Violence

That left the Party with the option of using the one resource over which they did exercise a monopoly: the means of violence. In practice, late-socialist power brought to completion the monarchic state doctrine of sovereignty, according to which no human society is possible without government, just as no government is possible unless it possesses the ultimate capacity to have the last word in deciding who gets what, when and how, if need be through violent means.²³¹ Viewed in this way, sovereign power is necessary to protect the state against its enemies. It is ultimately indivisible. When the crunch comes, and especially when normal conditions are threatened by an erupting crisis, the sovereign decision-makers must insist that all other members of the body politic are decision-takers. ‘All the characteristics of sovereignty are contained in this,’ wrote Jean Bodin, among the inventors of the modern doctrine of sovereign power, ‘to have power to give laws to each and every one of his subjects, and to receive none from them’.²³² Sovereign government must be supreme. Those who rule must wisely bear in mind the constant possibility of deception, cunning and violent opposition from their opponents. The rulers must be granted the plenitude of power and insist that the maxime unum is the maxime bonum. Sovereign power enjoys the jus belli. It is entitled to invoke all measures deemed necessary for the preservation or restoration of order, including suspension of the constitution and the liberties it protects. The sovereign state can and must act as a dictator. It must be intolerant of voluntary associations, regarding them (as Thomas Hobbes said) as treasonous, as nothing better than ‘worms within the entrails’ of the body politic.

The violent capacity of the state to kill off the worms in its entrails was displayed during the last days on earth of Havel’s close colleague, philosophical mentor, and co-spokesman of the Charter, Professor Jan Patočka. More than 1,000 people, flanked by 100 police, paid their last respects to Patocka at Břevnov cemetery in Prague. The mourners were frisked, some friends and Chartists were turned away at the entrance gates, while others were detained for questioning. Police cameras filmed and photographed everybody, even at the graveside. The service was interrupted, and the priest’s funeral oration drowned out, by a military helicopter circling overhead and the heavy revving of police motorcycles at a nearby racetrack. Havel’s face, like most in attendance, showed signs of deep strain as two members of the band Plastic People of the Universe placed a crown of thorns on Patočka’s grave.

From the time of the launch of the Charter, Havel had numerous brushes with state violence. For the first time in his life, he felt continuously gripped by the shadowy hand of the secret police. After signing the second document released by the Charter on 8 January, protesting police measures against the signatories, he was interrogated by the StB almost daily. He received threatening letters and anonymous telephone calls. His life began to feel as if it was one continuous round of threats, bright lights, padded doors, wooden desks, sliding chairs, handcuffs, truncheons that pointed to a limited future. When it became clear to the authorities that the man was not for giving up, and that the Charter activists could only be forcibly silenced, Havel was arrested, charged (under Section 98) with committing ‘serious crimes against the basic principles of the Republic’. He was confined without trial ‘in total isolation’ for four and a half months in Ruzyně prison.

During this time, he managed to write an open letter (dated 13 March 1977) to the editors of all the newspapers that had published ‘Who is Václav Havel?’, calling on them publicly to issue retractions. To ward off the ‘depressive emptiness and hopeless inner solitude’ of gloomy Ruzyně prison, he also penned an eloquent obituary for Professor Patočka, whose modesty, penetrating philosophical intellect, quiet sense of humour and ‘inconspicuous moral greatness’ he praised. The obituary also contained a philosophical twist. Surrounded by violence and mourning the loss of a key Chartist and friend, Havel confessed that he was perplexed by a strange double injustice within the human condition. Not only does ‘death even come to people who have spent their entire lives thinking about death’, he wrote. It is also a fact that such ‘people who understand so much about death and its meaning ... seem to be the ones to whom death pays most attention, perhaps out of fear that they might finally reveal her mystery after all — she hurries to get them, often before the others’.²³³

His reflections on death provided a clue that the authorities were playing dirty, and perhaps even that he was anxious about his safety. Ignorant about the Charter’s current activities — and denied even the heartening news of the daring release on 20 April of a large flotilla of brightly coloured children’s balloons in Wenceslas Square, accompanied by leaflets publicly demanding his release — Havel was interrogated constantly about its organization, signatories and leadership. The indictment the authorities drew up made no mention at all of the Charter, but on the day of his release (on 20 May 1977) they issued an official statement in which Havel was reported to have said that his actions as a Chartist had ‘not always been correct’ and that his statements had been ‘tendentiously interpreted by the foreign press and misused against Czechoslovakia’. Most importantly, it was claimed that Havel had agreed to resign as Charter spokesman. It was said that he had vowed ‘to avoid all activity which could be classed as criminal’ and given his word not to ‘participate in any action which could be misused for a campaign against the ČSSR’.²³⁴

