The New York Review Abroad (39 page)

And a very bad composition it is too. Despite Adamec’s solemn declaration about proposing a “broad coalition” government of experts, and despite the deletion of the leading role of the Party from the constitution, no less than sixteen out of the twenty-one proposed members of the government are Party members. Among them are almost no experts, but some very compromised figures, such as the foreign minister, Jaromír Johannes. Clearly this is unacceptable.

Crisis meeting in the smoking room. What is to be done? Some say that the Forum must go for what the people obviously want: a real government of experts led by Komárek. Others say that is impossible, and Komárek is not the right man. Professor Jicinský, the constitutional lawyer, points out that the Forum is in danger of painting itself into a constitutional corner: for if they don’t accept the government, and demand the President’s resignation by next Sunday, then they could end up with no constitutional authority in the land except the old and corrupt parliament. A confused discussion ends in general agreement that the Forum must demand the further reconstruction of the government, backing this up with a demonstration on Wenceslas Square tomorrow afternoon, and the threat of a general strike a week from Monday. Petr Pithart, now a central figure, is chosen to deliver the Forum’s reaction on television this evening, along with a student, an actor, and Petr Miller, with the worker’s muscle at the end. They hurry off down into the stuffy, overheated dressing rooms to draft the statements, together with the master draughtsman, Havel. Now there is no pink champagne and no laughter. It is too serious a business.

But later in the evening there is a moment, if not for laughter, then at least for a quiet tear. There is a concert “for all right-thinking people,” a concert to celebrate the revolution. When Marta Kubišová comes on stage, the audience erupts in the kind of applause that usually only follows a brilliant performance. But they are not applauding her singing. They are applauding her silence. Years of silence. For Marta Kubišová, one of the most popular singers of the Sixties, has not been allowed to appear in public in her native land since she signed Charter 77. When the applause finally subsides, a girl presents her with a bunch of flowers, “one for each lost year.” A fragile, gentle figure—now in early middle age—Marta Kubišová is so overwhelmed that she can hardly speak, let alone sing. “Thank you, thank you,” she whispers into the microphone. Then, with a friend supporting her, she sings: “The times they are a changin’ …” It is a moment of joy, but with an inner core of bitter sadness. For to most of her audience the songs she sings are ancient history—the sounds of the Sixties.

Day Eighteen (Monday, December 4). Three forty-five. Wenceslas Square. Despite the freezing cold, the demonstration will be huge, and a success. Of course it will. Everyone knows it. They file into the square slowly and matter-of-factly, as if they had been doing this for years. A few minutes before four, they start warming-up with the familiar chants, “Now’s the time!” “Resignation!” and ringing the keys. “Long live the students” they cry—is there another city in the world where you would hear that? “Long live the actors.”

Then come the official—that is, official unofficial—speakers, slowly reading rather complicated statements, full of “CF and PAV.” “Long live the Forum!” they chant, nonetheless. Loud support for the general strike on December 11. A fine, theatrical performance by Radim Palouš, who reads out the proposal to recall compromised
members of the Federal Assembly, such as—pause—and then, like a whiplash: “Jakeš.” Whistles and jeers. And so on down the list of gibbering thugs: Fojtík, Indra, Bilak. “Let it be done,” says the crowd. And from one corner: “Do it like the Germans!” (Meaning the East Germans, for this morning brought the news of Erich Honecker et al. being expelled from the Party, and placed under house arrest.) But “like the Germans” is how the Forum leadership does not want to do it. They want to do it like the Czechs, that is, gently, without hatred and revenge.

Finally, the bell-clear voice of Václav Malý reading the Forum statement: the demand for free elections by the end of June 1990 at the latest, with a new indication that the Forum will propose or endorse candidates; the formation of a genuine coalition government by next Sunday, otherwise the Forum will propose its own candidate; the Forum and the PAV declaring themselves to be the guarantors of the transition to a democratic state based on the rule of law. “Long live the Forum!” Then, in a last touch which verges on kitsch, the pudgy pop star Karel Gott (a housewives’ darling) and the exiled Karel Kryl come out onto the balcony together, to lead the singing of the national anthem(s), the slow, heart-rending first verse in Czech, the sprightly, dance-rhythm second verse in Slovak.

Up the street to my hotel, where the television brings news of the successful Malta summit, of Gorbachev’s subsequent meeting with Warsaw Pact leaders in Moscow, and then, separately, with Urbánek and Adamec. Then a report about the roundup of Communist leaders in East Germany. Later, a flash: the five Warsaw Pact states that invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 have formally renounced and condemned this as an intervention in Czechoslovakia’s internal affairs.

So every schoolboy can see which way the external winds are blowing. No doubt this will be a week of tense and tortuous negotiation. But it is hard to see what alternative the authorities have, other
than to make further concessions. They are caught between the hammer of popular revolt and the anvil of a completely transformed external context, symbolized by the Malta summit and that Warsaw Pact statement: “From Yalta to Malta” for the world; from Husák to Havel for Prague.

