Part III - Vaclav Havel's speech, January 1, 1990
Part IV - Ivan Klima - The Spirit of Prague
Here are some excerpts from Ivan Klima's wonderful collection of essays "The Spirit of Prague". Klima's a great novelist, too. I highly recommend his work. Here he talks about Prague itself, he talks about Havel, about Kafka, about the "velvet revolution". Don't miss these excerpts, and check out that book if you ever get the chance.
Klima on Prague:
The Prague of past eras is gone. No one can bring the murdered back to life, and most of those who were driven out will probably never return to the city. Nevertheless Prague has survived and has, finally, tasted freedom again. Its spirit is intact as well. This manifested itself vividly during the revolution that opened the way to freedom in 1989. Revolutions are usually marked by high-sounding slogans and flags; blood flows, or at least glass is shattered and stones fly.The November revolution, which earned the epithet "velvet", differed from other revolutions not only in its peacefulness, but also in the main weapon used in the struggle. It was ridicule. Almost every available space in Prague -- the walls of the buildings, the subway stations, the windows of buses and streetcars, shop windows, lampposts, even statues and monuments -- were covered, in the space of a few days, with an unbelievable number of signs and posters. Although the slogans had a single object -- to overthrow the dictatorship -- their tone was light, ironic. The citizens of Prague delivered the coup de grace to their despised rulers not with a sword, but with a joke. Yet at the heart of this original, unemotional style of struggle there dwelt a stunning passion. It was the most recent and perhaps the most remarkable paradox to date in the life of this remarkable city.
Klima on Kafka
What you call the dream world was, for Kafka, the real world -- the world in which order reigned, in which people were able to grow fond of each other, make love, raise families, be orderly in all their duties -- but for him, with his obsessive truthfulness, this world was unattainable. His heroes suffered not because they could not realize their dreams, but because they were not strong enough properly to enter the real world, to fulfill their duty.The reason Kafka was banned under communist regimes is explained in a single sentence by the hero of my novel Love and Garbage: "What matters most about Kafka's personality is his honesty." A regime that is built on deception, that asks people to pretend, that demands external agreement without caring about the inner conviction of those to whom it turns for consent, a regime afraid of anyone who asks about the sense of his actions, cannot allow anyone whose veracity attained such fascinating or even terrifying completeness to speak to the people.
If you ask what Kafka meant to me, we get back to the question we somehow keep circling. On the whole Kafka was an unpolitical writer. I like to quote the entry in his diary for 2 August 1914. "Germany has declared war on Russia. -- Swimming in the afternoon." Here the historic, world-shaking plane and the personal one are exactly level ...
Kafka's metaphors were so powerful that they far exceeded his original intentions. I know that The Trial as well as "In the Penal Colony" have been explained as ingenious prophecies of the terrible fate that befell the Jewish nation during the war, which broke out fifteen years after Kafka's death. But it was no prophecy of genius; these works merely prove that a creator who knows how to reflect his most personal experiences deeply and truthfully also touches the suprapersonal or social spheres. Again I am answering the question about political content in literature. Literature doesn't have to scratch around for political realities, or even worry about systems that come and go; it can transcend them and still answer questions that the system evokes in people.
This is the most important lesson that I extracted for myself from Kafka.
Klima on Havel
Havel's candidacy for president and his later election were, in the first place, an expression of the precipitate, truly revolutionary course of events in this country. When I was returning from a meeting of one of the committees of Civic Forum [the organization Havel formed in November, 1989, to investigate police brutality] one day towards the end of November, my friends and I were saying to each other that the time was near when we should nominate our candidate for the office of president. We agreed then that the only candidate to consider, for he enjoyed the relatively wide support of the public, was Alexander Dubcek. But it became clear a few days later that the revolution had gone beyond the point where any candidate who was connected, if only by his past, with the Communist Party, was acceptable to the younger generation of Czechs.At that moment the only suitable candidate emerged -- Vaclav Havel.
To a certain sector of the Czech public, Havel was, indeed, more or less unknown, or known as the son of a rich capitalist, even as a convict, but the revolutionary ethos that seized the nation brought about a change of attitude. In a certain atmosphere, in the midst of a crowd, however civil and restrained, an individual suddenly identifies himself with the prevailing mood and state of mind, and captures the crowd's enthusiasm. It's true that the majority of the country shared in the doings of the former system, but it's also true that the majority hated it just because it had made them complicit in its awfulness, and hardly anyone still identified himself with that regime which had so often humiliated, deceived and cheated them.
Within a few days, Havel became the symbol of revolutionary change, the man who would lead society out of its crisis.
Klima on fear and power
If power becomes so total that it can commit any arbitrary act, can falsely accuse anyone, arrest, try and sentence him for imaginary crimes, confiscate his property, his job, his freedom and, on top of it all, publicly dishonor him with insults, then fear can also become so total that almost none of those things need actually be done to maintain it. The powers that be need only occasionally demonstrate that they are willing and able to behave arbitrarily. We live in a world in which the powerful govern by means unlike anything humanity has ever known. They can control and exterminate individuals and entire peoples. As long as these means exist, our world will remain a world of fear.The fear that sleeps in the beds of the powerless gives a strong impetus to their dreams and their actions. The powerless person longing to escape his anxiety usually sees only two ways out: to flee beyond the reach of the hostile powers, or to become powerful himself. Fear engenders dreams of power.
...Power is soulless and it is derived from soullessness. It builds on it and draws its strength from it. Soullessness keeps company with fear. People who have given up their souls have only a body, and it is the body they are terrified for ... People who have not given up their souls can overcome fear because they know that in the end, fear comes from within and not from without. The person who has let anxiety from the external world replace his soul can never drive out his fear. Anyone who has defended his soul, his inner integrity, and is prepared to surrender everything, to risk even his freedom of movement and, in extreme need, even his life, cannot be broken by fear and is thus beyond the reach of power. He becomes free, he becomes a partner of power, not as a competitor in the struggle for control of the country, people and things, but as a living reminder of the mendacity and the transcience of everything power defends and represents ...
A person who, out of inner need, consistently stands up to the powerful, risking everything, has a single small hope: that by his actions, he will remind those in power where that power came from, what its origins are and what their responsibility is, and perhaps he will make them a little more human.
Klima on the 1968 invasion
The invasion of my country in August 1968 was a singular act in modern history: it was the only time a foreign country had intervened militarily in the peaceful affairs of a neighbor to which it was allegedly tied with bonds of friendship. The invasion was, of course, traumatic for most citizens ... But the shameful nature of the invasion indelibly tarnished all those whose intention it was to renew the old-style totalitarian power.As I have said, the appearance of being cultured and civilized is particularly important in Czech lands, where centuries of national and cultural repression have made culture, and especially literature, popular and highly respected. The powers-that-be needed poets to cloak their intentions and actions in verse ... But they needed them pliant, or even broken ... The powers-that-be were usually able to win over a part of the intellectual elite through promises, bribery, concessions and sometimes even by force.
But how could a power that was indelibly tarnished win them over? It could not. It sensed its own isolation and therefore decided to use compulsion. The early 70s were a turning-point for both the powers-that-be and for Czech culture. The regime decided to break those who, in their eyes, represented that culture, even at the cost of destroying the culture altogether. For their part, the members of the intellectual elite decided that they would rather be destroyed than have anything to do with this indelibly tarnished power.
Klima on the 1989 velvet revolution
The authorities frequently used police brutality to break up memorial assemblies to commemorate the country's national holiday or the memory of Jan Palach ... Those who came to pay their respects to a person who symbolized the possibility of individual protest taken to its furthest extreme became the object of a violent attack by special units who used truncheons, water-cannons and tear-gas. People, mostly the young, decided not to give way to violence.For 5 consecutive days the peaceful assemblies were repeated, and on four occasions the police used violence to break them up. Several people were arrested, Vaclav Havel among them.
During these events, which aroused the emotions of the whole country, the cruel truth about power was publicly revealed for the first time. At this critical juncture, the government could not find a single person with sufficient authority to address the nation. No one was willing to give public support to the regime, but many could be found to protest against police brutality, against imprisoning the innocent. Among the protestors were actors, filmmakers, and writers who, until then, the regime had believed to be on "its side".
In this critical situation, the authorities -- and it is hard to say whether this was out of stupidity or desperation or arrogance, or the awareness that they were indeed indelibly tarnished -- refused all invitations by the cultural opposition to take part in a dialogue. The deep chasm between totalitarian power and all the "shaken", to use Patocka's term, became unbridgeable. It was clear that any further error, any further act of arrogance, might be fatal.
