In Honor of Allan Miller, and in memory of his wife, Marie Winn
Within moments of landing in Czechoslovakia (as it was then still called) in the late spring of 1990, I could sense a country in hurried and dramatic transition yet keeping intact a quirky and ironic soul. The currency clerk at the Prague airport seemed befuddled about the correct exchange rate between US dollars and Czech crowns, and he gave me a tiered rate roughly averaging the market rate. An hour later, as I was checking in to my hotel, the same fellow appeared in the lobby, looking even more flustered. He had tracked me down because he needed a few hundred crowns back or would have to pay the difference out of his own pocket. A week later, as I was leaving the country, the same teller exchanged my crowns back into dollars, with a shy smile of recognition.
Even after 40-plus years of Communism, Prague strikes a visitor as a great European city: not as beautiful as Rome, as grand as Paris, or as deep and diverse as London, but graceful and kind to the senses; a walkable city of medieval buildings spared by World War II, gentle hills cloven by the river Moldau, chestnut-filled courtyards, strong coffee, and fine pilsner beer. There are also bleak reminders of the Communist era, especially the high-rise complexes in outlying districts. But central Prague, with its castles, bridges, churches and monuments, bears the unmistakable 14th century stamp of Charles IV, Bohemia’s most remembered king. A university town since 1348, it is also the city of Kepler, Smetana, Dvořak, Kafka – and Havel.
Czechs are friendly and seem reasonably well-off; most stores are full. Judging by the department stores, fishing and camping are popular. In fact, at first glance, many Czechs could be mistaken for Americans. What marks them in a crowd is not their features or clothing but their cigarettes: this is a country where chain-smoking is pandemic.
Prague in 1990 is still a great bargain for the visitor. A party of six can eat in one of the better restaurants for about $35-40 – although for a Czech guest, that might represent several weeks’ salary. Vladimir Vodička, the venerable director of the Theater on the Balustrade, a center of avant-garde political drama, notes that many in the intelligentsia have cars and second homes in the lovely Bohemian countryside but can’t afford the gas to get there. As Vodička observes with a wry smile: “Economics is a mystery.”
Vodička has guided the Theater on the Balustrade since the 1950s and was Vaclav Havel’s theatrical mentor, offering him a job there when his plays were banned. On a summery evening during my visit, after a performance of Havel’s “Largo Desolato,” Vodička attended a reception in the anteroom of the theater. It was abuzz with young actors. Around 11 pm, I noticed a rumpled, paunchy man of middle age pausing before a mirror in the outer foyer. He licked his hand and wiped it nervously across his wavy hair like a teenager at a prom. Elsewhere he might have been mistaken for a bartender or a high-school coach; not here. President Vaclav Havel, the playwright, essayist, and révolutionnaire who had once roamed the streets of Greenwich Village, melted easily into the throng. This was his theater and his crowd.
The next afternoon, a cool, bright Sunday, the president reappeared in a huge crowd that packed the magnificent baroque confines of Old Town Square. Rafael Kubelik, the Czech émigré conductor who had once vowed never to return, led three orchestras – one each from the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia and one from Slovakia – in Smetana’s twin classics, The Moldau and Ma Vlast (My Homeland). Despite the huge crowd, it was an almost eerily subdued celebration. Here, at least, it seemed that the weight of the past exceeded the lightness of being in a post-Communist society.
At this odd transitional moment, Czechs were reckoning with the past and girding for the difficult changes to come. Elation was fading; realism, not pessimism, held sway. Pavel Tigrid, a self-exiled writer, editor of the leading Czech émigré journal Witness, and an adviser to Havel, was visiting from his home outside Paris and found his books on prominent display in bookstores. Gregarious and witty, Tigrid, now 73, had been in exile since 1948. The euphoria had passed since his lifelong goal of seeing his country freed from Communism had been achieved in December 1989. He no longer even felt the need to write; he now preferred fishing. The dancing eyes, the lively and informed conversation, were not those of an old or tired man. But it was too late for him to repatriate now; exile had made him a Frenchman.
Another Czech writer, Jiri Stransky, 49, from a family of lawyers and statesmen, belonged to a younger generation also scarred by the ordeals of Communism. His grandfather, prime minister in Jan Masaryk’s government in the 1940s, had been hounded by the Communists, as had his brother, a United Press International correspondent. His father had been one of 5,000 prominent Czechs whom the Nazis shipped off to Auschwitz, and among the 61 who returned alive. Afterward, the Communists “couldn’t accuse him of anything, so they only gave him two years.”
Stransky, who now lived in a small villa on the outskirts of Prague, was himself arrested at age 21, while serving in the army in a special unit of suspected enemies of the state. During detention he frequently endured round-the-clock interrogations, torture, and beatings.
Then his trial began.
Stransky is quick to point out that he was hardly an isolated victim: “There were thousands who lived through the same thing I did.” Others were less lucky: they already had families. Stransky spent eight years in prison and was forced to work in uranium mines, which destroyed his health. Later, his writings were banned. “I lived through it, as you can see,” he smiles.
Perhaps the biggest change in daily life since the Velvet Revolution was a sense of openness in conversation; people were less afraid to talk. But as late as the previous summer, there was still residual fear of the specters haunting Czechoslovakia: the hardline Communists and the secret police. Some people were said to have held off voting until the second day of the June 1990 elections to thwart ballot tampering.
In a secondary school, I watched as an American documentary team, with a Czech crew, filmed residents of Prague voting in open elections, many for the first time in their lives. Neither the election officials nor the voters seemed the least fazed by the presence of cameras. The sole exception was a young woman in her 20s who turned down the hallway at the sight of the film crew, hiding her face as if mortified and convulsing with giggles.
As a visitor to Prague that spring, I was awed by the momentous changes that had already occurred. The arguments about Gorbachev’s catalytic role and the bankruptcy of Communism were by now familiar. (Czechs were enjoying the irony of saying they no longer cared what happens to Gorbachev.) But there was something deeper to ponder about the events of the previous year and a half. Here in Prague a regime that remained in power through brute force and intimidation had crumbled with shocking rapidity and ease. There had been no killings or mass round-ups, no desperate assaults on airfields or broadcast stations or government ministries, no midnight executions. (The police had beaten students in the streets, but incredibly not a single death was reported.) Rather, a revolutionary moment had arrived when it became clear that the Czech and Slovak people could no longer be intimidated by their rulers. As elsewhere in Eastern Europe, it was a stunning reversal of the forces that had wrenched the continent throughout the 20th century.
It was hardly surprising to find a sense of expectancy, without clear definition or direction, hanging over Prague in those days of epochal change. To the casual visitor, it seemed a blend of residual euphoria and a deep Slavic reserve about the future. However, it was no longer fear of a future drearily resembling the present, imposed by a foreign oppressor, but rather of the uncertain and complicated future Czechs and Slovaks had seized for themselves.
It was summed up, in a way, by an American friend in Prague who saw a long line outside a store at dawn. A native Czech speaker, she asked several people on the line what they were waiting for. One woman answered, “I don’t know.” Another said: “For everything.”