Year after year I’d see them in public places: on street corners in Chicago or in Washington parks or standing in the rain outside the United Nations in New York. It was always Captive Nations Week or some great date in a fading national history, and the exiles would chant their anguish and their protests in languages I could never know. The men were gaunt and moustached. The women were plump, with shiny pink skin. The languages in their leaflets had too many consonants, and in my life I was drawn more passionately to lands that were lush with vowels. Usually I sighed and walked on by.
After Hungary in ’56, there was a brief time when their existence was recorded in the public prints. This man had fought a Soviet tank with a Molotov cocktail and that man’s sister had died hurling a paving stone at a machine gunner; they made words and phrases like sacrifice and freedom and in vain sound like something more than Fourth of July oratory. But by the time we had plunged into our own anguished ’60s, most of us had ceased to care. We could do something about Vietnam. It was our war, waged by our politicians, fought by our armies. We could do nothing about Eastern Europe except exchange missiles with the Russians.
But the exiles kept coming on the appointed days to the United Nations. The numbers dwindled. The men began to look sleeker and were certainly grayer, and the women seldom came at all. Some of my friends in the reporting trade dismissed them with innuendo — their leaders were on the CIA payroll, some of them had collaborated with the Nazis, they were mere props for the addled legions of the American Right. I remember talking to some of them one drizzly morning (for the weather of Eastern Europe often seemed to have immigrated with them). I needed a column for the newspaper I then served, and tried to get them to tell me their solutions to the problems back in the old country. “Drive out the Russians!” they said. “Use the atom bomb!” Faces flushed, mouths contorted, they split the damp air with their slogans. One balding man literally screamed at me: “Better dead than Red!” I never wrote the column.
In ’68 we read about the changes in Czechoslovakia under Alexander Dubcek, the lifting of the heavy hand of Stalinism, the exuberant attempt to make “socialism with a human face.” In a way, this crack in the Stalinist ice pack seemed to further isolate the exiles outside the United Nations, particularly the Czechs and the Slovaks; they began to look like cranks. Then, on August 20 of that terrible year, one week before the American tribes gathered in Chicago for the Democratic convention, the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia. The Prague Spring was crushed. In Chicago, through the billy clubs and the tear gas, some young American antiwar demonstrators held signs accusing Mayor Daley of running “Czechago.” That year, nobody cared much for exact analogy.
But after that brief flurry, Eastern Europe faded from the American consciousness. The Reagan Right, of course, used its existence to pander for ethnic votes; the fading American Left sometimes spoke wistfully about the Prague Spring. But neither seemed really to care very much. There were other matters to divert us: Watergate, abortion, Iran, drugs, various gurus, the religion of the Leveraged Buyout. Reagan railed at the Evil Empire, invented the contras (degrading the 1956 Hungarian resistance by calling these hired thugs “freedom fighters”), and directed the heroic invasion of Grenada. But there was never any talk about “rolling back” the Red hordes in Prague or Warsaw, Sofia or Bucharest, East Berlin or Budapest; and places such as Lithuania, Estonia, Armenia, and Latvia had long ago vanished from the map. The attitude was brutally simple: Eastern Europe was “theirs”; Central American was “ours.” Realpolitik uber Alles. And every year or so, I’d pass the old exiled stalwarts holding weathered signs and chanting in the streets, occasionally producing one of their American children to do a dance in a folk costume from the old country. If it was a slow news day, the papers maybe even ran a picture.
But while visiting Prague and East Berlin last December, I kept thinking about those angry and grieving exiles and felt increasingly ashamed of myself. I should have listened harder and learned more. In Prague, there were people like them everywhere, with the same gaunt faces and ill-fitting clothes, the same grievances against injustice, except that now the world was listening. Their uncontested leader was the fifty-three-year-old playwright Vaclav Havel, whose moral authority was based on the years he’d spent in the country’s prisons. But when I first saw him, at a basement press conference in the Laterna Magika theater, I realized that he easily could have been one of those men from the sidewalk opposite the United Nations.
He did not speak in slogans. Even when addressing vast crowds, Havel’s language is concrete, precise, nuanced; he does not rant; even in confrontations with his former jailers, he sounds most reasonable. But his mission was the same as that of his countrymen: to get the dead clammy hands of Stalinism off Czechoslovakia and allow its people to breathe freely. Within a month after Prague police had used bats, clubs, and gun butts on hundreds of student demonstrators, Havel and other members of the opposition umbrella group called Civic Forum managed to force the old hard-line leaders to accept the first noncommunist government in the nation since before the communist coup in 1948. Not a shot was fired, not a window broken. It was an amazing process to watch; I woke each morning charged with an exhilaration I had almost never felt in the minefields of politics.
This revolution was a triumph of human intelligence. Czechoslovakia, like all countries ruled by totalitarians, was an oligarchy of the stupid. After 1968 the country’s best writers, including such world-class talents as Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky, and Ludvik Vaculik, were silenced, jailed, or driven into exile. Rock ‘n’ roll musicians were thrown into dungeons. Only the corniest jazz (white Dixieland, for example, or moldy swing music) was officially tolerated. The brilliant Czech new wave of ’60s filmmakers was halted, the best people exiled or cast out of the industry, while the Barrandov film studios ground out witless comedies and historical epics that nobody went to see. Thousands of scientists, engineers, schoolteachers, and scholars were removed from their jobs because they were ideologically suspect, and were then forced to do the most menial labor. In all cases, they were replaced by mediocrities, ass-kissing careerists, and Stalinist hacks. It was the most sustained act of national stupidity since Spain expelled both the Jews and the Arabs within ten years of each other at the end of the fifteenth century, thus ridding itself of its most brilliant artists, architects, mathematicians, and merchants.