What happened in November 1989 is well known. As an eyewitness and a participant, I wish to emphasize that this revoltuion, which really was the outcome of a clash between culture and power, was the most non-violent revolution imaginable. In the mass meetings attended by up to three-quarters of a million people, no one was hurt, not a window was broken, not a car damaged. Many of the tens of thousands of pamphlets that flooded Prague and other cities and towns urged people to peaceful, tolerant action; not one called for ciolence. For those who still believe in the power of culture, the power of words, of good and of love, and their dominance over violence, who believe that neither the poet nor Archimedes, in their struggle against the man in uniform, are beaten before they begin, the Prague revolution must have been an inspiration.
Amen!
Vaclav Havel made a speech on January 1, 1990, immediately following all of the extraordinary changes which had occurred in his country. This speech along with many many others made it into the book I have of "Speeches of the 20th Century".
The first time I read it, I was sitting on a crowded subway. By the end, tears were rolling down my face. In retrospect, I think that is hysterical. If anyone noticed I was crying, I am sure they would never have guessed the reason - and would have thought I was insane if they had asked:
"Ma'am, are you all right? Why are you crying? Did your boyfriend break up with you?"
"Oh ... uh ... no. I'm crying because of Vaclav Havel's speech to the Czech people in 1990."
".....Oh..."
Havel's speech, broadcast on the radio, set the tone for all that was to follow. It is referred to as "the contaminated moral environment" speech. After decades of double-speak, decades of being lied to by their own government, decades of muffling their true sentiments, Vaclav Havel stood up and told the truth. He had been preparing for this moment since the 1960s.
And that's another thing. We, as human beings, can recognize truth when we hear it. We know when we're being lied to, deceived. Truth is unmistakable, and Havel knew that. And Havel did not let the Czech people off the hook - another reason why the "velvet revolution" was so amazing. It was not about pointing fingers, screaming, "YOU DID THIS TO US". Havel encouraged the Czech people to take responsibility in their destinies, to take responsibility for having endured the tyranny for so long. The "contaminated moral environment" is not only addressing the Communist regime. He addressed that comment to every Czech person who had tolerated living under tyranny. No passing the buck, no blame. Take responsibility.
Imagine. How many leaders ever speak to their people in such a way? This speech is one of the myriad reasons that Vaclav Havel is one of my political heroes.
Quotes from his extraordinary speech - (the last line makes me want to cheer):
But all this is still not the main problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous ...
The previous regime -- armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology -- reduced man to a force of production and nature to a tool of production ... It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skillfully working in their own country, to nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy, and stinking machine, whose real meaning is not clear to anyone ...
When I talk about contaminated moral atmosphere ... I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all -- though naturally to differing extremes -- responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery; none of us is just its victim: we are all also its co-creators ...
We have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us only, to do something about it. We cannot blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue but also because it could blunt the duty that each of us faces today, namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably and quickly ... Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all.
If we realize this, then all the horrors that the new Czechoslovak democracy inherited will cease to appear so terrible. If we realize this, hope will return to our hearts ...
In the effort to rectify matters ... we have something to lean on. The recent period -- and in particular, the last six weeks of our peaceful revolution -- has shown the enormous human, moral, and spiritual potential and civil culture that slumbered in our society under the enforced mask of apathy. Whenever someone categorically claimed that we were this or that, I always objected that society is a very mysterious creature and that it is not wise to trust only the face it presents to you. I am happy that I was not mistaken. Everywhere in the world people wonder where those meek, humiliated, skeptical, and seemingly cynical citizens of Czechoslovakia found the marvelous strength to shake from their shoulders in several weeks and in a decent and peaceful way the totalitarian yoke...
There are free elections and an election campaign ahead of us. Let us not allow this struggle to dirty the so far clean face of our gentle revoltuion ... It is not really important now which party, club, or group will prevail in the elections. The important thing is that the winners will be the best of us, in the moral, civil, political and professional sense, regardless of their political affiliations ...
In conclusion, I would like to say that I want to be a president who will speak less and work more. To be a president who will ... always be present among his fellow citizens and listen to them well.
You may ask what kind of republic I dream of. Let me reply: I dream of a republic independent, free, and democratic, of a republic economically prosperous and yet socially just, in short, of a humane republic which serves the individual and which therefore holds the hope that the individual will serve it in turn. Of a republic of well-rounded people, because without such it is impossible to solve any of our problems, human, economic, ecological, social, or political.
People, your government has returned to you!
This is mercilessly long. Just a little heads-up. It's the story of Czechoslovakia throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
World War II
But all of that became meaningless with the outbreak of World War II. Czechoslovakia's location was disastrous for them. I mean, in actuality, their location was strategically fantastic for them in other times. They sat right on one of those most significant land routes in Europe, which was all very good for shipping goods in and out, for their military to move in and out, for trade to travel. But with all of Europe gone to hell, Czechoslovakia was caught right in the middle.
Look at a map of Czechoslovakia, and take a look at the countries surrounding them (at the time, Slovakia was part of the nation though, of course). It is obvious how trapped they were. It is like they are trapped in a vise: Germany chomping on them to the West like a big Pacman, Austria yawning beneath them like quicksand.
Czechoslovakia had millions of German-speakers, who got caught up in the nationalistic fever happening in the Pacman-country to the West. They wanted to join their country-men. They NEEDED to join their German countrymen. Hitler agreed. This is the whole "Sudetenland German" problem. The first terrible moment of appeasement.
The Munich Agreement, the betrayal of the Allies
And this is where Czechoslovakia was sold down the river in the Munich Agreement in 1938. Hitler demanded that the Sudetenland be returned to him. And then (famous last words): "That will be my last demand! All I want is the Sudetenland!" It was given to him. Czechoslovakia was handed to Germany by the countries of Europe.
There was a Czech underground, there were protests, there was some preparation for going head-to-head with Hitler all on their own, since the big leaders of Europe seemed willing to let them be chewed up and spit out. Europe basically said to Czechoslovakia in the Munich Agreement, "Buh-bye. We are feeding you to the lions. Sorry. We just can't fight this guy." Most of the Czech intelligentsia were killed (and this is very important to remember: resistance in Czechoslovakia has always been at the hands of the intellectuals). So the Germans, of course, knew this, and all of the intelligentsia were shipped off to concentration camps or just killed outright.
Ivan Klima, a Czechoslovakian writer was sent to a concentration camp as a small boy. There is a wonderful collection of his essays called The Spirit of Prague which I'm going to quote from later. He's awesome. He can describe the experience of living under a totalitarian fascistic regime, using no theory, no abstractions.
But anyway. Onward.
The Germans leave, the Soviets arrive
In 1945, the Czechs were rising up against the German forces, war breaking out, mini-battles, fighting for their lives. With no help from the Allies, who had abandoned them in the Munich Agreement. Meanwhile, the Soviets were closing in on them from the east.
On May 5, 1945, the Czech resistance in Prague rose up so fiercely against the Germans, that the German troops retreated out of the country. By that point, the German army was a rag-tag bunch of terrified starving soldiers, trying to do their best for the Fuhrer, but losing, losing, losing. They had already lost. This was a big victory for the Czechs, but then, on May 8, 1945, three days later, the Soviets rolled into town.
Under the Soviet umbrella
Czechoslovakia was established as an independent state in the Soviet sphere. There were large-scale deportations of German and Hungarian populations. The Germans who were deported following World War II, are still, to this day, demanding the return of their property. The country was permitted the freest multiparty democracy in Eastern Europe. This was mostly because there was genuine sympathy for Communism already existing in Czechoslovakia. In Czechoslovakia you didn't see the kind of harsh enforced Communism the way you saw in Poland or Lithuania or many other places.
An interesting factoid that I pulled off the CIA website (and take these statistics - like all statistics - with a grain of salt): the religious breakdown in the Czech Republic goes like this:
39% atheist
39% Roman Catholic
4% Protestant
That really stood out for me - I haven't encountered any other country in the Factbook with religious statistics like that, and so it got my attention. Atheists are tied as the largest religious group in the country. If this number is true, then it would make sense that the Communists didn't have as tough a time. In other countries, seriously Catholic countries like Poland, atheism had to forced down the people's throats, and the Poles fought back HARD against this. Catholicism was an essential part of their identity - it was the receptacle of their collective spirit. This intensified with Pope John Paul II - a Pole. They looked to HIM for guidance, not to the Politburo. The Communists, to punish the Poles, would turn their cathedrals into "Museums of Atheism". This would not have outraged the Czechs as much as it did other more religiously faithful countries.
They had elections in 1946 and the Communist candidates won the majority of the popular vote. This was one of the only instances where a country occupied by the Soviet Union willingly chose Communists to run their country. But by 1948, with the economy still suffering, the country going bankrupt, support for Communism was definitely waning.
The Communists could feel that they might be losing their grasp, so in 1948 they organized a coup d'etat, and seized absolute power, through the unions and the police. And Czechoslovakia fell. And fell. And fell.