A late-night walk through the old town, veiled in a mist. After twenty long years, the sleeping beauty of central Europe has woken up. The improvised posters on the shop windows deserve an article in themselves. “Unity is strength,” they say. “People, open your eyes.” And: “The heart of Europe cries for freedom.”

5.

At this point the Forum had to leave the Magic Lantern, and I had, alas, to leave Prague. The next week was probably as important as the previous two, but someone else will have to chronicle its inner dramas. On Tuesday there were further, inconclusive talks with Adamec. On Wednesday he threatened to resign, and on Thursday he did so. His former deputy, Marián Calfa, a Slovak, was asked by President Husák to form a new government. The Forum said they might be able to come to an agreement with him, and made some “suggestions” for the new cabinet. (A week before they had said “the CF does not aspire to any ministerial post,” but, as the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once remarked, a week in politics is a long time. Above all, a week in revolutionary politics.)

There followed “round table” talks between representatives of all the official parties—crucially, of course, the Communists, headed here by Vasil Mohorita—and those of the Forum, headed by Havel, and of the Public Against Violence, headed by Jan Carnogurský. As in Poland, the “round table” really had just two sides. But in Poland, the round table took two months; in Czechoslovakia, two days. Precisely
meeting the Forum’s deadline, on Sunday, December 10, UN Human Rights Day, Gustav Husák swore in the new government, and then resigned as president.

Václav Havel read out the names of the new cabinet to a jubilant crowd on Wenceslas Square. Virtually all the Forum’s “suggestions” were reflected in the agreed list. Jan Carnogurský was catapulted in the space of just a fortnight from being a prisoner of conscience. expecting a stiff sentence, to being one of two so-called “first vice-premiers” of Czechoslovakia, with partial responsibility for the security apparatus that had for so long harassed and persecuted him. In a compromise, since the two sides could not agree on an interior minister, he shared this responsibility with the Communist premier, Marián Calfa, and the other “first vice-premier,” our old friend the chief Prognistic, Pan Docent Valtr Komárek,
Dr. Sc
.

Komárek would have overall responsibility for economic policy, with two other members of his institute under him: Vladimír Dlouhý (like Komárek, a Party member), and, predictably, the glinting economist Václav Klaus as minister of finance. (So now Prince Schwarzenberg could rest content: one
does
know the minister.) As if in a fairy-tale, Jirí Dienstbier went from stoker to foreign minister. Almost as remarkably, Miroslav Kusy, a well-known, Slovak philosopher and signer of Charter 77, expelled from the Party like so many others, took charge of the Federal Office of Press and Information. Petr Miller, The Worker, became minister for labor and social affairs. The formerly puppet, but newly independent, Socialist and People’s parties got two seats each. Although the prime minister was still a Communist, only eight other ministers (out of a total of twenty-one) were Party members, and of these, two—Komárek and Dlouhý—were identified more with the Forum than with the Party.

It was an extraordinary triumph at incredible speed. The “ten days” actually took just twenty-four. Well might the factory sirens
blow and church bells ring on the morrow, instead of the threatened general strike. Within the next week, Klaus and Carnogurský were already announcing fiscal and legal changes to start the country down the road to a market economy and the rule of law: the road conjured up seemingly out of nothingness in those steamy dressing rooms and corridors of the Magic Lantern just a fortnight before. The next Sunday, Jirí Dienstbier was cutting the barbed wire of the iron curtain on the Czechoslovak-Austrian frontier, holding the giant wire cutters with his colleague, the Austrian foreign minister, Aloïs Mock. The students held another demonstration, taking exactly the same route that they had on Day One, just a month before: along the embankment, right at the National Theater, up Národní Street into Wenceslas Square. This time they were not met by truncheon-wielding police, by white helmets or red berets, for this time the police were, in a real sense, under their control.

Of course there were countless difficulties ahead. One major outstanding issue was the election of a new president. The Forum quickly said that Havel was its candidate, for the transitional period to free elections, and that he should be elected as soon as possible by the Federal Assembly. The Party suddenly discovered a burning passion for “democracy,” and suggested that the next president should be chosen by direct popular vote, which would take longer to organize, and which, it fondly hoped, Havel might actually lose. (Note, incidentally, that Hungary’s Communists recently tried an almost identical wheeze.) There was also a side plot concerning a suitable position for Dubcek, with his threefold importance: as a historical symbol, a reform Communist, and, not least, a Slovak.

As this article goes to press, the (Communist) prime minister has formally endorsed Havel’s candidacy at a session of the Federal Assembly, and it therefore seems likely that the playwright will indeed
be elected by that body in the near future. But even if that important dispute is resolved by the time you read this, there are many more ahead, on the path to free elections to parliament in the first half of 1990. Barring a great disaster (external or internal), it nonetheless seems certain that Czechoslovakia is now launched down the same road as Poland and Hungary, as East Germany (in a special, complicated way), and perhaps as Bulgaria: the road from communism to democracy. The breakthrough has happened.