Joy comes back to Prague after 20 years of silence by Gavin Young was published in the Observer, as part of a series of articles entitled The Czech Ordeal, on 4 August 1968
Although it seems unjustified by events, the anguish that swept through Prague, when official statements on the Soviet-Czech talks seemed to mask a Czech breakdown, was pitifully understandable.
It is hard for most Western Europeans, cosily wrapped in their constitutional safeguards, to understand what is at stake here. United as never before, with very few dissenters, the nation has rallied euphorically behind a Communist Government to shake off, bloodlessly, a mind-numbing tyranny.
In the space of a few months a sort of miracle has turned a Kafkaesque police State into somewhere one would rather like to live – even if there is not too much, perhaps, for professional Western anti-Communists to crow about. I have yet to meet any Czech Communist who suggests a return to private enterprise, or abandoning Czechoslovakia’s Eastern alliances.
You see signs of the new patriotism everywhere. Most evident were the swirling throngs, day after day, round tables set up for people to put their names and addresses to a massive pledge of support for the Government. They blocked the pavements and overflowed into the roads.
Excited groups of Czechs swarmed together like bees to discuss the situation. Youths, beery middle-aged men, full-blown women with shopping-bags took time off to explain their views to East Germans, West Germans – anyone else who was interested. It was a display of solidarity that usually only an impending declaration of war or a newly signed armistice can produce.
‘It is wonderful,’ a Czech truck driver told me. ‘I’ve never seen people just talking in crowds to total strangers before. Several people I’ve never even met offered me cigarettes. It’s amazing.’
A year ago hardly any of the voluble Czechs I have talked to since I arrived here would have dared come within shouting distance of me.
The Czechs are joyously making up for the almost unimaginable loneliness of 20 long years of State-imposed silence.
I drove out into the countryside one day. Old women in head scarves worked alongside the mechanical harvesters. Occasionally they straightened up to take long swigs from bottles of wine.
Outside a workers’ village canteen, workers drinking beer under a tree held their hands up, laughing, crossing their wrists for imaginary hand-cuffs when I ask them what would have happened if they had talked to me before the ‘liberalisation’.
Now they talked freely and gladly. ‘Dubček’s good. We should have freedom to talk and think. But, of course, we must wait and see how things go.’
How did they want things to go? ‘Well, discrimination must go for good. We are electricians with years of experience behind us. Before Dubček, you untrained men were getting better jobs in our trade simply because they were Communist Party members.’
A fat man with a pockmarked face and a pipe said: ‘Far too much money was being spent on white-collar administration – there were more administrators than workers in some industries. Jobs for the boys. Then, we want no outside interference in our country – from Russia or anywhere.’
A middle-aged woman I met later spoke of another side of the past, although she had little hope that the West could really understand. She had graduated from Oxford in English Literature during the war. She also had several diplomas from Prague University. When the Communists took over in 1948, she was told: ‘You are educated at an English nobleman’s university in a monarchist country.’ She was removed from her research job and made into a typist.
‘In 1958 I was at a holiday centre and a group of British trade unionists visited. I can see now that it was stupid, but the temptation was too great. I talked to one of the British wives. I hadn’t spoken English for so long.
‘One week later I was told our union bosses were having a meeting and I should attend. When they were all there, one of them stood up and said: “It is regretful but I have to say that one of you committed a serious crime a week ago.” They told me to stand up. Then they announced that I had committed the crime of talking to an English visitor. I lost my job.’
Others told me that the impersonality of their treatment was the dreadful thing. ‘They wouldn’t say what you had done wrong,’ a woman teacher said. ‘You would be moved to some menial job and a blank-faced man would say simply, “It’s the re-organisation, comrade.”’
Her husband was an RAF pilot in the war. In 1948, he was told he was a foreign mercenary and dismissed from the Air Force. His family were evicted from their modest flat and he was given a job as a porter.
‘He’s been rehabilitated now,’ his wife said. ‘He was told he is innocent and a hero and they gave him a medal. But by then he was a semi-invalid. When they pinned the medal on him he was so emotionally upset and had a heart attack.’
Rehabilitation is being taken over by the Government. In a high-ceilinged office of the Ministry of Justice, a small, grey official said: ‘We hope everyone will be rehabilitated in two years. Some will be compensated financially – including the families of those who died in jail.’
Over his desk, as in so many other offices, there was a light rectangular patch of wallpaper. ‘Yes, that was President Novotný’s picture’ – gone, like the colossal statue of Stalin that once menaced the city.
Despite it’s turbulent history, Prague is one of the world’s least changed and most beautiful cities. It’s a cluttered city of high Baroque churches, their interiors crammed with gold and huge saintly statues leaping in bearded abandon out of marble walls the colour of marzipan pink and dark seaweed.
The clothes of the crowds that wander past the posters of Russian and Romanian films and others advertising ‘Rio Bravo’ and Rita Tushinghamová are drab compared with the West, but now they are enlivened with badges saying: ‘I love freedom.’
There are even a few hippies, boys with long hair. They are no longer seized in the street by police and dragged off to have it forcibly cut. The downstairs jazz club frequented by students drinking vodka and orange juice or red wine could be in Paris or London.
What do Czech students think of Western youth? In the offices of the weekly popular magazine Student, which got into slight trouble the other day for printing articles about Radio Free Europe, one of the editors said: ‘We don’t understand those Paris riots. Those students were so destructive, cutting down trees, destroying cars and so on. They don’t seem to know how lucky they are.’
One of his colleagues said: ‘The theories of people like Rudi Dutschke are interesting, but how does it all work out in practice? You have to be able to follow things through. Dutschke doesn’t seem to know what the world’s about. We have a revolution and we know what it can lead to. After our revolution it has taken 20 years to achieve a free Press and free speech.’
There is no friction today between Communist and non-Communist students: that is one of Dubček’s almost incredible achievements. Student attitudes are calm and constructive.
‘What is the Czech character?’ One student said: ‘Well, politically speaking, we had 300 years of the Hapsburg monarchy. Then this last 20 years. The years between the wars were not enough really to develop a sense of freedom here. This we have to do now. In Britain, you have no idea what tyranny is. Do you know how lucky you are?’
All photographs © David Newell-Smith for the Observer. Photograph: David Newell Smith/The Observer
