I’ve been reading a book while here entitled Rowboat to Prague, by American journalist Alan Levy, who moved to Prague from New York City at the end of 1967, and was thus a first-hand witness to the events of 1968 — the “Prague Spring” and the resulting Soviet invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia.
In connection with his account of the resignation (under pressure) of the communist president Antonin Novotný in March 1968, he writes the following short “interlude.”
On the “Fourth of July” the anniversary of American independence, I was struck by the historical ironies, and thought it was worth passing on. Americans (especially young Americans) have very little sense of history — their own, let alone world history — so they are willing to follow a charismatic young president who promises “change” with no sense at all of what “change” might actually mean. They are ignorant of the possibilities. (They think there has always been U-2 and MTV.) They have never heard of the European socialist “experiments” of the first half of the 20th century (or their body-counts). They have no idea what we may be in for.
Levy writes:
It was a kind of Jersey City-model Stalinism that the Czechoslovak people lived under. Novotnýism had no ideals, no real program, just a blind instinct to consolidate power and cling to it at any cost. By the time these self-serving reflexes had aged into torpor, the structure of the government ministries (according to Rudé Právo [the official communist newspaper] itself) had been re-organized more than 100 times—for the betterment not of the masses, but of the bosses.
Novotnýism was the ideological heir of its parent regime, Gottwaldism. But, where the nation's first Communist Prime Minister (later President) Klement Gottwald (1896-1953) was an ambitious, belligerent drunkard who had dedicated much of his life to making Czechoslovakia go Communist for reasons that must have started with belief, Antonin Novotný (born 1904) was a careerist dedicated to keeping Czechoslovakia Communist for the sake of his own personal security.
An analysis of the combined result was delivered at Charles University two days before President Novotný abdicated:
"The character of the totalitarian dictatorship under which we have lived for the last twenty years has certain national peculiarities. One big advantage for the regime was that it was headed by full-blooded Czechs imbued with the Austrian tradition of joviality plus our own disorderly capability as caretakers. Totalitarian dictatorship in the Czechoslovak manner often seemed more chaotic, paradoxical, and comical than tyrannical.
"Apart from a few murders, the government knew as little about what to do with absolute power as an infant does with numbers. A spontaneously spouting geyser of improvised stupidity bubbled forth tirelessly for twenty years in the official press, the tolerated culture, and the speeches of statesmen. But it proved unable, even by extreme effort, to undermine the basis of the socialist set-up here. The natural intelligence of the good-natured people in Slovakia, Moravia, and the Czech Lands always corrected the worst excesses to a bearable degree.
"Another characteristic feature of this totalitarian dictatorship was that, for twenty years, internal political crises were avoided so long as there was something that could be reduced in price. And it must be said that this suited our people fine; it was enough for them.
"The regime survived at the expense of economic effectiveness. It made it possible for one to work less and worse for more money. It insured the legal and economic equality of a laborer with a university professor. Thanks to this, no noticeable opposition appeared in Czechoslovakia, even during the last decade, when our economic difficulties were growing. The State was led to bankruptcy, helped by the taciturn discipline of the controlled but thrifty citizens…"
The speaker of these unflattering truths was a balding, bespectacled historian and philosophy lecturer named Ivan Sviták, forty-two. He was a teacher whose ideas have touched the life of every student of his I've ever met….
For his pains, Sviták had been expelled in the 1960's first from the party and then from the Academy of Sciences as a "deviationist." He had only recently been reinstated and now he could state from academic and even official podiums what he had been saying all along.
"I am what you might call a lonely sniper," he remarked after his lecture on Novotnýism. "I don't think I will go to prison for this. They will not persecute me, at least not now."
With Novotný's downfall, Sviták served notice that he would not be silenced by a mere turn for the better. From his perch in academia, the lonely sniper would continue to strafe the new men with his opinions, starting with a prediction that "the harmony between critical intellectuals and high representatives of the party and State will vanish. This will happen when the new set of leaders will consider the democratization process completed, which will be at the stage achieved when they come to power."
And this, said Sviták, would never do: "We want democracy, not democratization. At present, we are not very clear on what democratization is. On the other hand, we know quite precisely what democracy is. And apart from the temporary, unofficial and, at any time, revocable abolition of censorship, our country lacks all the attributes of this form of government."
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