Havel, along with millions of other Czechs, was pushed sideways and downwards by the pledge to retain socialism, if necessary by armed force. Perhaps that is why the surviving fragments of his life during the first twelve months or so following the occupation suggest hesitation, even incoherence. Whereas before and immediately after the invasion he had been a driving intellectual force by calling for an opposition party and citizens’ involvement in political opposition, he now began to react with some uncertainty about what to do. The key political question was whether to submit to ‘realism’, or whether the process of normalization required and even facilitated greater political radicalism. ‘Realism’ meant accepting whatever measures the invading power and their quislings decided upon, hoping perhaps that the restoration of order might take the foreign heat off the country, and thus enable a further phase of liberalization to take place, as appeared to be happening in neighbouring Hungary under the leadership of Kádár. The option of ‘radicalism’, by contrast, supposed that no good could come from the invasion. The pacifiers had to be resisted non-violently — through strikes, petitions, protest letters, street demonstrations — for that was the only way that the liberalizing achievements of the Prague Spring could be rescued, and perhaps developed further.
There were fleeting moments — around the time (17 April 1969) that Gustáv Husák was appointed as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party — when Havel may have thought that the ‘realist’ option of getting rid of Dubček, the politician of retreat, was necessary for promoting much-needed political order. The secret-police claim to have recorded a conversation in which Havel observed that ‘the situation in the state needed a firm hand. Dubček wasn’t up to it, because he is a dreamer and a lyric poet.’ Havel apparently went on to favour Gustáv Husák, who was at the time (because he worried about a split in the Party) posing as a friend of the Prague Spring, and whom Havel considered to be the only person ‘who has a genuinely firm vision and can lead the people out of this crisis situation’. In an interview around the same time, he suggested that Husák’s appointment was ‘not a bad thing’ since it would clarify the lines of power and subordination. He made it clear that Husák was no friend. ‘He will rule dictatorially,’ he said.204
Then there were moments when Havel seemed to waver, and bend back towards the option of supporting Dubček, in the hope that he might speak out actively for resistance to the occupation — and for continuing liberalization. A few days before Dubček’s dumping, Havel addressed a huge meeting at the Arts Faculty of Charles University, attended by about 1,200 students. Turning to several members of the Central Committee who were also on the podium, Havel urged everybody to stand behind Dubček. ‘We must ask for progressive members to fight harder — to fight on small issues as well as big ones,’ he said. Two weeks before the first anniversary of the Soviet invasion, he wrote a private letter to Dubček appealing to him to walk out from ‘this dark and tangled wood into the light of what we might call “simple human reasoning”. To think the way every ordinary, decent person thinks.’205 Havel said that he feared that the ruling authorities were preparing to pressure Dubček into making a public confession in favour of occupation. It would be a set-piece speech, in which Dubček acknowledged the failings of his leadership, fully endorsed the Soviet view of things, and confessed that with hindsight he had come to realize that the Soviet leadership should be thanked for their ‘fraternal assistance’ in sending planes and tanks to preserve socialism against counter-revolution.
Havel warned that if Dubček gave such a speech, then it would deal a terrible blow to the population’s morale — by fostering the collective depression, indifference and cynicism that would be required for Soviet-style ‘normalization’ to succeed. It was therefore imperative, argued Havel, that Dubček take a moral stand. His stated support for democratization might well be misused by the ruling authorities to justify further repression. So be it, for the moral significance of taking a stand in support of the highest ideals of the Prague Spring would be threefold. The ‘prestige of Czechoslovakia’s struggle in the eyes of the world’ would be enhanced. The stand would keep alive the ideal of democratizing socialism, which Havel described as ‘one of the more positive aspects of the Communist movement’. Above all, Dubček had the chance of acting as an ethical mirror before the eyes of the population. His words of support for continuing democratization would have immeasurable ethical significance. ‘People would realize that it is always possible to preserve one’s ideals and one’s backbone,’ wrote Havel. They would be reminded ‘that one can stand up to lies; that there are values worth struggling for; that there are still trustworthy leaders; and that no political defeat justifies complete historical scepticism as long as the victims manage to bear their defeat with dignity.’