After 1948
It soon became one of the most repressive regimes in Eastern Europe. People imprisoned, executed, sent off into exile, sent off to prison camps, the gulag ... All dissent was squashed, through fear and terror. Only the intellectuals kept the identity of Czechoslovakia alive. Only the intellectuals tried to keep the Czech language alive. Only the intellectuals tried to maintain the memory of the country. Everybody else was cowed. Beaten.
Then along comes:
The 1960s
Czechoslovakia started waking up. I suppose it must have been the tenor of the times, but there were other factors as well. The 1960s was a fever, spreading all over the world. The Czechs experienced a cultural awakening, they started remembering who they were.
But along with the Zeitgeist of the time, a lot of this awakening had to do with who was in charge of the country: Alexander Dubcek. He was a Communist, he was one of the founders of the Czech Communist Party actually. But he had different ideas from Moscow. He began making moves to liberalize the country. He wanted to end censorship. He wanted to open up dialogues again. His motto was: "We will show the world Socialism with a Human Face." Socialism with a Human Face. He wanted to prove to the world that Communism need not be synonymous with Dictatorship. He dismantled any vestige of a personality cult around himself (a necessity for all other Communist leaders). He promised the Czechs "rule of law".
It's hard to imagine what it must have been like for the people of Czechoslovakia at that heady time. I can only try. I can only read what they write, the memoirs of that time - Kundera, Klima, Havel, and others. Hope rising up, happiness, freedom, being able to SPEAK, being able to feel like they are joining the rest of the world again, after decades of repression, hope, hope, all of this hope coming from their LEADER. Who seemed to hear what they were saying, expressing their own desires.
All of this was going on without the blessing of Moscow. Dubcek, a die-hard Communist, assumed that the Soviets would not care. He trusted the leaders in Moscow. He underestimated them.
He, maybe even more than the Czech people themselves, was devastated by what happened next.
1968: The Prague Spring
The Prague Spring refers to the cultural awakening coming to a real head through the early months of 1968. There was a sense of possiblity, of hope.
Moscow was alarmed by what was going on in Czechoslovakia. They had no interest in promoting Socialism with a Human Face. Freedom of the press means that people can criticize the regime, can criticize Communism, and if people can criticize then the cracks in the entire facade will widen. Moscow felt that they must have an unbroken Red Wall of Unity to present to the rest of the world. Nobody can deviate from the party line.
Moscow demanded that all of the Warsaw Pact allies participate in an invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush Socialism with a Human Face, to crush what was also called "the Czech Experiment". (An interesting sidenote: Nicolae Ceausescu, dictator of Romania, refused to join in the invasion, and because of that, the West LOVED him, and ignored the fact that the man was a villain, a despot, a crackpot. He was wined and dined all over the West for not stepping in line with the rest of the Warsaw Pact, and hailed as a maverick leader. Yeah, he was a maverick all right! So maverick that he starved his own citizens in order to built dams, he turned off heat and electricity in the middle of the winter so he could pay back the country's debt ahead of schedule, he criminalized birth control ... you remember those horror images of starving Romanian orphans strapped to their beds in the late 1980s? That's his doing.)
In early August of 1968, the entire leadership of Czechoslovakia was flown to Moscow, to be scolded by Brezhnev. Actually, no, it wasn't a scolding. He was warning them. "Cut this shit OUT." Dubcek (a real hero) refused to cut the shit out. Dubcek refused to turn his back on his ideas that Socialism did not have to mean cruelty and tyranny. He would not denounce the Prague Spring. But Dubcek still did not believe that Moscow would invade. He did not believe that Moscow would turn on him. And so - in a way - he was brainwashed by the Politburo as well.
On the night of August 20-21, 1968, the Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague and took the city back by force. By the next day, 58 people had been killed.
Wenceslas Square, in Prague, was the focal point of the resistance to the Soviet invasion. (See the movie "Unbearable Lightness of Being" for an incredible look at what it must have been like.) Chaos. Horror. Grief. And utter betrayal. The "Czech experiment" was over.
The world was horrified. But nobody did anything. Nobody stopped it. The Czechs, once again, were thrown to the wolves.
Dark dark days ahead.
The Crackdown
After the invasion, Gustav Husak was responsible for whipping the country back into shape. He himself had been a victim of Stalinist repression and had spent 8 years in prison. That, to me, is one of the most insidious things about such tyranny: the persecuted become the persecutor. Nobody escapes.
Husak whirled through the country like a tornado. He did a major purge of the Czech Communist Party, getting rid of anybody who might have sympathized with the idea of Socialism with a Human Face. Anybody who might even be on the FENCE about it was gone. And major Stalinist hard-liners were brought in to replace them.
And once again, nothing changed in Czechoslovakia until 1989 when everything fell apart in two weeks time.
The country was completely closed off from the rest of the world. Prague became a Communist backwater, as opposed to one of Europe's premier cities. Nobody could travel, nobody could leave. Censorship was imposed. All liberalization programs introduced by Dubcek were cut off.
Oh, and what happened to Dubcek?? The father of Czechoslovakian Communism was forced to resign, obviously, in 1969, and then he was kept under house arrest from 1968 until 1987. And he wasn't allowed to communicate, or write, or let the Czech people know he was alive, and still around. The Communists, in the words of the Mafia, "disappeared" Dubcek. I am so glad they didn't "disappear" him forever, because once the Soviet Union started collapsing, suddenly Dubcek emerged again, and the Czech nation was able to express, openly, to him just how much he meant to them. Just how much they appreciated his sacrifices. How much, basically, that they loved him. Nobody had heard from him in decades. They thought he was dead. And then ... like a ghost ... he came out from house arrest, accompanied by Vaclav Havel, and the people of Czechoslovakia, waking up once again, could not believe their eyes. Dubcek! The man who tried to set them free! His emergence made them remember who they were. And then they fought back like hell, and toppled the house of cards. At last.
1968 - 1989
But up until 1989, the Czechs suffered under a hardline Stalinist regime. Who knows what was going on in the privacy of Czechoslovakian homes, but on the outside: they became a drab backwards silent Communist country. The borders closed, the trade unions shut down, everything got very reactionary, and extremely rigid.
GLASNOST
Gorbachev's idea of glasnost was a huge threat to Gustav Husak. Husak LIVED in the shadow of the 1968 invasion. He did not want the humiliation of Dubcek, being rejected by his former Communist friends. Husak refused to take on glasnost as a concept, even though Gorbachev was encouraging all of his "clients" to do so. Husak held on, and held on tight, to the old way.
And again, it was as though the Czech people were under a cloud. Glasnost did not infect the Czech nation. The 1968 invasion had been so devastating, so painful.
The only people protesting, and demanding that Husak start adopting glasnost, were the intellectuals. The writers. Vaclav Havel, most of all. Vaclav Havel had been there the whole time, stirring up shit, creating human rights organizations, writing plays, getting arrested, getting in trouble ... but it was never enough to make the population, as a whole, rise up. It was more like a "cafe" revolution. Tortured intellectuals talking about a better world over cups of coffee, while outside, all the normal people slogged off to work, unaware, uncaring.
As the astonishing changes started sweeping through Eastern Europe, during 1988 and 1989, the Husak regime became more and more alarmed. Their response was to crack down harder and harder, isolate their country even more. Idiots. You can't keep out life!
Oh, and I forgot to tell about one important thing:
Jan Palach ... and what he meant
The year after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, in 1969, Jan Palach, a young student in Prague, burned himself to death in the middle of Wenceslas Square to protest the invasion of his country. He killed himself on January 16, 1969.
In the years after, the decades after, nobody was ever allowed to memorialize Palach. People would secretly gather together on the day of his death to remember him, but any public sentiment of mourning for Palach was punishable with prison time. This was one of Havel's raison d'etres: every single year he would stage some sort of public memorial service for Palach, and every year he would get arrested. But this never stopped him, this never shut him up. Palach WOULD be remembered.
Today, the spot of his death is marked with a cross and a plaque. People every year gather around to remember this martyr for the cause of a free Czechoslovakia.
So back to glasnost.
Glasnost 1988, 1989
Suddenly, unbelievably, during 1988 and 1989, without Moscow's "permission", without Husak's "permission", Czech people started flaunting forbidden things: the Czech flag, photos of Dubcek, photos of Palach. They were, in the words of Havel, "behaving AS IF they were free in an unfree nation". It was a quiet rebellion, though. No demands for change were made, and Husak had created an environment that barely let the Czech people breathe on their own.
