Long before Munich, old President Masaryk, who had given his life to the creation and nurture of a democratic State called Czechoslovakia, told a young British journalist that if a little country like his enjoyed liberty for 20 years every now and then ╥it could not necessarily hope for more.╙
This time his people have had barely 30 weeks in which to enjoy a degree of liberty greater than anything that had been known in Central and Eastern Europe since 1948. But if one fights down the sickening, impotent anger that anyone who has witnessed that brief interlude must feel at the news of the last 24 hours, if one looks for any sign of hope in the new darkness that has descended on Czechoslovakia, it is to that unnerving stoicism of Masaryk╒s that one must turn.
It is a stoicism bred into the Czech people during three and a half centuries of foreign rule by the Hapsburgs, by Nazism, and by Stalinist communism directed from Moscow. It helped them to learn the bargaining skills which brought the new State so auspiciously into being at the end of the First World War; it was the backbone of the Good Soldier Schweik himself, a far more real and credible national symbol than John Bull or Marianne, whose talent for looking one way and doggedly going another so maddened the Germans and indeed most of his other neighbours in Europe. More immediately, these were the qualities that brought Czechoslovakia so near to success in its attempt to wriggle out from under the dead hand of neo-Stalinist orthodoxy and get back on its own road to a valid, democratic socialism.
Slow growth
One must date the final break in the closed circuit of total rule from January 5, when Novotny was removed from the secretary-generalship of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. But the whole point of what we had begun to call the new Czech ╥Reformation,╙ the thing which made its substance so formidable, yet caused its importance to be missed by many people until quite late in the day was its gradualism. The removal of Novotny was the result of a slow growth of forces quietly and craftily drawn into alliance over the years, which eventually proved irresistible.
The principal parties in the alliance were Slovak nationalists, the new wave of technocrats and economists like Professor Sik and Premier Cernik who were allowed to organise economic reforms when orthodoxy had run the economy almost into the ground, and the generation of writers and intellectuals who had gone most of the way from adolescent idealism in the late forties to disillusionment but not despair 20 years later. Throughout the ╒sixties these forces grew and slowly, almost reluctantly in the case of some Slovak leaders, began to coalesce.
Slovak nationalism in various forms had always been potentially disruptive of party unity, and the turning point on that particular front came in 1963 with the purging of the old Slovak Stalinist and the emergence of Alexander Dubcek as First Secretary of the Slovak Communist Party and as a member of the Czechoslovak Party Praesidium. From then on the Slovaks exerted increasing pressure at the political centre for a measure of autonomy and incidentally but necessarily for a more liberal ordering of things in the nation╒s life generally.
By 1963 the need for economic reform was painfully clear to the man in the street in Prague and Pilsen, and soon middle-of-the-road men in the higher reaches of the apparat were being forced to acknowledge what Marxism of all codes should have taught them anyway: that economic changes could not be made in a political vacuum, that no technical plan could get Czechoslovakia to work again if the political system still tended to alienate the people instead of enlisting them as individual participants in the ordering of their society.
Advance guard
And, finally, there were the writers, the advance guard of reform in a society which has always respected the word and whose hunger for renewed contact with the mainstream of European life and culture caused huge editions of classical and modern literature to be bought up like pop records in the last decade.
Again 1963 was a crucial year. To the fury of Ulbricht╒s ideologues, Kafka was rehabilitated in a symposium in Prague in which Eduard Goldstaecker, the chairman of the Czech Writers╒ Union, first showed his political toughness and courage. And, finally, in the summer of 1967, came that congress of the Writers╒ Union at which the young Czechoslovak playwright, Pavel Kohout, got up and read aloud Solzhenitsyn╒s open letter describing the tragic fate of Russian literature under the neo-Stalinism which had come to dominate Soviet culture in the years after Khrushchev.
The fury that followed brought the crisis to a head and drew together all the reforming forces that had been working in the earth so well, in a final and successful confrontation. Schweik suddenly stood his ground and outfaced the exhausted oppressors he had so cautiously and patiently worn down.
Canny courage
The canny courage he has shown in the open since then is a more recent and familiar story. It was a particular and infectious kind of courage to watch, rarely posturing or melodramatic (though it could produce noble documents like the manifesto which ╥Literarni Listy╙ and the Czech people sent to fortify their leaders as they left for the meeting at Cierna), but always human and humorous, not expecting too much but hoping for the best.
Almost throughout the tense weeks leading up to and including the talks at Cierna and Bratislava, the people of Prague seemed to believe that the new force that had grown so steadily and gradually in their society, could not be negated, and gradually one came to share their conviction. History, they felt, was moving in that direction; to turn the clock back to 1956 would be an act outside the realm of reason, and in Europe at least there were surely grounds for thinking that reason had begun to order the affairs of nations once more.
Now, in spite of all their rational hopes the unreasonable thing has been done, and Czechoslovakia seems to be falling back into the nightmare of unreason, back into the sick world of Kafka╒s imagination, not Schweik╒s. The Czechoslovaks╒ sane and sensible instinct for democracy, which contained also the hope ╤ perhaps the last hope of a humane and effective kind of socialism, has foundered on the neurotic fear of freedom and noncomformity that shows the dominant force in Eastern Europe to be still essentially and archaically Stalinist.
Less than three weeks ago, feeling the relief in the sane and sunny streets of Prague after Mr Dubcek had finally broadcast his credible reassurances that he had not retreated at Cierna or at Bratislava from the essential principles of the Czechoslovak Communist Party╒s action programme, one could scarcely have believed that Soviet tanks would roar along Na Prikope to crush that programme and that hope after all. And even now I believe that this solution to the problem of the Communist half of Europe is not credible, does not coincide with the realities of the situation.
Likely betrayer
This is not 1956, Czechoslovakia is not Hungary nor Poland. It is not credible that Brezhney and Ulbricht will be able simply to reinstate Novotny and Hendrych and their old colleagues, or that Oldrich Svestka, the editor of ╥Rude Pravo,╙ and the most likely betrayer of the Czech praesidium, will be able to recruit men to run a jackal press of the kind Czechoslovakia has not had for some years now. It is not credible that the Czechoslovak people will return except under the lash of equally incredibly brutal and draconian force, to the condition of their lives, not as they were in 1967, but as they were in 1952 and 1953.
Perhaps this is simply the incredulity that the Czechs themselves taught me during my visits to Prague in this year that had seemed so full of promise and recovered sanity, an incredulity that had to forget the fact that in Europe there is more than one ╥reality.╙ But if the Czechs can keep their sanity in the shadow of Ulbricht╒s reality, of Kafka╒s reality, as Schweik has taught them to, if they can remember what anyone who witnessed it cannot forget, the quality of their courage and stoical patience during the last few months and what it had managed to achieve, we may yet discover that this is not the end of the affair. Schweik has survived tanks and gauleiters and commissars before. His stoicism and ingenuity should not be under-estimated, His grasp of reality is surer than that of his adversaries and he knows what desperate wounds they have inflicted on themselves in wounding him.
He knows, and the world ╤ east and west of Prague ╤ knows whose defeat this is.