It cannot be ruled out that the letter to Dubček was Havel’s first calculated move towards assuming leadership of the moral opposition to the abnormalities of normalization. The thought may not have occurred to Havel, certainly. But equally certain is that the letter initiated that effect. The tone and content established a pattern that was to be repeated often during the years to come. The letter was notably tough on Dubček’s doings prior to the invasion. ‘I must say,’ Havel wrote, ‘I am convinced that you must share some of the blame for your present situation.’ He especially laid into Dubček for signing the Moscow agreement, whose effect was to provide the illusion of success when in fact they merely postponed the decision explicitly to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to intervention — thus failing to take advantage of the other fact that the Soviet leadership was initially wrong-footed and embarrassed by the local (if uncoordinated) resistance to invasion. What is also interesting about Havel’s letter was its anticipation of Dubček’s skulking off into the oblivion of silence. Havel noted that if Dubček behaved like Švejk and pretended that he could fool everybody by quietly slipping unscathed out of the crisis, then Dubček would draw fire from both sides. The Party would quickly get rid of him. The population would dismiss him as a schmuck. That of course is precisely what happened. Dubček gave up without a fight, and a month after Havel sent off the letter, he was removed from the Presidium and then, in January 1970, expelled from the Communist Party.206
Dubček’s capitulation confirmed Havel’s hunch about the importance of long-term moral resistance. The need for such resistance had surfaced some months earlier in a public tussle with Milan Kundera, whose strange essay called ‘The Czech Lot’ (Český úděl) had aroused much controversy after its publication in mid-December 1968.207 Kundera suggested that the long-term significance of the Czechoslovak autumn would outweigh that of the Czechoslovak spring. The two periods, despite appearances to the contrary, were on a positive continuum. The attempt to build humane socialism was now being reinforced by the dignified — and successful — resistance to the invasion. The reform policies and their underlying principles remained intact, and no police state had been installed. Everybody should cheer up. Those who had fled the country, or who remained abroad after the invasion, should return. ‘People who are today falling into depression and defeatism,’ he wrote, ‘who are commenting that there is an absence of guarantees, that everything could end badly, that we might again slide into a marasmus of censorship and trials, that this or that might happen, are simply weak people, who know how to live only in the illusions of certainty.’
Writing in February 1969, Havel strongly objected to Kundera’s view that things weren’t so bad. It rested upon the mythopoeic presumption that the small nation of Czechs was fated to be the creator of big values, not a nation of exploiters. Kundera’s position, he argued, exuded a form of typically Czech passive patriotism that served to rationalize away a disaster as a moral victory. It also suffered from a typically nostalgic form of Czech myopia, argued Havel. It was easy to celebrate imagined past glories — imagining ‘how good we were before August and how marvellous we were in August (when those bad guys came to get us)’ — all the while forgetting about present-day needs. Kundera could accuse him of ‘moral exhibitionism’. He could insinuate that Havel was suffering from the ‘illness of people anxious to prove their integrity’. Yet the harsh reality was that there was now an urgent need ‘to examine what we are like now, who among us is still good and who not at all, and what must be done so that we are true to our previously earned merits’.
The defiant tone of Havel’s remarks was foreshadowed a few weeks earlier in tough replies to the questions put by a journalist from Svět ν obrazech (The World in Pictures).208 He criticized the current government’s reassurances that the ‘springtime of politics’ would mature into summer, despite the arrival of thousands of Warsaw Pact troops. He noted that the government’s talk of democratizing the system was contradicted by the reintroduction of censorship. He said he feared that the ethos of the springtime was suffering liquidation, and that therefore stiff civic resistance was required. In a democracy, said Havel, the aim of citizens should be to ‘make life more complicated for its government’ by expressing their opinions openly about its aims, methods, and policies. ‘I am for democracy,’ he said in the old spirit of Dobříš, ‘and so I am also for a maximum amount of freedom of information, because such freedom is the first condition of democracy: in order that people truly keep tabs on their government and influence it, they must perforce know what the government is doing and why, and they must have the right to express themselves freely about what it does.’ Havel said he intended to use responsibly to the full the existing freedoms. He was currently working with Jan Němec on a screenplay on the theme of the swindling of ‘ordinary people’ by ‘the international establishment’. He also reported that he was sketching a new play called The Wedding (Svatba): It was to be a portrait of a convivial wedding reception. At one point during the celebration, one of the newlyweds’ relatives suddenly interrupts the chatting and laughter with a straightforward burst of honesty about the marriage. The relative is pounced upon and beaten up by her husband. Nobody comes to her rescue. Everybody feels sorry for her. But then she falls silent, and everybody resumes their feast of small talk, sprinkled with laughter.
