The cliches of our half-solicitous, half-envious friends about the riskiness of going, the excitement of being where the action is, was far from the reality of coexisting with the Russians from Cierna to Tisou to Bratislava. Not that my wife and I felt none of the factitious anxiety which Raymond Williams has suggested Western media whipped up with their foolishly "friendly" coverage of the Czechs' mini-cold war; it was hard to suppress a very real shiver at the sight of a Tommy gun-manned watchtower on the border between West Germany and Czechoslovakia.
But our first contact with Czech officialdom a few minutes later was hardly geopolitical: the Banlon-frocked moneychangers aboard our train could have been, from the pert looks of them, any second-generation American Slavs at any Midwestern state university near Cleveland or Pittsburgh. (But their flattered cross-talk to each other when they realized we wanted to know where in Prague to find more poets like Miroslav Holub and more films like Closely Watched Trains would be hard to imagine among their American contemporaries.)
Our being there "at the historic moment" was mostly chance. After a year of teaching Americans in England, we had qualified for a National Union of Students tour. We reluctantly abstained from Greece to punish the colonels, and long before Dubcek's heroic fortnight, had signed on for Czechoslovakia with thirteen British university students or recent graduates and another American. Not that we were uninterested in what was going on there.
Our political awakening had dated approximately from F. O. Matthiessen's suicide over another Eastern European Socialist crisis in the 1950s, and we were eager to see for ourselves "what communism was like." We wanted to believe that socialism could renew itself, that its overbureaucratized ugliness could wither away under the scorn and joy of Czech cartoonists, film makers, writers. Long depressed by the playpen atmosphere of American television, we wanted to believe that we had read about the revolutionary role Czech TV had played in the post-January examination of the national conscience.
So, as the crisis mounted in the fortnight before our departure, we anxiously scanned the dispatches from Prague over morning coffee, gauging whether it would be chicken to back out at the last moment. I cite these feelings at length because I think they illustrate how misleading most of the attitudes inherited from the cold war turn out to be when people--even those who make some special effort to be broadminded--risk their first visit behind (note, not simply "the other side of") the iron curtain. And these (ex post facto) uncredible assumptions which we brought to our visit (four days in Prague, three in Bratislava, six in the cities and villages of Eastern Slovakia from Poprad to Kosice) may help to explain the paradoxical exhilaration and depression we brought back from our possibly too bookish tour.
The first, and ultimately only essential, truth to record about the gray socialism that Czech intellectuals are revolting against is that it is indeed revolting. Even to one whose eyes were weaned on the squalor of Midwestern American motorscapes, today's Czechoslovak vistas must be seen to be discredited. Reading Mencken's "Libido of the Ugly" in a copy of Writers in Revolt that our American undergraduate was carrying, we concluded that his archetypal patch of desolation along the 25 miles of railroad track between Greensburgh and Pittsburgh would look almost Edenic by comparison with the bomb-site drabness all over Czechoslovakia.
This is the more ironic because Mencken makes the point that the Central European immigrants inhabiting those steel mill towns had made a mighty poor bargain when they traded their quaint Slovakian villages for the infernal river valleys of the coal and steel magnates. It's not just the prevailing torn-up atmosphere--sewer and cable lines "temporarily" dug up, and left behind wooden protective fences which looked as through they had weathered more than one winter; half-erected ski jumps in tourist-development areas, with the missing steel beams complacently rusting away in a crazy heap. And it's not only the run-down quality of public services: clogged bathrooms in trains, bulbless light fixtures (under-illumination is a national vice, especially in museums), unrunning hot water in huge dormitory complexes. Beyond all this, it is the excruciating quality of recent building that is so discouraging.
We walked with a recent British civil engineering graduate through two so-called construction sites in the high-prestige tourist area of Stary Smokovec. It didn't require his professional comment to make us understand that in front of the local post office we were watching the slowest bricklayer in the history of mortar. An amateur could also see that the rubbly bricks he was so meticulously laying one on another were no inducement to speed. That was one Czech structure that would never beat the considerable snows of the High Tatry mountains this coming winter. And down the road, two other workers were hacking phlegmatically at great boulders, chipping them down to size for insertion in a wooden wall form. They might beat the winter, if it was very late. I suspect that this is the kind of disarray that prompted Czechoslovak Life to editorialize in its August issue:
The complete abolition of small-scale private enterprise, which exists to a greater or lesser degree in most of the other Socialist countries, is one of the reasons why local services are at such a low level in Czechoslovakia. To encourage a return to skilled crafts like carpentry and plumbing, national committees last year issued over 20,000 permits to private craftsmen. A law establishing the conditions under which individuals may set up shop will probably be passed before the end of the year. It is envisaged that permission will be granted not only to individuals and members of their families but to groups of individuals working in related crafts. Equipment could be owned or borrowed, and proprietors may also be given the right to train one apprentice.
