PRAGUE
The enormous mass movement that has essentially overthrown Czechoslovak communism rose up with amazing speed. By the last week in November millions of people had participated in demonstrations across the country. Yet as recently as October 28--Czechoslovakia’s independence day--dissidents could bring only 10,000 people into the streets. These brave souls had scarcely unfurled their pro-democracy banners before truncheon-wielding police were chasing them through Prague's winding Gothic lanes. Three weeks later throngs of hundreds of thousands of people were routine in Wenceslas Square. In a matter of days they brought down the Communist leadership and dispatched the Party toward permanent oblivion.
The long-suffering dissident community deserves much of the credit for the dramatic turnaround. But news reports have largely overlooked the role played by the students. Hundreds of students from Charles University and other Prague colleges were clubbed by police at a November 17 march marking the 50th anniversary of the Nazi murder of Czech student demonstrators in 1939. The regime's decision to knock heads was a monumental blunder. Milos Jakes, the Communist Party boss, hoped it would frighten the students back into apathy. But the dramatic liberalizations in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and especially East Germany had primed the Czechoslovak public for rapid change, as had hints of intensifying Soviet pressure on the hard-line Czechoslovak regime to reform. The zeal with which security forces bloodied unarmed students shocked Czechoslovaks more than any other event since Soviet tanks rolled over the Prague Spring reforms 21 years ago. It shattered the passivity that had long frustrated dissident organizers. "This is the start of the finish of this government," one man shouted prophetically during the violence.
The awful parallel between the regime's violence against student demonstrators and that of the Nazis exactly 50 years earlier created an immensely powerful emotional rallying point. The next day young Praguers were mobilizing for a student strike, calling for mass protests and a nationwide work stoppage, and fanning out across the capital with handbills. It was the students who finally cast of the legacy of timidity and fear left by the Prague Spring, and who bridged the considerable gap dividing oppositionists from the public.
The snap founding of Civic Forum, the new umbrella opposition group, just two days after the police beatings signaled clearly that members of the disparate activist community had at last pulled together. They had emerged from a period of soul-searching over strategy with a will to seize the moment and an unsuspected mastery of coalition politics. "Now it isn't a small, foolish group of so-called dissidents," said Civic Forum's leader, Vaclav Havel. "We are at the time of a real beginning of a real opposition movement in this country."
From then on Civic Forum rode a tidal wave of popular discontent. In little more than a week, the democracy movement was transformed from a motley band of dissidents into an organized opposition--and more. "We're no longer the opposition," Michael Horacek, a spokesman, proclaimed during the stunningly successful general strike on November 27. "They [the Communists] are the opposition." In a region where history, seemingly frozen for four decades, now moves with unnatural rapidity, the evolution of the Czechoslovak opposition movement has broken all records. In ten days it achieved what Poland's Solidarity took nine years to extract: a commitment by Communists accustomed to jailing their critics to abandon the Party's monopoly on power.
When the wave of protests hit on November 17, activists were mulling over their past and future. Their principal achievement, as veteran dissident Jiri Dienstbier said, had been preserving the moral will to resist: "We were passing a small candle through the darkness." The movement's major failing had been its inability to spark protest across Czechoslovak society. The massive demonstrations in East Germany seemed to cause only ripples in Czechoslovakia. As long as the "socialist certainties" of sausage and beer remained in ample supply, the conventional analysis held, the complacent Czechs and Slovaks wouldn’t join their East German neighbors in the streets. "In my opinion this society is completely destroyed," Ivan Lamper, an editor of a samizdat political magazine, lamented to me before the first mass rallies. "People want democracy but they don't want to pay for it." Dissidents bemoaned the lack of a central opposition organization and of an alternative political program. And they didn't seem to be closing the gap between the largely Prague-based intelligentsia, which guides the opposition, and the rest of Czechoslovakia's 15 million people. Many of Solidarity's leaders built their legitimacy as representatives through years of close contact with the masses. But the writers, artists, actors, and journalists of Czechoslovakia's opposition functioned mainly as a moral beacon for a demoralized society. As practical politicians, they were a bit inept.
.jpg)
Print