On November 17, 1989, the Communist youth movement in Prague organized a demonstration, a peaceful demonstration, to memorialize 9 students killed by the Nazis in 1939. A peaceful crowd of 50,000 people gathered. Mostly students and intellectuals. The workers of the country remained slumbering. Rip Van Winkle. The Husak regime brutally crushed this peaceful demonstration. 500 people were beaten by the police. 100 people were arrested.
And this, suddenly, was the spark. The straw. The galvanizing moment when the entire Czech nation woke up. When the entire Czech nation suddenly HEARD what Havel had been saying for so many years, and stepped in line beside him.
Instead of crushing the rebellion, the regime, through its own actions, exploded it into an inferno.
The Velvet Revolution
Let me try to describe it to you from an uber-perspective, so you can get just how fast this all happened. It stuns me.
In 1988: Czechoslovakia remained a place of repressive calm. The only loudmouth was Vaclav Havel. And nobody was listening, except for people in the West. His own country ignored him.
In 1989: a movement began, a student movement. The students began calling for a change in government, they began calling for change.
Oct. 1989: 10,000 students demonstrated, calling for change. There was a massive show of force from the government. Heavily armed police put down the demonstrations, and the tyrants stayed in power. (Here's something else: by December, 2 months later, the entire Communist Party in Czechoslovakia had resigned. I mean, this is stunning. But I get ahead of myself.)
Nov. 17, 1989: The memorial demonstration for those killed by the Nazis, people arrested, people beaten ... This was the spark I have spoken of.
The days following Nov. 17: Instead of backing down, the students kept demonstrating. Every single day. Every single day the crowds got larger, and larger, and larger. The students, the intellectuals, kept begging the workers to join them. They needed their support. It was a difficult fight, it took a lot of persuading over the days following Nov. 17, but the workers, so long asleep, finally left their jobs, went on strike, and joined the students. Constant demonstrations. Husak had no more authority.
More in November, 1989, it was a big month: Vaclav Havel, at the forefront, created an organization called the Civic Forum, to investigate charges of police brutality on November 17. He was relentless. And every day, the crowds got bigger. And louder. Vaclav Havel not only was calling for investigations, he was also calling for the entire Communist Party to resign.
And...
on November 24, 1989 They did. The entire Politburo resigned, in one shot.
From November 17 to November 24 is just 7 days. Unbelievable.
AND: (it gets better, it gets even more breathtaking)
On December 29, 1989, Vaclav Havel is elected president of the new free Czechoslovakia. And Dubcek emerged from hiding, at Havel's side, and was elected speaker of the national assembly.
A peaceful transition of power. A so-called "velvet revolution". The Communists basically gave up, and walked away.
There was not one casualty in Czechoslovakia, following the Nov. 17 demonstration. Compared to other countries in Eastern Europe, this is phenomenal. A tribute to the Czech people, I would say.
In 1993, the nation experienced what they called "a velvet divorce" from the Slovaks. They split into two national components: the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Havel was president of Czechoslovakia for 10 years. He stepped down in February of 2003, and Vaclav Klaus is now the President. The Czech Republic is now a member of NATO, and were invited to join the EU in 2002. It is expected that they will be ready to join in 2004. Their economic policies have been working for them, and they have made an amazing economic recovery, after decades of Soviet mismanagement. Tourism is booming. The industrial base (completely decrepit and outdated through the years of Communism) has been updated, and is functioning at a very high level. There are goods to buy, the cities are blossoming, Prague is back. They've still got problems, of course. Every country does. They suffer from severe pollution, much of the land was destroyed during the decades of Communism, there's a lot of crime ... but these are the basic problems for every city. The Czech Republic has joined the world again.
It's one of my favorite stories of the 20th century. The story of their "velvet revolution".
Per my dad's request, here are my "Czech Republic" pieces, hijacked over from my old blog.
To all the historian readers I have - please feel free to interject at any time - and let me know if my interpretation is faulty, or if I'm missing certain elements. I am not an expert. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Also - I have a love for Czechoslovakia, primarily through its art - a deep love - and so I am completely biased, and this may color how I talk about things.
Let me know if this is the case!
This first piece is on the long history of what is now called The Czech Republic.
This first essay takes us up to World War I.
Back in the day
Czechoslovakia has never stayed in the same form for too long.
In the 5th and 6th centuries, the Slavs arrived in this region. The various tribes adopted Christianity soon after and eventually cohered into an empire. An empire that didn't last very long. It was called the Great Moravian Empire, and had its glory days from 830 to 906. It was a large empire, encompassing areas in Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Silesia and Bohemia. Silesia and Bohemia are now regions in the Czech Republic.
At the end of the 9th century, the Czechs seceded from this empire to form the country of Bohemia. (A country named Bohemia clearly would eventually elect Vaclav Havel as president.) But the Czechs still were factioned off into little tribes, squabbling tribes, without any unification. So it was very easy for King Otto I (King of Germany) to stroll into Bohemia in 950 and conquer them. Bohemia was incorporated into the Holy Roman Empire, but still: King Otto gave the Bohemian prince (Otakar I) at the time the right to some degree of autonomy (again: this is a theme which also comes up again and again in Czech history) and self-rule. The son of the Bohemian prince (Otakar II) was more ambitious than was expected of him: he tried to claim for himself the title of Holy Roman Emperor, and he also tried to proclaim himself King of the Czechs. This all happened during the middle ages, the 1200s.
Otakar II was doomed for disappointment. The imperial crown instead went to Rudolph Hapsburg, which ushers in a whole new phase in Czech history.
The Hapsburgs were strong rulers. Tyrannical to some, benign to others. It was an empire, after all. The Czech people were subjects in this empire, subjects with a long memory, a memory of a grand past, when they had princes and kings. This past is symbolized (to this day) by Prague Castle, an undeniable reminder of the greatness of this nation once upon a time. During the long drab years under Soviet rule, their borders were closed off, and they were completely cut off from the rest of the world. But there ... in Prague ... was their castle. The memory of the country contained in its borders; the Soviets could not erase that memory, even though they tried.
Under the Hapsburgs, Bohemia flourished. They had strong protection from the empire, and so were able to blossom, and experience a Golden Age, since they didn't have worries about self-defense or keeping enemies at bay. Prague became one of the most important cities in Europe.
Moving along in history...
I know a lot of huge stuff went down in the 14th and 15th centuries, but it gets confusing, and I am not too sure of my facts, so I will not be vague, and pretend I understand it all.
I know there were revolutions, I know there was some sort of mass religious reform movement which alarmed the Catholics, and caused a lot of problems. The status quo of Catholicism in Europe was threatened by the reform. And then along came the Hapsburgs again. The Hapsburgs were, of course, a Catholic empire.
The Czech nation came under the Hapsburg sphere again in the 1500s. The Hapsburgs made promises to the Czechs, and did not follow through. (This is yet another theme in the story of Czechoslovakia.) They said that they would have religious tolerance for minorities, they promised freedom, and they also promised the Bohemian royal families that they would maintain their royal privileges. None of this occurred. The Bohemian Royal Estates revolted against this, violently. Two Hapsburg officials were pushed out of a window, and plummeted to their deaths. This event sparked the Thirty Years War. Well, no. That is an exaggeration. There was a hell of a lot of religious turmoil swirling all across Europe at that time. And THAT was what sparked the Thirty Years War ... but the Bohemians were so rebellious, and so angry, and actually killed some of the Hapsburgs, so the Hapsburgs felt they had no choice but to crack-down, and crack down HARD, on the pesky little Czechs.
But the real issue in Bohemia, is that the Hapsburgs wanted to stomp out Protestantism, squash it like a bug.
Like I said: I am tearing through this story. I am missing a lot.
The Thirty Years War
This war was crushing to the Czechs.
Here's a quote about what happened (one of those interminable quotes I collect - sometimes I remember to write down where it came from, sometimes I do not - This one, unfortunately, is un-attributed):
The Austrian Habsburgs had failed in their efforts to increase their authority in the Empire and to eradicate Protestantism, but they emerged from the war stronger than before. In Bohemia, they had stamped out Protestantism, broken the power of the old nobility, and declared the crown hereditary in the male line of their family. With Bohemia now firmly in their grasp and with their large group of adjoining territories, they were ready to expand to the east in the Balkans, to the south in Italy, or to interfere once more in the Empire.
So in the end, the Czechs lost everything. They lost all of their rights. They lost all of their hard-won freedom. They lost their property. They also then were put through forced Catholicization and forced Germanization. The Hapsburgs (again: sometimes benign, sometimes tyrannical) wanted to wipe out the concept of Czech national identity. They wanted to erase the individuality of the Czech people off the map forever. This was devastating. And they nearly succeeded.
What is so incredible, and hopeful, is that it did NOT succeed. You cannot do that to people. You cannot. They will, no matter what the hell you do to them, remember who they are, and where they came from. Sometimes, the worse the tyranny, the stronger the cultural memory. Milan Kundera writes about that so well.