The heavy-handed tactics of detention and disinformation were the cause of trembling within the ranks of the Chartists. Havel tried to stand firm. In a carefully worded statement, issued to correct the official ‘distortions’, he confirmed that he was indeed relinquishing his position as Charter spokesman. But he said categorically that he would remain defiant in the face of state intimidation. He would not withdraw his name from the list of Charter signatories. He would stand by ‘the moral obligation’ it implied. And he would do everything within the law to come to the assistance of the victims of political injustice.²³⁵ It was in this spirit of acting as if the rule of law existed that, ten days after his release from prison, he bravely called on the District Prosecutor’s office in Prague 2 to initiate proceedings against the writer, Tomáš Řezáč, who was originally responsible for slandering him in ‘Who is Václav Havel?’. In quick succession, he hosted a small celebration, with Chartist friends, to mark the appearance of the volume Hry 1970-1976 (Plays 1970-1976), published by Zdena Škvorecká’s and her husband Josef’s Sixty-Eight Publishers in Toronto; gave an interview, published in London, about Charter 77 and independent culture; and (on 1 October 1977) helped demonstrate the meaning of cultural independence by hosting an autumn music festival at his country retreat at Hrádeček.²³⁶ Exactly the same spirit of acting as if he were a citizen living in freedom under the rule of law was again displayed less than three weeks later in his concluding address to the Prague city court hearing the charge of ‘serious crimes against the basic principles of the Republic’.²³⁷

The judge was so unpersuaded by the address that he dispensed with ceremony to sentence Havel to fourteen months, suspended for a period of three years. Havel had damaged the sovereign interests of Czechoslovakia and justice had been seen as done. Now it was to be done in fact. The secret police readied their weapons. On the evening of 28 January 1978, they carefully set a trap for him and other Chartists outside the Railwaymen’s House of Culture building in the Prague district of Vinohrady. It had been a custom in Bohemia since the turn of the century that organizations arranged balls and sold tickets to non-members. Aware of this old custom, several women within Chartist circles had spontaneously thought up plans for Chartists and their friends to join the annual ball held at the Railwaymen’s House. ‘It’s politics all the time. We have the right to entertainment too,’ they agreed, without resistance, certainly not from Havel, who (as the Americans say) had always liked being shown a good time. A crumpled black-and-white photograph shows him on the way to the ball, grinning, dressed in a dinner jacket, looking every bit the dandy, or perhaps the ladies’ man, Anna Šabatová draped over one arm and another woman over the other.

The evening quickly turned into an unrelaxing episode resembling the final murder scene in Dürrenmatt’s play Visit of an Old Lady. At the entrance to the building, state security police masquerading as railway workers dressed in black politely greeted Havel and others, then announced with a snarl that they were unwelcome guests at the ball. Truncheons suddenly cracked heads. Havel and others fell involuntarily on to the frozen pavement, stunned, bleeding. Several women in evening dress were kicked, and the word ‘whore’ shouted repeatedly. Someone cried out for help. Uniformed police were instantly on the scene. They were instructed by the black-suited security police to take Havel and several others straight to the clinic for alcoholics, claiming in the process that the agitators who had been hit were actually dead drunk.

The uniformed police had the sense to take them instead to a casualty ward, in precariously slow time. Had Havel and his colleagues (Pavel Landovský and Jaroslav Kukal) been suffering brain damage, they may well have drawn their last breath during the journey. En route to the hospital, they were stopped and detained for ten minutes by another police patrol. After checking their identity papers and taking down their names, the police then tailed the threesome at every turn for the rest of the evening. Around midnight, after a doctor administering a blood test laughed in his face when asked for guarantees that the sample would not be exchanged, Havel was formally charged with obstructing and attacking a public official in the course of duty. He was carted off to Ruzyně prison, where he was to spend the next six weeks, pending a trial that never took place.

One evening just before lights-out, halfway through his ordeal, sitting upright on his bed, nursing a recurrent headache caused by crunching truncheons, Havel heard a man’s voice calling out down the prison corridor. ‘Is there anybody here from the committee to defend Václav Havel, Pavel Landovský and Jaroslav Kukal?’ ‘Yes!’ replied an anonymous voice. ‘Well then, do something,’ said the first man’s voice, ‘I’m Jarda Kukal!’