The Wedding ended up in the dustbin. A script written with Jan Němec and called Heart Beat, about the international mafia trade in human hearts, went unfilmed. Under the weight of military occupation, Havel instead wrote the dark and depressing play The Conspirators (Spiklenci). It proved not to be among his favourites. He later complained, harshly, that it was the first of his plays to be ‘forbidden’, that it had been conceived in times suffering from ‘lack of air and senselessness’, and that the play consequently felt (to him) ‘lifeless, over-organized, bloodless, lacking humour as well as mystery’. It resembled ‘a cake that has been left in the oven too long and has completely dried out’.209 Posterity may draw that same conclusion. Yet The Conspirators reveals — in fifteen precisely structured scenes — Havel’s ongoing preoccupation with the subject of political power, and its corrupting effects. A revolution erupts. Student demonstrators in Concord Square call for freedom and justice, above all for the immediate release of a political prisoner, Alfred Stein, an individual loved for his honesty, his passion for philosophy, his desire to live quietly with his cat. Public joy floods through the streets of the capital. Cries of ‘Long live the revolution!’ signal the end of the bloody despotism of Olah. But behind the scenes, four conspirators set to work. Parroting slogans like ‘Freedom and Democracy!’, warning of the ‘evils of anarchy’ and the need for ‘unifying action’, they jostle for control over the revolution. Like swine before slop, their greed before power proves limitless. Two conspirators — the weakling Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, and the Chief Censor Aram, an idiot who can only think after denouncing others — are quickly shoved out of the way. That leaves two figures locked in a Hobbesian struggle for state power: Chief Prosecutor Dykl and Chief of Police Moher. As menacing crowds gather in Concord Square, this time to demand the return of the exiled despot Olah, the much-loved political prisoner, who has been tortured into making diametrically opposed confessions of guilt, commits suicide in his cell. The two conspirators try to outmanoeuvre each other, without success. Incapable of absolute victory, they end their struggle in stalemate. So Chief of Police Moher gets to the point. ‘My friends, let us finally stop beating about the bush! After all, everyone knows that one man is capable of establishing order here, to return the nation to the path of disciplined work ... and a future of genuine freedom and democracy.’ He continues, in twisted logic: ‘Seriously, my friends: if we do not want the leadership qualities of this man to be misused against the people, why could we not also use them for the benefit of the people?’ The soliloquy is interrupted by a phone call from Monte Carlo. The curtain falls — with the Chief of Police striding towards the telephone, to invite back the despot to take charge of the new revolution.
Legislative Measure Number 99/1969 turned The Conspirators into a ‘forbidden’ work. On the late afternoon of 22 August 1969, as street battles raged in several cities, especially in Brno, the Presidium of the Federal Assembly passed legislation by this name. It was presented by Gustáv Husák and signed by three of the principal proponents of the Prague Spring, including Alexander Dubček, who later claimed (typically) that he did so only because he had his arm twisted.210 Passed in the absence of the Federal Asembly, Legislative Measure 99/1969 in effect cleared the way for a permanent state of emergency. It provided for steep fines and imprisonment for those involved in public disturbances. Crimes of a political nature, including defamation either of the Republic and its representatives or of any state in the international socialist system and its representatives, were from here on punishable with increased sentences. Criminal proceedings related to political violations were to be expedited: pre-trial proceedings were scrapped, one-man tribunals were introduced, the right to defence was limited, and the maximum period of detention without trial was extended from forty-eight hours to three weeks. The legislation also took aim at trade unions and other (potential) civil associations by restricting or disbanding volunteer and other organizations. And it prepared the way, within such bodies as schools, universities, theatres, the academies of science, and the state ministries, for mass purges of ‘untrustworthy’ individuals suspected of having ‘disturbed the socialist social order’.
Born of street protests crushed by water cannon, truncheons and firearms, Legislative Measure 99/1969 contained the basic elements of the late-socialist regime of power all Czechs and Slovaks would have to live with for the next twenty years. Late-socialism admittedly had older roots — traceable to the Bolshevik Revolution, and deeper still to the practice of party discipline, the calculated use of promotions, demotions and expulsions, and the life-and-death struggles for organizational control within the oppositional socialist parties of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Late-socialism — as Havel himself was to point out — also preserved certain characteristics from the regime built from the coup de Prague. But the type of state that was born of the military invasion was nevertheless a new and distinctive system of power. Although the Communist Party continued to rely ultimately upon government by fear and brutal repression, it did so in considerably more anonymous, selective and calculated form. Violence was from here on ‘targeted’ against the unlucky few who ‘disrespected public officials’ or engaged in ‘acts against the Republic’. Big show trials became a thing of the past. The Party’s utter disregard for efficiency, characteristic of the delirium of the Stalin period, was also abandoned. Especially in matters of administration and production, much emphasis was given to innovation, productivity and the need for permanent reform. There were novelties as well in the field of communications. While the Party still attempted to contain everything that was said within an ideological tent of words and images covering the past, present and future worlds, almost nobody — probably not even senior Party apparatchiks — believed any longer in their pantomime of ritualized claims. Finally, the late-socialist regime abandoned the old totalitarian formula, L’état, c’est nous. The state no longer strived to control fully the bodies and souls of its subjects, to embrace everything in depth, to magnetize everyone so as to produce a single will, focused upon the Great Leader. Late-socialism was instead largely content with the regulation and control of apparent behaviour. So long as its subjects forgot the past, quietly conformed and merely grumbled among themselves, they were probably safe.
