Let’s stop at this exhibit of a typical shop in the USSR. Shops here looked much better, so I was made to understand. In comparison to Moscow, Prague shops were like elegant supermarkets: full of food, especially after 1968, in the period of so-called normalization. Here you could see two kinds of canned food. That’s perhaps an exaggeration; there must have been a few more items in the shops in the USSR, at least in the big cities. Still, you have to imagine what it was like to live on very meager means. Ordinary poverty, you think? I’ve heard others say that too, meaning that there was poverty in the West also, especially after the war. Well, you could call it poverty, I suppose, but it is really not the same. “Poverty is when there are things to buy but you don’t have the money for them. A shortage is something else: it is when you have the money but there is nothing to buy—the articles are either not produced or not delivered to the shops—because of the way the planned economy works.” Again, this is how Professor Perlík explained it to his pupils. “I mean, you had to be very skillful to get certain products, like shoes, for example. It worked almost like the natural exchange of goods, or if not goods, then services: If you provide me with the medicine I need, I can help you get a better coat, and so forth,” he explained.
Also, shortages seem to be the key to understanding the end of Communism. You think it was Pope John Paul II? Or Mikhail Gorbachev’s ideas of glasnost and perestroika? Or both of them combined? Yes, of course, everybody agrees on that. But take a look at this shop again. Toilet paper is not exhibited here, and for good reason: There wasn’t any. Nor were there sanitary napkins, or diapers, or washing powder—not to mention coffee, butter, or oranges. Milena remembers when a friend would travel abroad—Yugoslavia was abroad then, because it was outside of the Soviet bloc—and there in the midseventies you could get toilet paper—her friend would fill a suitcase with rolls and rolls of it! Banalities, you might say—but they, too, decided the destiny of the Communist regimes everywhere. In order to understand why Communism failed, one has to know that it could not produce the basic things people needed. Or, perhaps, not enough of them. How long could such regimes last? The success of a political system is also measured in terms of the goods available to ordinary people, I suppose. And to mice, I might add. Sometimes, when I am making my bed from the fine, soft Italian toilet paper that Milena puts in our toilets, I wonder if my life would have been different if I had been born under Communism. Yet, there is communism and Communism, of course. My cousins in Romania, for example, had to chew on their tails sometimes just to keep hunger at bay. That was never the case here. In Czechoslovakia during Communism, the authorities merely needed to keep the price of beer low; otherwise they would have had a real revolution on their hands! Most probably that was the main reason why beer was always so cheap here.
Now we come to an interrogation room. Everybody says that this is the centerpiece of this museum. Indeed, here you can see what I mean when I keep saying that in this museum much is left to the individual imagination. Again, there is not much for you to actually see in this room: a desk, two chairs—one in front, one behind the desk—a lamp, an old typewriter, a hanger with the notorious black leather coat. Why notorious? Because they say that agents of the Soviet secret police would come for you in the middle of the night habitually wearing such a coat. Yet, what can these things, this setting, tell visitors like you, if you don’t know what happened in such interrogation rooms? Not much. You can see the statistics on the wall—names and numbers, again. They hide horrible stories, but as in the case of Auschwitz, these are abstractions. How can one present the people, the living persons behind the numbers? You have to make an effort to see the individual destiny, a man who has been interrogated and whose spirit is broken. Professor Perlík mentioned Arthur Koestler’s book Darkness at Noon and Arthur London’s The Confession—if I remember correctly. I know that the professor had a neighbor who testified at the trial of Rudolf Slansky during the first wave of Stalinist purges in the fifties here. He survived the whole ordeal. “But that man,” said the professor nodding sadly, “was never the same again.”
If anything, this room is the symbol of absolute power. In such rooms they would force people to betray not only others but themselves as well. On the other hand, this was the destiny of relatively few people. But think of something else not represented here. Think of how people lived—hundreds of millions of them—with a feeling that an interrogation room had been installed in their brains. You could not see it, but it was there. Now again you might think that I am exaggerating. But I’m merely speaking of self-censorship. It is a situation in which you yourself become your own interrogator—on exactly the opposite side of freedom of expression. What, you wonder if this was a form of political correctness? My dear Hans… let me put it this way, if I might quote the professor again: “Political correctness grew out of a concern for others; self-censorship grew out of a fear of others.” Surveillance of each other was installed as a system—perfected in the USSR but practiced everywhere. For example, you had no way of knowing if your elderly neighbor, who would even cook you a soup when you were ill, was in fact reporting on your every word and move. If you could not trust the people around you, in your house or at work, you would behave cautiously, controlling yourself. The system of surveillance and self-control lives off of fear and suspicion. It is a simple and efficient psychological mechanism that turns people into liars—and, therefore, into accomplices of the regime.
But, again, there were shades of gray even within this self-censorship. Antonín Novotný was not exactly Stalin, even if there are those who would like to see him like that nowadays. He used to blow his top over films like Closely Watched Trains by Jirí Menzel, which was awarded an Oscar in 1967, and The Firemen’s Ball, By Milos Forman. Or over novels by Ludvik Vaculik, Pavel Kohout, and Milan Kundera, all critical of Communism. In the midsixties the atmosphere in this country became so liberal that Secretary General Alexander Dubček believed it was even possible to reform Communism when he became secretary general in 1967. The invasion by the Warsaw Pact military force in 1968 started because of the Soviet fear of our reforms—of losing its grip on us, that is.
I recently overheard Milena telling some visitors the following story:
“That summer I saw Soviet tanks rolling into the streets of Prague. I will never forget that day. I was barely twenty years old, and I had gone out with my brother. We were running some errands downtown, and at one moment he asked me to buy him an ice cream. It was August twenty-first, a pleasant, sunny morning. We were somewhere near the National Theatre, and there, at the corner, was an ice cream stand. And just as we were turning to get there we heard a strange noise. It sounded like a thunderstorm at first, then like some huge, powerful machine moving. Indeed, I felt the asphalt tremble under my feet. As we were about to cross the road, we saw a tank at the bottom of the street, some hundred meters away. A tank in the middle of Prague! I had never seen a real one before, only in war movies. It was slowly coming toward us, very slowly, as if the soldiers were in no particular hurry. I remember we both just stood there, looking, as if hypnotized…