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.
“Here, you see this photo? It was taken on the morning of August 21, 1968, by the Hajný brothers, Jan and Bohumil. Their photos became famous later. You see that woman with the small boy? Well, that happens to be me. Do you notice something odd about this photo? See how the people are behaving; see the woman with the white handbag. She must have heard the tank; she must have seen it coming. Yet she is walking down the street as if taking a stroll, probably deliberately so. Nobody seems to be panicking in this picture, and that, considering that the tanks are rolling closer and closer, is very strange behavior, no? You would think that people would be screaming and running away, scared. But no, the citizens of Prague are slowly walking, minding their own business, while the occupation army is entering their city! Oh, I just love this photo! No, not because I am in it, but because it captures a certain attitude of the people: pride, arrogance, even, in the face of might — like a kind of highly civilized act of protest. A kind of heroism the Czech way, as if we were saying, we are superior to your tanks. That is how we were, proud, brave. Those tanks did not humiliate us. We felt undefeated — at least for a short while! The best of Czechoslovakia is here in these photos. When you think that it was not about a revolution, not a demand to abolish Communism, but only to reform it into ‘socialism with a human face.ʹ. That day we listened to radio reports about what was happening, about clashes with the tanks in Vinohradska Street. The people of Prague were fighting the Warsaw Pact’s 750,000 troops and 6,000 tanks with Molotov cocktails and barricades! We had no chance. Dubček was kidnapped by the KGB and forced to sign the Moscow Protocol that legalized the Soviet occupation. I still remember that feeling of powerlessness and defeat that settled in and stayed with us for the next twenty years.”
“At least people now know that 1968 in Czechoslovakia was the beginning of the end,” the professor used to say. “They learned the hard way that Communism is not to be reformed. But never in their wildest dreams could they have imagined that another attempt to reform Communism — a copy of 1968!— would come from within the USSR itself, and that it would mean its demise. Did you know that Gorbachev was friends with Zdeněk Mlynář, one of the leading figures of the Prague spring? Ah, Gorby, hated and forgotten in his own country. I remember how the whole Western world applauded him, as if he really wanted to dispatch Communism to the ‘graveyard of history,’ as it were. His achievement was that he did not, could not, send the army against us again (or against other Communist countries, for that matter). And this made it possible for our revolution to be velvet. Not so velvet as one might think, though: My own son, a student then, got hit in the head by the police during the November seventeenth student protest. My daughter soon became a member of Obcanske forum and knew Vaclav Havel personally. To me it’s as if it all happened yesterday. Yet, it was twenty years ago when I was standing under the balcony at Vaclavske namesti, where Havel was speaking, and chanting: ‘Havel to the castle!’ We wanted him to become president, and imagine — he did! He did! But once the dream was fulfilled, reality sank in.”