To this list of novelties of late-socialism should be added another: the painful disruption caused to many Czechs and Slovaks during the drastic transition to late-socialism during the years 1969-1971. Among the paradoxes of late-socialism was the fact that it was able to tolerate the quiet conformity of its subjects only after it had rummaged through their personal and working lives to an unprecedented degree. In the name of eliminating ‘right-wing’ and ‘anti-socialist’ forces, a mass purge of the population was carried out. The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was designated as the major force of cleansing and regeneration, but the key problem was that the Party was internally divided, with a clear majority of its members and officials opposed to winding back the political clock. So the Party had to be rebuilt — around what was called the ‘sound core’ of Communist officials and members who believed that the most dangerous enemy was to be found within its own ranks.
The scale of the autumn cleaning was inversely proportional to the defeats inflicted on Party unity in the spring years. During the two-year period following Legislative Measure 99/1969, at least three-quarters of a million citizens of the country, or about 2 million people if their households are included, lost their jobs or were demoted or seriously discriminated against — rarely with a punch in the mouth, usually with a frown or a warning, and quite often over a cup of coffee, or with a smile or a shrug of the shoulders, or a handshake from the perpetrators. The ‘civilized violence’ of the purges was felt in every nook and cranny of the regime.211 Far-reaching changes in the supreme legislative bodies were enforced. Three-quarters of the ministers and all of the premiers (including Dubček) of the federal and two national (i.e., Czech and Slovak) governments were dismissed. The same proportion of leading diplomats was replaced. The entire top team at the Czechoslovak General Prosecutor’s Office was sacked. There were sweeping changes as well in the field of production and commerce. The whole management of the major banks — the State Bank and the Commercial Bank — was removed. More than two-thirds of directors of national enterprises and foreign trade corporations were dismissed. More than a third of a million management officials were screened at least once, while workers’ councils, which had sprung up during the Prague Spring, were entirely liquidated. ‘Normalization’ in the trade unions meanwhile meant the total reorganization of their committees and councils and the dismissal of 125,000 officials. In the field of education the story was much the same. Hundreds of headmasters and their deputies and thousands of teachers at the secondary and primary levels were dismissed or removed to more remote localities and disqualified from teaching political subjects. The Union of University Students was liquidated. Some 2,000 university teachers were forced out of their posts.
The purges were especially harsh in the field of media and cultural policy. Most film and television directors, actors, cameramen, music-hall artists, script-writers, painters and sculptors were screened and re-screened and then forced on to a long-term treadmill of persecution. 475 of the 590 members of the Czech Writers’ Union were removed, while 130 writers, among them Havel, were put on the blacklist and had their earlier editions removed from public libraries. The entire management and senior editorial staff of television, radio and the news agency were booted out. Out of forty influential dailies and weeklies, thirty-seven editors were replaced. Nearly 40 per cent of all journalists were forced to resign, their jobs being filled especially by young people lured by increased salaries. The autumn purges also extended into the mass ‘front’ organizations which functioned like flesh on the bones of the Party. The changes were especially harsh within those front organizations considered strategically vital, such as the peace committees, the Association for Co-operation with the Army, and the organizations of youth, women, and co-operative farmers. But even the ‘non-political’ organizations suffered. Sackings, warnings and demotions were commonplace in such bodies as sporting clubs, the Red Cross, local fire brigades, and associations of huntsmen and beekeepers.
The fear and disruption produced by the purges was well worth it. Late-socialism became renowned world-wide as a system of state power structured by the grey and dreary principle of the leading role of the Party. Under late-socialist conditions, the Party was sovereign — it was the central nervous system of the political order, so that all important powers of making and administering decisions were concentrated in its hands. The Party organization itself was pyramid-shaped. All Party members were formally equal, but the upper echelons — the senior nomenklatura — were definitely more equal than the rest. Having carefully climbed the ladders of power within the Party, they enjoyed wide-ranging privileges, including a special kind of non-monetary wealth attached to their leadership roles.
