Ludvík Vaculík: Forty Years After

Over and against that, interestingly enough, there are voices increasingly heard in this country that run down the importance of those events, alleging that it was merely a struggle between two different party fractions. That Communism only acquired a mask behind which another group of people of the same basic thinking wanted to get themselves into power. Thus speaks a younger generation, which accepts only the evident facts, events and documents, and did not live through the events, is not emotionally or rationally involved: does not know the strength possessed by hope.

The “Prague Spring” had significance for the civic society of its day in general. That which began as a movement within the Communist Party developed quickly into a civic movement: a wise movement, because it did not go against the Communists, but supported one group against others. In this way it retained its legality. It happened at a time when there was still, twenty years after, a generation that remembered the pre-war democracy of Czechoslovakia as well as the ideals and ideas around after the War when we resolved and accepted the programme of some kind of “people’s democracy”. It is important to know that Socialism was not brought to Czechoslovakia by the Red Army, as happened in several of the neighbouring lands – in Hungary, Poland and Romania... There were influential political parties at work here with a Socialist programme, President T. G. Masaryk indeed in his Social Question was assigning tasks for democracy. Our cooperative movement was fully evolved, not waiting for the coming of the kolkhoz!

The first three years after the War allowed us to believe that we would be making our own path. Behind the scenes of formal democracy however a forcible takeover of power was already being foreshadowed by the way in which the Communists placed their own people in all kinds of positions. And then they confronted the other political parties, the President, and the unions with their diktat. – That reminds me of an event, allegedly quite true, but even if it is not true, nevertheless symptomatic: for it characterizes the Communists perfectly. After the War the Soviets allegedly detached Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia from our Republic by collecting the signatures of people in need of coal and potatoes and subsequently issuing those signatures as votes petitioning in favour of joining the Soviet Union: that is an almost poetic truth! – And thus today’s Communists say that they came to power in February 1948 entirely legally.

The thaw of the nineteen-sixties culminated in 1968 in the nick of time: it was as if someone held down for a long time under water were given a moment of respite, to raise his head up and take a breath. Immediately the Sokol movement, the Scouts, the Churches all revived, along with a whole variety of professional and interest groups. The Club of Committed Non-Party Members was permitted, whereas any new political party was forbidden. I reckon that this taking of breath, moral and political, only occurred again twenty years later – with Charta 77.

There are other voices asking today whether this was wise at the time, seeing as there was no prospect of success. How was there not? Were you not aware, say these voices, that the Soviet Union simply would not allow this to be? The question is correct, the answer to it is however even more correct: this could not be and had not to be heeded! A nation just like any human individual has to be governed by instinct, by its feeling of strength, by will to action, it has to listen to its drive, invest its courage in an idea. It has to act, as long as it is alive. As in the life of an individual, so in the life of a nation there come certain opportunities, fitting moments, which have to be seized, because they may not soon be repeated.

The Poles had their uprising against Communism, of which they were proud, but what was the outcome? The Hungarians had their armed uprising, and what was the outcome? Yes, these are the signs of national character, they flash past, but they are not often reproducible. I think that our non-violent uprising was in keeping with our history, it contained something that continues in our living fibre. The forces that responded are hidden but continue, they can be awakened once more. And it seems to me that there is also an opportunity here, a theme, a question: Communism fell, and the causes which produced it are back. What are we to do about it?

Translated from Czech by Jim Naughton