But the oddest reaction, to one indoctrinated by Western capitalist dependence on creature comforts, is the paradoxical spiritual exhilaration amidst all this physical ugliness. And this is not necessarily a matter of cerebral high-mindedness. On an electric tram one day in the mountains, I struck up a conversation with a steel worker from Brno returning from a holiday with his wife and 11-year-old son. He was carving traditional designs on a walking stick he had cut in the forest, as a summer souvenir for his son. The postcard stands and shops are flooded with crude parodies of this craft, slickly shellacked kitsch, a Czech equivalent of African airport art.
But the man from Brno, with whom we carried on in German a clumsy but satisfying conversation on politics and industry, on his grown children and on his second family, showed us how, in a train jouncing down a mountainside, he carved this stick, ingeniously using the knots in the pine to make variations on the traditional patterns.
Enchanted by his skill, I asked where one could buy such a present for my son back home (unaware then that he was making it for his own). You can't buy this kind, he told me, you have to make them yourself. You don't sell them, but you can give them away. Generosity feeds benignly on itself, and a boy in Brno now wears my wristwatch. On the bus to Presov, a very ordinary lady was wearing her Sunday-best apron--another brilliant everyday improvisation on traditional themes, the commonest black shiny cotton transfigured by what one is reduced to calling "modern" juxtapositions of green, beige and brown.
The state-run crafts shops attempt to market these everyday arts, but only in Kosice, the least metropolitan of the big cities, did we find materials that even approached in quality the do-it-yourself crafts of the Slovaks. Surely the collections of such materials gathered in the Eastern Slovakian Museum at Kosice are among the most splendid anywhere in the world. It is perhaps significant, too, that the exhibition of Russian useful arts (mostly ceramics and textiles) at the Eastern Slovakian Gallery in Kosice was as vigorous and true as the exposition of Socialist Realism next to the statue of Jan Hus in Prague was complacently tawdry.
The Czech (and especially Slovak) capacity to hang onto traits in their culture which protect a human scale in the midst of grandiose bureaucratic failure is a precious legacy they bring into the 20th century. It is part of their Schweikmanship, a tactic learned at infinite cost over centuries of brutal interventionism--Tartars, "benevolent" medieval German economic developers, anti-Hussite mercenaries in search of vacated estates, Bohemian book-burning Jesuits, Hapsburg anti-nationalist overlords, Nazis and now the Russians.
It behooves the Russian occupiers to read The Good Soldier Schweik. It should give them second thoughts about the costs of Russifying Czech Communists. Our Prague guide, who had given up teaching history to be a grandmotherly baby sitter, proudly told us, a week before the Russian occupation, how the city hall architects conned the Nazi authorities our of dismantling the fine Mikolas Ales mosaics in the entranceway to the old Town Hall: They claimed the whole tower would come tumbling down if the occupiers tried to expunge the fighting words worked into the design.
Perhaps the most useful historical tradition the Czechs take very seriously is not forgiving those who have the best of intentions for "helping" them. Peter Cheloicky, the 16th-century Bohemian proto-anarchist whom Tolstoy praised for his prescience, had some savage observations to make in The Net of Faith (1521) on another vanguard elite: "It is thus as regards the poverty of the monks: If it were true poverty it would be blessed, but their poverty is insatiable and endures no want; therefore has it only the name of poverty ... And if a poor monk obtains such abundance for his dinner table that he disdains beef and delicious peas with fat bacon, but wags his tail when he sees game, birds, or other delicacies that are better than peas, then he has got himself a good livelihood by his begging; and he and his companions the other monks have made a better business out of begging than some squire who has a plough and two fields, or even a large farm."
The night after the mendacious Russian leaders had made their ritual visit there, we were taken to the Slavin memorial high above Bratislava by two young architecture students who wanted to show us the best view of their city. They amused us with anti-Russian jokes and stories (and hearty but unsynchronized laughter, because each story was filtered through a babel of Slovak, French, German and English). They pointed to the flaring red exhausts of the petrol refinery, along the Danube and groused bitterly that the Russians sent them crude oil and they sent it back, refined, free. They noted bitterly that the American Army had no comparable monument in Pilsen, and openly wished that they hadn't stopped there.
Perhaps it is unfair, even to the Russian occupiers. Americans lost no 20 million in the war against the commonly hated German. But the Russians had better face the utter disillusion of the Czechs with Stalinist rigidity. The students we talked with simply don't accept agitprop ideologies. They regaled themselves with puns on how the Czech pronunciation of democracy comes out sounding "crazy." And they openly mocked tipsy workers at a Danube cafe who were trying to bait us with workers'-solidarity slogans. The overflowing Sunday churches in Slovakia, with worshipers standing outside the doors in the rain, were offering prayers, we were told, for the success of Dubcek.
That is a reality of character which not many Czech quislings will have the courage to buck. Russia's bad conscience about the pressure for liberalization at home has sucked it over the brink in Czechoslovakia. Judging from what we saw of Czech disenchantment with failing slogans and their joy in the new feeling of freedom, the Russians are going to regret this precipitate step. Their cure may well cause them more pain than the infection they wanted to stop. For the Czechs are not melodramatic Hungarians, ready to assault a tank with upraised hands. If I were a Russian occupier, I'd watch my fuel lines. There's more than one way for a Schweik to sweet-talk a Russian bear into wishing he had never left home.
Reprinted from THE NATION, September 9, 1968
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