But here's what's even more incredible:
After the Thirty Years War, the Hapsburgs kept Bohemia under such a strong thumb that nothing changed in that country for THREE CENTURIES. I mean, of course, people grew up, got married, died, had fun, cried, built buildings, tore buildings down. But I'm talking about evolution as a nation. That completely stopped. They were beaten. Defeated.
The Hapsburgs won.
Until ...
The mid-1800s
Tracy Chapman may think that revolution "sounds like a whisper", but the year of 1848 was a year of shriekingly loud revolutions, which caught on like a brushfire, leaping across borders, igniting in first this country, then that one. Not a hell of a lot of whispering going on. Empires, monarchies - all going up in flames.
Bohemia got caught up in it, too, despite the lead cloak of the Hapsburgs. They began to buck against the authority (the Czechs seem to have a talent for that). They may LOOK like they are being compliant, but underneath it all: they are ready to explode.
I read a great quote from Vaclav Havel about his many years living under Soviet oppression. And of course, he was a big loud-mouth trouble-maker, writing inflammatory plays (none of which were allowed to be performed in his own country), creating human rights organizations, ignoring the ban on public meetings of more than 10 people. Vaclav Havel, at one point, decided to "behave AS IF he were free, in an unfree nation". He was arrested countless times, he was constantly followed, spied upon ... but he behaved AS IF he were free. This seems to me to be a talent of the Czech people.
Anyway. Back to the story.
Slowly, slowly ... the Czech people began to contemplate being a free and independent state. This desire percolated for many years, as the Hapsburg Empire slowly deteriorated.
All of that ended when Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian student, stepped out of the crowd one day in Sarajevo and assassinated the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Of course, this was the shot heard round the world. The shot that began World War I.
History was about to speed up again for the Czechs. Only to come to a shrieking halt once more.
Here are all my blitherings about Hungary, compiled:
This post is a simple version of the Hungarian revolt against Soviet Russia in 1956, the revolt which had such long-lasting implications, in terms of its effect on the psyche of Hungarians.
This is why, as the edifice cracked in the late 1980s, demonstrations commemorating fallen heroes were such a massive deal in all of the countries of the Soviet bloc. Heroes whose names had been erased from the public record, heroes the Communist Party wanted to wipe out of people's memory banks ...
The 1956 revolt in Hungary cost an estimated 30,000 lives.
The Soviet Army tried to control the protests, the demonstrations. They cracked down on the journalists, the academics, the students ... all to no avail. The revolt kept escalating, gathering speed and momentum.
The year was 1956. The Cold War was in full bloom. The Communists were not going to give an inch. So the Soviet Army feigned a withdrawal from all the hotspots in Hungary. People noticed the troops were gone, they noticed that they were no longer being watched and persecuted. So they relaxed. The dissidents and loud-mouthed intellectuals and journalists came out of hiding.
And on November 4, 1956, the Soviet Army launched a surprise attack and crushed the uprising, decimating the opposition. The tanks rolled through Hungary, terrorizing the population. There were Stalinist show trials, tons of people were hanged and tossed in unmarked graves. People were forced to rat each other out, people were tortured, murdered, executed. The spirit of Hungary was crushed (temporarily), along with the revolution. It's like the country went into a deep depression after that, a clinical depression which lingered, and lingered, and lingered.
Moscow then secretly put Janos Kadar in full charge of the country. He had actually been freed from prison by Mr. Nagy. Kadar dominated Hungary from 1956 until 1988, when he was deposed. It sounds to me like he was a Soviet puppet.
The long-delayed funeral service for Nagy in 1989 was one of the sparks which lit the match which ignited the entire world of Eastern Europe to throw off the Communist dominators. You cannot obliterate a people's memory. You cannot tell them who to care about. You cannot say, "No no no no, Nagy really wasn't for YOU ... he was a pawn of the Communists ... Love KADAR...LOVE KADAR." People are NOT that stupid.
I am thinking of Iran. The Shah (the last Shah, anyway) could not make the Iranian people love him and get behind his plans for their country. No matter how hard he tried, he had not captured the hearts and minds of his people. You cannot fake the kind of devotion and mania the Iranians had when Khomeini returned to Iran. This sort of devotion can be dysfunctional, and terrifying, like all of the Aryan youths marching around screaming "Heil, Hitler!", or it can take on a more benign form.
Imre Nagy, the prime minister of Hungary, a Communist himself!, did not want the country to be crushed and dominated by Communism. He did not want the citizens of Hungary to be dogged by secret police wherever they went. He stood up for them, he spoke up for them. He paid for this with his life. The Hungarians love him. He is their hero. Their voice.
The outpouring of love over 30 years later at Nagy's funeral was baffling to the Communist Party, which continued to try to control things in Hungary. But they were increasingly losing it. They refused to rehabilitate Nagy's memory.
But here is the New York Times article (or an excerpt from it), describing what happened at this memorial service in June, 1989.
Thirty-one years after he was hanged and his body thrown into a prison grave, Imre Nagy, who led the 1956 uprising against Soviet domination, was given a solemn funeral today ... The ceremonies were organized by the opposition, which worships the former Prime Minister as a national hero, but four leading members of the ruling Communist Party came to pay tribute ... The four top party officials ...left before a succession of eulogies to Imre Nagy that were unsparing in their condemnation of the Communist Party and its ally, the Soviet Union.Many in the crowd looked up in shock and seemed to be holding their breath to hear at so public a ceremony, in so sumptuous a setting, words of such astonishing candor ...
Victor Orban, a spokesman for the Federation of Young Democrats, paid tribute to Mr. Nagy as a man who, although a Communist, "identified himself with the wishes of the Hungarian nation to put an end to the Communist taboos, blind obedience to the Russian empire and the dictatorship of a single party." ...
Sandor Racz, who led the Budapest Workers' Council during the uprising and spent seven years in prison, condemned the Soviet Army and the Communist Party as "obstacles for Hungarian society". ... He said the party was "clinging fearfully to power," although it was clear that "what it failed to achieve in the last 44 years cannot be remedied now." He continued, "They are responsible for the past. They are responsible for the damaged lives of Hungarians."
Budapest experienced a day full of anomalies and contradictions. No state funeral could have been more solemnly and publicly marked or held in a more prestigious settling, but for the Hungarian Governemtn and the ruling party, Mr. Nagy and the four companions who were sentenced to death and now reburied with him remain traitors and counterrrevolutionaries...As recently as earlier this year, Mr. Grosz still ruled out Mr. Nagy's rehabilitation. On the 30th anniversary of the hangings last year, the police broke up with considerable violence a small tribute organized by dissidents on a Budapest square.
It was an anomaly also that the Soviet Union and Hungary's other Communist friends sent diplomats, but not their ambassadors, to attend the ceremony, although it had no official character that would have obliged them to be there. But other Communist countries -- China, North Korea, Romania, and Albania -- stayed away.
The Heroes Square ceremony was staged, in one more irony, by the son of another executed Communist, Laszlo Rajk, who was Interior and Foreign Minister. Mr. Rajk, a loyal Communist, was hanged after a show trial in 1949 at the height of the Stalinist period. The younger Laszlo Rajk, an architect and movie set deisgner, draped the neoclassical facade of the art museum and a tall column in the center of the square's vast expanse fully in black and white, traditional mourning colors among the Hungarians of Transylvania, annexed by Romania. He devised strikingly modern wood and metal structures as a setting on which to display the five coffins, as well as a sixth, empty one commemorating the more than 300 victims of judicial retributions after the uprising. Tall, flaming torches stood between the coffins, and a permanent rotation of honorary pallbearers -- including widows, children, and other relatives of the five victims being buried -- flanked them ...
Today, after the wreath-laying and eulogies, a procession of hearses, followed by cars and buses, set out for the huge public ceremony next to the prison where the hangings took place ... Beyond them, in an adjoining field full of mainly unmarked graves, a tomb had been dug for Mr. Nagy. His daughter had requested that he be laid to rest amid the bulk of those who paid with their lives for following his lead.
Two actors read in alphabetical order the names of the 260 victims, who were executed from 1956 to 1961, their occupations and their ages. At each name, a torchbearer stepped forward, held high the flame and replied, "He has lived in us; he has not gone."
When the name of one of the five was called, surname first, in the Hungarian fashion, like "Nagy Imre, Prime Minister, 62 years," his coffin was carried to the grave and a friend delivered a eulogy. Then, supporting one another, his nearest relatives stepped to the grave to put down flowers and stand, with bowed heads, allowed for the first time to mourn in public, together with those who share their grief.
Unbelievable.