The sovereign powers of the ruling group within the Party ran wide and deep. Leading members of the Party chose the Party membership, and also structured the outcomes of the Party Congress. Constitutional changes had to be approved by the Party leadership before going through the mere formality of acceptance by the Party-dominated parliamentary bodies. The Party executive suppressed market mechanisms by monopolizing key decisions concerning investment, production and consumption. In matters of law, court decisions were also supervised closely by the Party executive, especially in sensitive cases, when the courts functioned as executive bodies. The army and police and secret police — the beating heart of the Party, Czechs said — were also supervised closely by the Party leadership, even with direct assistance of their Party-controlled Soviet counterparts. In the field of communications media, the hand of the Party leadership was omnipresent as well. The Party sought to entomb the whole population within an ideological pyramid of clichéd and often bizarre language. ‘Socialism is a young, dynamic social order,’ said Gustáv Husák at one point, typically, ‘which is seeking and testing in its stride ways of making even better use of its advantages, of organizing and controlling social development most efficiently.’212
The monopoly powers of the Party leadership in matters of state policy-making and administration, production and consumption, communications, law and policing led unavoidably to arbitrary decision-making. It also produced a constant widening of the discretionary powers of the Party authorities. The line of the Party leadership was always correct — even when it contradicted itself, or changed course markedly. Party had a sibylline quality. It represented itself as wise and omniscient Its ‘scientific’ pronouncements were presumed to be incontrovertible, even if onlookers often found them mysterious, confused, unfathomable. The standpoint of the Party, especially! its leadership, seemed synonymous with life itself.
The overall function of the Party and its leading echelons was to determine the substantive aims and formal methods to be followed by all subsidiary organizations and personnel. The upper layers of the Party aimed to penetrate, strictly subordinate and centrally unify the vast labyrinth of state ministries, which perforce had distinct chains of bureaucratic command, interact with each other at various levels, and develop and defend (partially) divergent interests. In this task of centrally co-ordinating and synthesizing the various state bureaucracies, the sovereign Party leadership was reinforced by a complex network of subordinate Party structures — trade unions, youth and women’s and writers’ organizations, for instance — staffed by middle- and lower-level Party members. The task of these ancillary Party organizations was to enforce the primary objectives of the ruling pinnacle of the Party and, thereby, to monitor, regulate and discipline each and every organization within the political order.
Their function was also to keep the Party’s firm grip on each and every individual citizen. Since proportionately few citizens were Party members, the vast majority of the population were considered second-class citizens. The life chances of a young person who refused to join the Party, for instance, were extremely limited, for she or he in effect refused to accept the principle that only Party members can and should govern. That person also refused to acknowledge the converse of this principle: that the programmes and actions of the Party were always binding upon its individual subjects, who therefore had to be prevented systematically from developing alternative policies, organizations and forms of expression in matters of politics, production and culture. These policy areas were deemed the exclusive prerogative of the Party, its ministries and ancillary organizations. Their goal was ‘socialism’ — meaning unchallenged rule, the complete subordination and incorporation of all individuals into the crystalline structures of the Party-dominated state. The vast majority of the citizenry of late-socialist regimes had no say at all — not even legally — in the decisive question of who would rule them. This question was always answered in advance. Since the Party was always right, even retroactively, it was obliged to lead, limit and teach its citizens. The one-party system of late-socialism was in this precise sense totalitarian: democratic pluralism was outlawed.
Under the conditions of post-Stalinism, in other words, the citizens of late-socialism were expected to join what Havel’s friend Ivan Klíma called the ‘community of the defeated’, and to abide by its basic rules: that there would only ever be one governing party, to which everything, including truth itself, belonged; that the world was divided into enemies and friends of the Party and, accordingly, that compliance with Party policies was rewarded, dissent penalized; and, finally, that the Party no longer required the complete devotion of its subjects, only the quiet acceptance of its dictates. This meant that the Party emphasized discipline, caution, respectability, self-censorship, resignation, and moral flaccidity among its subjects (’far better not to know and not to think’). Conversely, the Party feared and actively discouraged independence of mind and judgement, excellence, boldness, perspicacity, courage, public commitment to democratic principles and the pagan mistrust of official jargon and bureaucratic regulations.
These basic unwritten rules of late-socialism implied that no subject was ever fully innocent before the Party apparatus. In effect, this apparatus subjected each individual to a form of permanent internment. Life was made to feel like one big grey dreary depressing prison. And since the Party was always right about everything, even retroactively, those individuals who ceased to be humble and obedient Party followers were automatically considered to be its deserters and, therefore, enemies of socialism. Citizen opposition to the Party was always regarded by its top echelons as ‘decadent’ and seditious, which is why the (potential) opponents of the Party were to be found not only among intellectuals like Havel, but also in every pub, café, street queue, factory, church and theatre.