But while visiting Prague and East Berlin last December, I kept thinking about those angry and grieving exiles and felt increasingly ashamed of myself. I should have listened harder and learned more. In Prague, there were people like them everywhere, with the same gaunt faces and ill-fitting clothes, the same grievances against injustice, except that now the world was listening. Their uncontested leader was the fifty-three-year-old playwright Vaclav Havel, whose moral authority was based on the years he’d spent in the country’s prisons. But when I first saw him, at a basement press conference in the Laterna Magika theater, I realized that he easily could have been one of those men from the sidewalk opposite the United Nations.
He did not speak in slogans. Even when addressing vast crowds, Havel’s language is concrete, precise, nuanced; he does not rant; even in confrontations with his former jailers, he sounds most reasonable. But his mission was the same as that of his countrymen: to get the dead clammy hands of Stalinism off Czechoslovakia and allow its people to breathe freely. Within a month after Prague police had used bats, clubs, and gun butts on hundreds of student demonstrators, Havel and other members of the opposition umbrella group called Civic Forum managed to force the old hard-line leaders to accept the first noncommunist government in the nation since before the communist coup in 1948. Not a shot was fired, not a window broken. It was an amazing process to watch; I woke each morning charged with an exhilaration I had almost never felt in the minefields of politics.
This revolution was a triumph of human intelligence. Czechoslovakia, like all countries ruled by totalitarians, was an oligarchy of the stupid. After 1968 the country’s best writers, including such world-class talents as Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky, and Ludvik Vaculik, were silenced, jailed, or driven into exile. Rock ‘n’ roll musicians were thrown into dungeons. Only the corniest jazz (white Dixieland, for example, or moldy swing music) was officially tolerated. The brilliant Czech new wave of ’60s filmmakers was halted, the best people exiled or cast out of the industry, while the Barrandov film studios ground out witless comedies and historical epics that nobody went to see. Thousands of scientists, engineers, schoolteachers, and scholars were removed from their jobs because they were ideologically suspect, and were then forced to do the most menial labor. In all cases, they were replaced by mediocrities, ass-kissing careerists, and Stalinist hacks. It was the most sustained act of national stupidity since Spain expelled both the Jews and the Arabs within ten years of each other at the end of the fifteenth century, thus ridding itself of its most brilliant artists, architects, mathematicians, and merchants.
For an American, some of this was uncomfortably familiar. We, too, once had a blacklist that prevented writers, directors, and actors from working in movies or television — on ideological grounds. During the McCarthy era, we, too, lost scientists, schoolteachers, and scholars, on ideological grounds. Our religious Right continues trying to impose its party line on everything from abortion to the content of television shows. We have a free press, but the vast majority of our newspapers wouldn’t challenge the intelligence of a cocker spaniel. Certainly, in our mass media, we seldom read, see, or hear from American communists or socialists, who are dismissed as a disloyal opposition. In Prague, people showed me bound copies of samizdat, precious hand-typed books passed from person to person because they were banned from the bookstores. In East Berlin I saw a line of almost three hundred people waiting in a freezing rain to buy the first West German books to be sold in the East. But a glance at any American best-seller list, or the shelves of any bookstore in a shopping mall, will show you what most Americans have chosen to do with their freedoms.
Still, we have choice, and until last year, millions of Eastern Europeans had no choice at all. Those who protested, like Havel, were visited by the secret police and taken away in handcuffs. He was a writer, and writers are rememberers or they are nothing. And that made him dangerous. In Czechoslovakia people were told to forget the Prague Spring, to forget the country’s democratic past between the world wars, to forget the 1948 coup. The social contract was simple: Let the party make the big decisions and the individuals could make most of the small decisions. If they agreed to give up memory and a critical intelligence, citizens could indulge in small bourgeois pleasures: a cottage in the country, a car, skiing, clothes that made Czech women the most chic in Eastern Europe. In Moscow, citizens wait in line for potatoes; on Parizska Street in Prague, I saw a line outside Christian Dior.
But the basic neo-Stalinist demand was for national amnesia, and that, too, was familiar. It was at the heart of the Reagan era, when Americans were urged by the Great Communicator to forget Vietnam and forget Watergate, and use borrowed money to indulge in mindless pleasures.
This is not to say that the United States is the moral equivalent of a totalitarian state. That’s ludicrous. But all human beings, including Americans, are confronted every day by the temptation of the totalitarian solution. Wandering the streets of Prague and East Berlin, I never saw a homeless person, never ran into a junkie, never felt a personal sense of menace. The total state, after all, places order above all human values, including justice. But back home in New York and Los Angeles and other American cities, I’ve talked to many people over the years who demand those Good Old Draconian Measures to deal with our disorders. They would gladly surrender the Bill of Rights if that meant clearing the streets of drug addicts and gunmen. I even heard this argument from some of the Eastern European exiles on the rainy sidewalks outside the United Nations.
That taste for the draconian certainly hasn’t perished from the earth, as we saw in December in Romania and Panama. In the hardest of the old Stalinist states, the end came in blood and destruction, with the ruling family joining that of the czar on the casualty lists of the century’s revolutions. In Panama, an American soldier was killed, another soldier’s wife was insulted, and the great might of the United States was unleashed on the regime of Manuel Noriega. According to polls, most Americans loved this fierce spectacle. And while such peaceful and historic events as the collapse of the Berlin Wall drew poor television ratings, many cheered the brutality of the Romanian revolution. Apparently, nothing makes American blood quicken faster than the spirit of revenge. If it’s history, most of us yawn; if it resembles a movie, we snap to attention.
That was what was so special about the events in Prague. Over and over, Havel and the others sent out the message: We are not going to do to them what they’ve done to us. “That would be the worst corruption of this revolution’s ideals,” said a filmmaker named Antonin Masa, who had spent twenty years directing his movies only in his imagination. “We want a country that is generous and decent. And where every man can speak his piece. That’s all. Revenge is a debasing emotion.” Another quoted Albert Camus, saying how it should be possible to love one’s country and justice too.
There are lessons here for all of us. The American Right, after an initial period of bafflement, is claiming a triumph of capitalism over communism. “But that’s not what is going on here,” said Rita Klimova, who lived in New York as a child from 1939 to 1946, returned to Prague, became an economics professor, was blacklisted after the fall of Dubcek, and earned a marginal living as a free-lance translator. “If people here had to choose a model, it would probably be Sweden. A democratic socialist society, with freedom for the individual. This is a struggle for choice.” Others noted that in the places where the United States did use physical force in the crusade against communism (Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam), Stalinism was still in power, its authority reinforced by the need (real or imaginary) to resist an outside threat. In Eastern Europe, the more pacific techniques of trade, cultural exchanges, and communications helped bring about the great change. Stalinism eventually fell of its own dumb weight. One Czech friend said to me: “There were two specific factors. One was Gorbachev, who made it clear that he wouldn’t send the tanks. The other was the decision to stop jamming Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America. That allowed us to get hard news. We didn’t care about the propaganda or the oratory. Just the news. That was very important.”