After that funeral service, the power of the Communist Party continued to erode throughout the summer. The party leadership elected a four-man presidency, and then it stripped one of the four (who had succeeded Kadar as party leader) of all authority. The party liberals were rising, and suddenly: other parties outside the political system started sprouting up. Parties of dissidents, cultural activists, ecologists, cultural nationalists. These parties all started calling for pluralistic free elctions. They demanded that they occur in 1990. No more "some day", no more "we're working on it." It was 1989. They wanted the elections in 1990.
And indeed, elections were scheduled by 1990, and secretly the Communist Party members in Hungary began talking amongst themselves about how to liquidate the party's assets, and change its name (so they could participate in the free elections as well).
This post is made up of excerpts from Robert Kaplan's man-on-the-street reporting from the streets of Budapest. It is a mix of historical information, personal impressions, and quotes from a man he meets - Rudolf Fischer. Kaplan's books are never straight history, which is why I enjoy them, although they may be displeasing to history buffs because it focuses on the personal, and on somewhat anecdotal information.
I like the anecdotes. I like meeting the people of the country through Kaplan's eyes.
These excerpts are snapshots from that chapter.
Fischer unfurled his set of late-nineteenth-century Austrian army staff maps and a somewhat earlier German one. "These are the maps you must use at the start of your journey," he told me. "They are better than Cold War era maps. The maps before 1989 are, of course, useless. The Iron Curtain is still a social and cultural border. Do you know the real service provided by McDonald's in Hungary and the other formerly socialist countries? They are the only place where people -- women, especially -- can find a clean public lavatory."
Kaplan on the still reverberating echo of the Roman empire:
Very simply put, the split running through the Balkans between the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires to which Fischer referred reflects a much earlier division. In the fourth century A.D., the Roman empire divided into western and eastern halves. Rome remained the capital of the western empire, while Constantinople became the capital of the eastern one. Rome's western empire eventually gave way to Charlemagne's kingdom and to the Vatican: Western Europe, in other words. The eastern empire -- Byzantium -- was populated mainly by Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians, and later by Moslems, when the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople in 1453. The border between the eastern and western empires ran through the middle of what after World War I became the multiethnic state of Yugoslavia. When that state broke apart violently in 1991, at least initially it echoed the division of Rome sixteen centuries earlier: The Slovenes and Croats were Roman Catholics, heirs to a tradition that went back from Austria-Hungary to Rome in the West; the Serbs, however, were Eastern Orthodox and heirs to the Ottoman-Byzantine legacy of Rome in the East.
Kaplan on the Carpathian Mountains:
The Carpathians, which run northeast of the former Yugoslavia and divide Romania into two parts, reinforced this boundary between Rome and Byzantium and, later, between the Habsburg emperors in Vienna and the Turkish sultans in Constantinople. Rudolf Fischer told me that the Carpathians, which were not easily traversed, halted the eastward spread of European culture, marked by Romanesque and Gothic architecture and by the Renaissance and Reformation.
A quote from Rudolf Fischer on the Carpathian Mountains and the divide between West and East:
"Romania -- because of the influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation in the northwest of the country -- had been more developed than Greece before World War II! It was only the Truman Doctrine -- $10 billion in American aid, in 1940s dollars no less -- that created today's westernized Greece. Let me go on in the same vein. The differences between the Hungarian Stalinist leader Matyas Rakosi and the Romanian Stalinist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, and even more so between their successors, Janos Kadar and Nicolae Ceausescu, were the differences -- don't you see! -- between Habsburg Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey. Rakosi and Kadar may have been perverse Central Europeans, but as Hungarians, they were Central Europeans nonetheless. But Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceausescu were Oriental despots, from a part of Europe influenced more by Ottoman Turkey than by Habsburg Austria. That's why communism did less damage to Hungary than to Romania."
Fischer on the difficulty Hungary faces in escaping its communist past:
"Our whores in Budapest are Russian and Ukrainian; our money -- though it floats freely -- is still worthless in the West; our oil and gas are from Russia; and we have mafia murders and corruption just like in the countries to the south and east. Mafia shootings and the drug trade put pressure on the Hungarian government to make [entrance] visas compulsory for Romanians, Serbs, and Ukrainians, who are thought to be the culprits, but that will never happen, because it will separate us from the ethnic Hungarians just over the [Romanian] border. We are tied to the ex-Communist East, whether we like it or not."
Kaplan on the lingering effects of Communism in the Hungarian urban landscape:
...the hallway in his building was dark and untidy, like many that I had seen throughout the former Communist world, where decades of state ownership had given people no incentive to maintain property, an attitude that was changing slowly. There was, too, the building itself, and all the others in Fischer's neighborhood, whose unfinished look and poor construction -- plate glass and mustard-colored cinder blocks -- were more typical of buildings in formerly Communist Central Asia than those in Austria, just a two-hour ride away by train. The Berlin Wall may have fallen in November 1989, but for a traveler almost a decade later, its ghost was still present.
A conversation between Kaplan and Fischer about Hungary, NATO, and the EU:
Kaplan: "What about NATO? Will its new eastern frontier -- following the admission of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary-- mark the border of the Near East?" Fischer: "NATO doesn't matter. Only the EU is real. The EU is about currency, border controls, passports, trade, interest rates, environmental and dietary regulations -- the details of daily life -- which will change Hungary. For decades Austria was not part of NATO, but did you ever think of Austria as part of Eastern Europe or the Near East? Of course not."
Kaplan expanding on the new Near East:
Therefore, it appeared likely -- at least if the EU expanded into Hungary, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Poland but took a decade to grant full membership to Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Turkey, and Russia -- that the Western alliance would be an eerie variation of the Holy Roman Empire at its zenith in the 11th century, and the split between Western and Eastern Christianity would be institutionalized once more, as it had been during the divisions between Rome and Byzantium and the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. The Near East would then begin on the border of Hungary and Romania. Completing the reemergence of this older map, Russia was now returning to the dimensions of 16th century Muscovy: a vibrant city-state within a chaotic hinterland.
A conversation between Fischer and Kaplan about the borders of Hungary:
Fischer: "Hungarians want to spiritualize the frontiers -- that is the word that they use here."
Kaplan: "You mean they want the borders to be filters: to protect, but not to divide."
Fischer: "Perhaps. What the Hungarians really want is to let ethnic Hungarians from the east into Hungary, but nobody else."
Fischer on modern-day Europe:
Fischer then railed against the "modern age" in Europe, in which democratic stirrings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries strengthened ethnic nationalism, while industrialization strengthened the power of states. The result was the collapse of multiethnic empires like Habsburg Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey and the rise of uniethnic powers like Germany and of nasty tribal principalities in the post-World War I Balkans, though they were in some cases called parliamentary democracies. Even the 1848 democratic revolutions in Central Europe, it seemed, were not so pure; they were based on ethnicity as much as on liberal ideals, and in Hungarian (Magyar) areas, at least, were opposed by the minority Croats, Serbs, and Romanians. For Fischer, with his background, the modern age had meant "Magyarization campaigns" and other forms of "ethnic cleansing", crucial to the establishment of petty states tyrannized by ethnic majorities.
A personal story from Fischer's past which illuminates the problems with Hungarian nationalism. It is the story of what happened to him on his 21st birthday, September 17, 1944:
"Because my father and I had fled Romania when World War II broke out and managed to get visas to Australia, I was in the Australian army on my 21st birthday. My commanding officer had given me a short leave. Thus, I spent my birthday alone, walking in the Australian countryside and thinking about who among my family and friends back in Transylvania were alive or dead. What had happened to them? Soon after the war, I learned that on that very day, Hungarian soldiers shot the entire Jewish population of Sarmas, a village east of Kolozsvar, in Transylvania. Those poor people. They had thought of themselves as Hungarian. They spoke Hungarian. They had managed to survive five years of fascism without being deported to concentration camps. It was as if they had been miraculously forgotten while every kind of horror reigned around them. Then their own Hungarian soldiers appears in Sarmas, and what did they do? They herded all the Jews into pigsties for several days and then took them to a hill and massacred them. Within the Holocaust, there were many little pogroms. This is why I remember so vividly walking alone in Australia on my 21st birthday. Because the memory of it was preserved by what I later found out had occurred on that same day in Sarmasu. You see, Robert, Hungarian nationalism, Romanian nationalism -- they're all bad. The boundary formed by the Carpathians was benign compared to these modern nationalistic boundaries, because the Carpathians divided empires within which peoples and religions mixed. I am a cosmopolitan. That is what every civilized person must now try to be!"