For an American, some of this was uncomfortably familiar. We, too, once had a blacklist that prevented writers, directors, and actors from working in movies or television — on ideological grounds. During the McCarthy era, we, too, lost scientists, schoolteachers, and scholars, on ideological grounds. Our religious Right continues trying to impose its party line on everything from abortion to the content of television shows. We have a free press, but the vast majority of our newspapers wouldn’t challenge the intelligence of a cocker spaniel. Certainly, in our mass media, we seldom read, see, or hear from American communists or socialists, who are dismissed as a disloyal opposition. In Prague, people showed me bound copies of samizdat, precious hand-typed books passed from person to person because they were banned from the bookstores. In East Berlin I saw a line of almost three hundred people waiting in a freezing rain to buy the first West German books to be sold in the East. But a glance at any American best-seller list, or the shelves of any bookstore in a shopping mall, will show you what most Americans have chosen to do with their freedoms.
Still, we have choice, and until last year, millions of Eastern Europeans had no choice at all. Those who protested, like Havel, were visited by the secret police and taken away in handcuffs. He was a writer, and writers are rememberers or they are nothing. And that made him dangerous. In Czechoslovakia people were told to forget the Prague Spring, to forget the country’s democratic past between the world wars, to forget the 1948 coup. The social contract was simple: Let the party make the big decisions and the individuals could make most of the small decisions. If they agreed to give up memory and a critical intelligence, citizens could indulge in small bourgeois pleasures: a cottage in the country, a car, skiing, clothes that made Czech women the most chic in Eastern Europe. In Moscow, citizens wait in line for potatoes; on Parizska Street in Prague, I saw a line outside Christian Dior.
But the basic neo-Stalinist demand was for national amnesia, and that, too, was familiar. It was at the heart of the Reagan era, when Americans were urged by the Great Communicator to forget Vietnam and forget Watergate, and use borrowed money to indulge in mindless pleasures.
This is not to say that the United States is the moral equivalent of a totalitarian state. That’s ludicrous. But all human beings, including Americans, are confronted every day by the temptation of the totalitarian solution. Wandering the streets of Prague and East Berlin, I never saw a homeless person, never ran into a junkie, never felt a personal sense of menace. The total state, after all, places order above all human values, including justice. But back home in New York and Los Angeles and other American cities, I’ve talked to many people over the years who demand those Good Old Draconian Measures to deal with our disorders. They would gladly surrender the Bill of Rights if that meant clearing the streets of drug addicts and gunmen. I even heard this argument from some of the Eastern European exiles on the rainy sidewalks outside the United Nations.
That taste for the draconian certainly hasn’t perished from the earth, as we saw in December in Romania and Panama. In the hardest of the old Stalinist states, the end came in blood and destruction, with the ruling family joining that of the czar on the casualty lists of the century’s revolutions. In Panama, an American soldier was killed, another soldier’s wife was insulted, and the great might of the United States was unleashed on the regime of Manuel Noriega. According to polls, most Americans loved this fierce spectacle. And while such peaceful and historic events as the collapse of the Berlin Wall drew poor television ratings, many cheered the brutality of the Romanian revolution. Apparently, nothing makes American blood quicken faster than the spirit of revenge. If it’s history, most of us yawn; if it resembles a movie, we snap to attention.
That was what was so special about the events in Prague. Over and over, Havel and the others sent out the message: We are not going to do to them what they’ve done to us. “That would be the worst corruption of this revolution’s ideals,” said a filmmaker named Antonin Masa, who had spent twenty years directing his movies only in his imagination. “We want a country that is generous and decent. And where every man can speak his piece. That’s all. Revenge is a debasing emotion.” Another quoted Albert Camus, saying how it should be possible to love one’s country and justice too.
There are lessons here for all of us. The American Right, after an initial period of bafflement, is claiming a triumph of capitalism over communism. “But that’s not what is going on here,” said Rita Klimova, who lived in New York as a child from 1939 to 1946, returned to Prague, became an economics professor, was blacklisted after the fall of Dubcek, and earned a marginal living as a free-lance translator. “If people here had to choose a model, it would probably be Sweden. A democratic socialist society, with freedom for the individual. This is a struggle for choice.” Others noted that in the places where the United States did use physical force in the crusade against communism (Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam), Stalinism was still in power, its authority reinforced by the need (real or imaginary) to resist an outside threat. In Eastern Europe, the more pacific techniques of trade, cultural exchanges, and communications helped bring about the great change. Stalinism eventually fell of its own dumb weight. One Czech friend said to me: “There were two specific factors. One was Gorbachev, who made it clear that he wouldn’t send the tanks. The other was the decision to stop jamming Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America. That allowed us to get hard news. We didn’t care about the propaganda or the oratory. Just the news. That was very important.”
He and the others were too modest to mention the one final factor: courage. Men like Havel, who began their lonely fight more than a decade ago, believed enough in their cause to place their bodies before the might of the state. They had no guns. They had no money. And in the end they won. They won for themselves and their families and their friends, for their country, for memory and history. But they also won for those lonely men and women who stood for so many years in the hard rain of strange cities. I wish I could find some of them and say that I am sorry for not listening to them in their separation and solitude. But they’re gone now. And that might be the happiest ending of all.