes,everyone can see that we just want to belatedly get rid of the legacy ofStalinism..."

The philosophy of this run to the fore was simple: if we can change theCzechoslovak Communist Party into a democratic socialist party and the partiesof the National Front into real political partners with real members quicklyenough, the USSR and Warsaw Pact countries will be faced with a done deal. Theywon't be able to intervene with force against the party line approved by theParty congress in September, and in time they'll get used to it, and maybe evenrealise that it is the only possible way. Naive? Perhaps, but until today Ithink that there was no other hope. April's "Plan of Action" came toolate – at the time of its announcement it had long been overtaken by progress.Dubček and his allies never had a real majority in the Communist Partyleadership and had to manoeuvre – the USSR was stepping up its pressure and arace against time seemed like the only option. As soon as the USSR figured itout and decided to intervene, the Spring's fate was sealed. I don't believe,even today, that open opposition would have made sense. It's another questionwhether "normalisation" had to take place the way it did, in itsfirst as well as its later phases. And above all, whether Czech and Slovaknormalisation figureheads didn't do more from their own diligence and fervourthan what was expected of them. Some say that's also a Czech characteristic.Perhaps. But from other occupational regimes we know that it's not only true ofCzechs and Slovaks. Historians will have to deal with that one day too, even ifmy reading of the Spring and the start of normalisation will likely never bereconciled with Pithart's.

But I've really got ahead of myself. What I actually wanted to say was thatin that tidal wave that was rolling through the country, and in which thehordes of latecomers were desperately trying to jump on the boat already adrifton the current, Literárky suddenlyseemed like a moderate voice, if not downright cautious. In the months whennewspapers from Rudé právo to Lidová demokracie to Student were all vying for the mostsensational headlines and exposés – which was all somehow for free, as freedomof the press and actually of all media was unmitigated, everyone could print orproclaim whatever occurred to them, nobody restricted anyone to keep them fromfalling under suspicion of conservatism or something even worse –, in thosemonths Literárky, with theircirculation of 300 000, seemed like more of a sober voice that was trying to leadthe boat through the rocks to calmer waters. (During all that there was aregular political commentary urging for a quicker and more planned-out approachthat Václav Klaus, Milan Hübl, Jaroslav Šedivý and I wrote under the collectivepseudonym Dalimil, with which I then signed my regular commentaries in theRoman Listy for twenty years).

Meanwhile the doors of the editorial department were constantly filled withforeign visitors of various calibres, from a young Churchill to the chair ofthe US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, MPs from the German Bundestag,and so on. They all wanted to know the same thing: What can we do for you? Andwe, with the spectre of Hungary before our eyes, responded: For heaven's sake,nothing!

And yet. It was already July when a young historian came into the newsroomwith a piece for the anniversary of the execution of Imre Nagy. An innocent piecesimply noting that Nagy didn't do anything different than Dubček, that hewasn't a counter-revolutionary and that it's important to remember him thisway. I showed a proof of the piece to the French historian and journalistFrançois Fejtö. I don't know, I don't know, he told me, this could cause complications.I laughed, just like Ján Kadár laughed at his Hungarian friends in KarlovyVary: What complications? After all, it's true, and that was a long time ago,everybody knows that today... A few days later I found out that a steaming JánosKádár, the big boss of the Hungarian communists, had welcomed Alexander Dubček,who had flown in to negotiate support for the Czechoslovak reforms, at theairport with a copy of the issue of Literárkyin his hand. That was certainly the last thing we wanted. Fejtö was right, heunderstood his Hungarians better. But every piece of wisdom and caution has itslimits. At his request I had met with the Prague correspondent of Izvestia at Semyon Bialer's place inJuly. "The situation in Moscow is bad," he said. "Couldn't youpublish something I could send them that would put them at ease?" Iunderstood that he wanted to help – he took his sympathies for us to Moscowlater – it really might be useful, but nothing occurred to us, it just wasn'tpossible. And so we're back to the boat adrift on the current. The will to sensiblereforms must exist on both sides, only then is dialogue possible.

I don't want to repeat the known and unknown history of those eight months.But it's impossible to forget that '68 was exceptional in all senses. In MarchI happened to find myself in Japan, where I was on television commenting on theresignation of Antonín Novotný, which I had found out about from the Japanese.In May the wind of film blew me to Valladolid in Spain. Spring was hot inFranco's Spain as well and I was beset by students, just as I was later byordinary Spaniards in a pub in the Pyrenees. The Czechoslovak spring was a kindof hope for them too. But their May Day, which they had prepared forextensively and which I experienced in Madrid, ended in a fiasco as well. Asidefrom the imposing police mobilisations, nothing. I often thought about thosepeople in the following years and I met some of them again later in Spain. Itwas all so similar in many respects, yet also so different. And so it is today.

I returned to Prague via Paris, where the first barricades were alreadyappearing in the streets. More cops than in Madrid, except that here it didn'thelp very much. Here too there was a tidal wave that, just as in Prague, knewwhere it came from, but not where it was going. I had lunch at some friends'place with Herbert Marcus, considered the godfather of that revolution."I'm leaving tomorrow," I announced. "Everyone's gone crazyhere." A few years later we spoke for a long time in La Jolla inCalifornia about how a philosophy that becomes an ideology has trouble withpolitics that play out in anything other than virtual reality. And how it latercauses problems for historians. Here I would quote what Milan Kundera wrote forthe foreword of the French version of Škvorecký's The Miracle Game in 1978:

"...May '68 in Paris was a revolt ofyoung people. The initiative of the Czechoslovak Spring was in the hands ofadults; it was an explosion of post-revolution scepticism. That's one of thereasons why the Paris student looked at Prague distrustfully (or ratherapathetically), while the Prague student only chuckled at Paris's illusions,which he considered – whether rightly or wrongly – discredited, laughable, ordangerous. (We should consider one paradox: the only realisation – albeit veryshort-lived – of socialism in freedom was not the work of revolutionaryexcitement, but rather of sceptical disenchantment.)
The Paris May was radical. The explosion of the Czechoslovak Spring had beenprepared over long years of 'revolt of the moderates'. Just like Ivana Hroznáin The Miracle Game, who'replaced bad quotes from Marx with better ones', they tried to weaken theothers, to ease and relieve the burden of the existing political system. Theword 'thaw', which is sometimes used as a characteristic of the whole process,is more than just characteristic: it was about melting the ice, to soften thehardness. And when I say moderates, I don't mean a certain politicalconception, but the human reaction, which has deep roots: every radicalism assuch triggers allergies, because in the subconscious of most Czechs it wasconnected with the worst memories. The Paris May attacked what is calledEuropean culture and its traditional values. The Czechoslovak Spring was apassionate defence of the European cultural tradition in the widest and mosttolerant meaning (a defence of Christianity as well as modern art, which theregime rejected). We were all striving for the right to that tradition, whichwas threatened by the anti-Western messianism of Russian totalitarianism. TheParis May '68 was a revolt of the left. The traditional contours of left andright on the other hand weren't apparent at all during the CzechoslovakSpring..."

Two months after Paris – Chicago. In August the Soviet occupation ofCzechoslovakia, in the autumn the French voted in the most right-wingparliament in their post-war history, but in a year de Gaulle lost a referendumand went into retirement. And so forth. At the start of the seventies MarcelOphüls and I thought up a film in New York about 1968 between Prague, Paris,and Chicago. But nobody gave us the money for it.