Fischer says to Kaplan: "We are going for a walk. I have something to show you which you must see before you start on your journey.":
Near Orczy Square, in the far-off southeast corner of Budapest, we came to an immense hodgepodge of metal-framed stalls and greasy canteens set up in abandoned Russian railway cars. I saw Chinese-manufactured high-top running shoes on sale for the equivalent of ten dollars, sweaters for four dollars, socks, clocks, jackets, cell phones, shampoo, toys, and just about any other necessity -- all cheap and made in either Asia or formerly Communist Europe. Many of the goods were Russian. The food at the canteens was Turkish. The merchants were Chinese, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and other Central Asian nationalities, but mostly Chinese. i noticed bus stops for destinations in Romania and other points east, but never west. Hungarian policemen were ubiquitous, for there had been several murders here recently. Nobody was well dressed."People in Budapest call this place the Chinese market," Fischer told me. "It grew in the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed and China loosened travel restrictions on its own citizens. It is a real caravansary." Chinese families dominated a vast underground trading network that provided cheap goods for the overwhelming majority of people in Eastern Europe, who could not afford the new Western-style shops. Here, any language worked. Commerce was the great equalizer. "Yes, it is a bit violent, with gangland killings," Fischer said. "But is it any different from the backstreets of Odessa one or two hundred years ago, where my Jewish ancestors and yours were carrying on much as these people do now?"
"This is all I have to show you, Robert," Fischer concluded. "Remember that the Iron Curtain still forms a community. Just look at this market. Over four decades of the most comprehensive repression cannot be wished away in a few years." Fischer guided me onto a tram and rode with me for a few stops. "It is good that you will be passing through Transylvania. Ah, so much to see there," he said, his voice full of longing. Then he stepped off the tram and waved good-bye by lifting his walking stick.
This post is about the world-wrenching events of 1989, and Hungary's role in all of that.
The Berlin Wall came down in November. But that mind-blowing development was created by a crisis in Hungary. A crisis for the Communist Party and for the Soviet Union in general.
Basically, the edifice of the Communist Party had been crumbling for awhile, and suddenly, in a matter of a year, there was no mask left. Nobody cared, nobody listened to them anymore. There was no belief in the power of the Communist Party. It was a paper dragon. The slaughter in Beijing, under the eyes of the visiting Gorbachev, had something to do with it, but it also was a fever which spread across the world, in all places at once. Lech Walesa and Solidarity, the massacre of demonstrators in Tbilisi ... every single country began to explode, and the Communist Party was completely ineffective in dealing with all of these crises. There would be no Prague Spring this time. No one listened to the mouthpieces anymore. No one feared the Paper Dragon.
And here is what the Hungarians did: Let me make sure I get this straight:
For decades, Hungary was a popular vacation spot for people from behind the Iron Curtain. It was a summer "resort" spot, with lakes and cabins (as opposed to a wintry Alp-type atmosphere.) Knowing the holiday season in Hungary is important because it was when everyone started returning home for their vacations in late August, early September 1989, that everything started changing, cracking, accelerating.
East Germans and West Germans would use Hungary (a relatively open and relaxed Communist country ... as opposed to the more Stalinist Romania, or the wacky militant Bulgars) as a meeting spot in the summer months. Families would be reunited, would have vacations together on a yearly basis, and then return to their respective homes, on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain.
For forty years, the Hungarian border guards were fierce about making sure that the East Germans returned to East Germany. The border with Austria was one of the toughest and most harassing in the world, because it was the place where you could escape. Austria represented Europe, and the West. Hungary was Communist, so the poor East Germans didn't have a chance to escape because everybody had their eye on them. First of all, they were hated because they were Germans, part of the country that started two World Wars. Second of all, they were from a divided country. They still had enormous family connections on the other side of the wall. Of course they wanted the wall to be taken down, so that they could be with their relatives again, see their families again. This was just the sort of tight family bond that the Communist Party frowned upon. And the situation in Germany was extremely volatile because of this. The Berlin Wall did not make things easier for the Communists. It made things worse.
So anyway. Back to Hungary.
Hungary had a treaty agreement with East Germany, signed in 1968, saying that they would not permit East German citizens to travel to the West via Hungary.
And then suddenly, in the early autumn of 1989, the foreign minister of Hungary (Gyula Horn) decided to ignore his treaty obligations. He did so without any permission from Moscow, without any discussion with the politburo. This is just incredible.
But here's what led up to that autonomous decision which changed everything. What is so incredible is how quickly the massive Communist structure toppled. The rot within was so extensive. The East Germany refugee crisis was in September1989, the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, and it all was over by summer of 1991.
Phenomenal.
Hungary decided to let some of the East German refugees pass through to the West with their families and the border guards turned a blind eye. At first. So this is in itself incredible, and goes to show you how much things had relaxed, how the power had been crumbling bit by bit - until in one fell swoop, it no longer existed. But what began as a small trickle of people exploded, and quickly, into a massive refugee crisis. Once people heard that you could get to the West easily through Hungary, they all basically packed their bags, left East Germany, and poured into Hungary. This was an incredibly embarrassing situation for the Communists in Moscow, and for the politburo in Hungary. What should they do? There were thousands and thousands of people suddenly crushing up against the border with Austria. Tens of thousands of refugees. And this was not a refugee crisis of the kind we are accustomed to - poor bedraggled people, huddled in tents on a windy plain. These people were young, educated, and supposedly the future of the Communist Party.
Here's a quote from Michael Dobbs' great book Down with Big Brother:
Unbeknownst to either man, the foreign minister of Hungary made a decision, in the privacy of his Budapest home, that led inexorably to the fall of the Berlin Wall less than three months later. Gyula Horn was grappling with the kind of excruciating moral and political dilemma familiar to many Communist reformers that summer. Over the past few months Hungary had been transformed into a holding pen for tens of thousands of East German refugees. Very few were political dissidents. For the most part they were young people, fed up with the austerity of life under communism and the never-ending snooping of the secret police. They had given up on their dogmatic Communist leaders, who seemed allergic to the very idea of reform, and were voting with their feet. From Hungary they wanted nothing more than safe passage to the bright lights of capitalism in West Germany. "There is no future for us in the East" was a common refrain. The foreign minister had to decide whether to let them go or keep them penned up in the Communist East.
Now this is amazing: Yes, Hungary had this treaty with East Germany. Hungary did fear that the hard-liners in Berlin, in Moscow, would come down on them fiercely if they broke this treaty and let the refugees go through. Czechloslovakia's "Prague Spring" in 1968 had been a warning to all Communist countries everywhere of what could happen if you started ignoring Moscow.
HOWEVER: a few months before Hungary filled up with East German refugees it had also signed an international agreement pledging freedom of travel, and also "humane treatment" of refugees.
So this was Horn's dilemma. He knew the whole world was watching his country's behavior because Hungary had signed this international agreement, stating its commitment to human rights. Hungary was a Communist state. Was it possible for a Communist country to protect the human rights of its citizens, as well as people "visiting" their country? Beijing was an obvious debacle in this regard. The world was still shocked, stunned, and devastated (one more descriptive term, Sheila??) by the massacre in Tienamen Square. There had been hope that the Chinese government was changing: allowing the students to speak out, allowing forums on democracy, etc. But once they were confronted by an actual revolution, they crushed it like a bug.
Would Hungary go the same way? Would Hungary reveal itself to be as hypocritical and as afraid as China? Would it honor its agreement with Moscow? Or would it honor its agreement with the world?
Horn (a hero in my book) decided, on his own, without getting permission from the powers-that-be in Moscow, to stand by the international human-rights agreement, and NOT the agreement with East Germany.
Another quote from Dobbs:
After a sleepless night, pacing up and down his sitting room, the 57 year old foreign minister made up his mind. He decided to abrogate the treaty with East Berlin and let the refugees go. Hungarian leaders had earlier taken the precaution of informally testing the waters with Moscow. The Soviets appeared to have no objection."There was no other way," Horn recalled later. "We had to look for the humanist solution, no matter what sort of conflict might arise. It was quite obvious to me that this would be the first step in a landslide-like series of events."
And he was certainly correct. East Germans fled their own country in droves. They piled into Hungary, poured out through Austria, and then poured into West Germany to be reunited joyously with their families. This directly led to the Berlin Wall coming down a couple of months later.
"We had to look for the humanist solution, no matter what sort of conflict might arise" said Horn. God bless him. He may have acted out of a sense of his own political survival, and not out of any lofty goal. But still - in an uber sense, he did the right thing.
Unfortunately, my notes about Hungary start in the 800 ADs, and then skip to World War I. My apologies for that. One of the many cool things about doing this whole "Country of the Week" thing is that I get to see what I don't know, and the obvious gaps. I have no idea what Hungary was like in between the 10th century and the 20th century, and that's a pretty huge freakin' gap.
Here are a couple of general points about Hungary:
Hungary had always been way more influenced by Habsburg Austria than by Ottoman Turkey.
Hungary has a large Calvinist population, mostly in the eastern part of the country. Hungary also has a large Catholic population. Robert Kaplan describes the interesting (and potentially volatile) relationship between these two faiths, and also how these faiths have manifested themselves in Hungary in areas like economic development:
"In the mid-sixteenth century Debrecen [a city in eastern Hungary] was a hotbed of the Reformation, and Catholics were forbidden to settle. Here, a Calvinist college was established and local Calvinists made a pact with the ruling Moslem Turks to provide for the town's security. But the so-called Prussian work ethic did not invigorate the Calvinists of Debrecen. 'In eastern Hungary, Calvinism has been mere conservatism and fatalism, yet another element of ethnicity surrounded by religious walls, proscribing innovation,' Laszlo Csaba, a Hungarian economist and social critic, had told me in Budapest. It has always been the Catholic areas of Hungary that displayed economic dynamism. (Csaba had added that the 'Prussian work ethic,' based partly on Protestantism, was also misunderstood. 'The Prussian work ethic was not entrepreneurial, but fitted to bureaucracy and mass industrialization. It functioned only if somebody else supplied the jobs and told people what to do. In a postindustrial entrepreneurial age,' he continued, 'don't expect the formerly Prussian parts of Germany to be economically impressive. Budapest and the rest of Hungary are closer to Catholic Munich than to Prussian-Protestant Berlin, and in a new Europe of region-states, the region oriented toward Munich may be stronger.')"
Now, this is just me personally, but a paragraph like that completely turns me on. I can read it 10 times in a row, and I have, and still feel like I have only scratched the surface of what is going on. I have my eye jammed up against a tiny hole in the wall, trying to see the whole world beyond. And I have only that paragraph to go on. It is just one man's interpretation of events - but it provides me with avenues of inquiry, it tells me some of the right questions to ask.
In the next post, I'll talk about Hungary's role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Before the Berlin Wall ever came down, Hungarians were already dismantling the empire in their own country. In a very sneaky and entrepreneurial way. Very cool.
More essays from the "Country of the Week" thing I did on my old blog. Here are the other essays, for those of you new to me, or for anyone who is interested.
I had done a bunch of them, focusing on Turkmenistan, Macedonia - and I got a random email from someone: "Could you do Hungary?"
Uh ... Could I "do" Hungary? In what way, might I ask?
But anyway, I took on the challenge.
All errors of facts or interpretation are my fault, if any come up.
This is a long way of saying geography is destiny.
It makes a lot of sense if you check it out on a map. I actually just spent 15 minutes searching the Web for a good topographical map of the area, and came up lacking. Frustrating. If you have access to a globe, just look at Hungary, and look at the inverted "C" of the Carpathians, cutting a swath through Romania. See how those mountains block Romania off from surrounding areas, and also see how the Great Plain on the eastern side of Hungary runs right up to the Carpathians, spreading upwards into the foothills of the mountain range, leaving the plain open to the north.
Such a simple thing, but crucial to the development of nations. A huge open plain, surrounded by a curving mountain range, with foothills to the north, provided easy access to the nomadic tribes and wandering people in the Middle Ages and before. This is how Hungary was born.
In 896 A.D. (how in the world do people come up with such specific dates??) seven "Magyar tribes" entered what is now modern-day Hungary, through the Great Plain, after being on the move for more than a thousand years. The Magyars are the ancestors of Hungarians. Who were they? To be honest, I'm not sure. Please feel free to illuminate me. Here is all I know, and this is basically regurgitated from one of my books: In the 9th and 10th centuries, the Magyars, along with the Finns, were the first Ural-Altaic peoples in Europe. (Those are two regions in Siberia, by the way.) They were horsemen of the Asian steppe, distantly related to the fantastic Uighur Turks. I have an endless fascination with these ancient little-known equestrian tribes.
The Magyars spent a thousand years migrating from the western edge of Siberia. Who knows why. They passed through the Caucasus, where they encountered Bulgars and Turks before coming in to Hungary.
Here is one of the things I have picked up about the Magyars. They had a genius for assimilation. Their culture was enormously flexible and expansive. Well, perhaps "culture" is not the correct word for a tribe who basically lived on their horses, with no country to call their own, without even the concept of "country" or "nation-state" in their collective consciousness. But this assimilative talent is very important to keep in mind, if you want to understand Hungary and present-day Hungarians. It seems that the open intelligence of the Magyars, their willingness to transform, their willingness to add words to their language taken from the Bulgars and the Turks, is one of the keys to the character of Hungary today.
I love that. The thought that an ancient tribe's personality can course through the culture of the generations to follow, 600 years later. It seems to me that this view may not be a very politically correct one, but it also seems to me to be true. Why else would my heart rise up out of my chest when I hear the beat of a bodhran or the sound of Uilleann Pipes? Why else would the stamp of riverdancing feet make me feel like I am remembering something? I personally did not grow up in Ireland, I was not part of a Celtic tribe, I cannot speak Gaelic ... but there is something familiar about the entire thing. I go to Ireland and there is something about it that feels like home. Is this just a trick of the mind? As in: I know that my ancestors are Irish and so I relate to the Irish experience? Maybe. But I think that that is just part of what is going on. Perhaps it's a Jungian view of the world. That there is such a thing as a collective unconscious. In my case, I tap into the collective Irish unconscious in a way which does not feel intellectual, or analytical, or understood in any normal way. It is like a memory. Only these memories are not my own, personally. They are of "my people".
Tangent over.
Anyway, what is known of the Magyars is that they had a genius for evolution and assimilation. They came to Europe from Siberia, they were primitive people who lived on their horses, who were buried with their horses, and within a century, a CENTURY, had completely adopted European manners, and a European mindset. This is extraordinary. A century is a blip on the radar screen of history. But the Magyars accomplished this. They must have been an amazing people.
Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language, with many words of Turkish. A bizarre mix, and it is one of the legacies of the nomadic Magyars.
The Great Plain of Hungary had been important long before the arrival of the Magyars. Way earlier, it had been the northeasternmost frontier region of Rome, and like all frontier regions, it was filled with chaos and conflict. The order provided by the Roman empire dissolved a bit the further away you got from the center, and the Great Plain was filled with tribes, fighting for supremacy.
The Magyars were not the first tribes to pass through this area. For centuries, nomadic tribes with fascinating ancient names (Scythians, Huns, Avars, Tartars, Kumyks) migrated here. But they did not have the staying power of the Magyars, who arrived, settled in, and prospered. These other Central Asian tribes came, left a genetic imprint of one kind or another, and then disappeared off the face of the earth.
I love the idea that ancient history is a better guide to current events than the major newspapers of our day. Apparently, in Hungary now, Inner Asian studies has become enormously popular, because the country (after decades of crushing communism) is now interested in understanding its ethnic roots.
The other thing I have mentioned here which continues to be important in Hungary today, is the topography of the country. It is a small and very flat country. Budapest is in the center. Because there are no physical barriers (like the Carpathian mountains in Romania) it makes it very easy for ideas, movements, influences to move out from Budapest into the rest of the country. Things like Western investment (now a big big deal in Budapest) is fanning outwards, and the entire country is benefiting.
Take a look at Romania - again, on a globe if you have one. You can't get topographical maps online, obviously. Romania is filled with enormous mountain ranges, cutting one side of the country off from the other, and the rest of it is thick forests. It must be incredibly beautiful, but perhaps it makes it difficult for Romania to cohere. Eastern and Western Romania may as well be two different countries.
Hungary remains open, assimilative, flexible, expansive. Maybe partly due to the ancient Magyar culture coursing in the collective unconscious of the country to this day.
That's just a guess, though.
I will close with a couple of quotes from Colin Thubron's book Among the Russians. (It's part of his awesome Russian trilogy. Other titles in this trilogy: In Siberia and The Lost Heart of Asia.)
Among the Russians was published in 1983, and it was based on Thubron's travels through Russia (western Russia), Georgia, Armenia, Latvia, Estonia, and the Ukraine. The Soviet Union was still a behemoth at the time, albeit a rotting one. But all of these countries were still under the thumb of Moscow.
Thubron drove around these countries in his car, camping in camp sites, and talking with people. It's kind of a depressing book, actually. There is next to no intimation of the cataclysmic changes which would rock the world a mere six years later.
And more than anything - you can feel the lingering shadow of Stalin.
The entire Soviet system is just maintaining. Like that joke about all of Russia on a broken train, and the Soviet leaders pull the shades down and demand that everybody on the train pretend that they are still moving.
The first describes Thubron's vodka-soaked experience at one camp ground in Zaporozhye, in the Ukraine. He ends up hanging out with a group of 20 year old students. Music is playing, and he dances with one girl:
She was a 19 year old student from the local polytechnic ... She looked embarrassed and lost. "You're English?" She jigged in my arms with her head turned away, blushing. "You're not really English?" She answered my questions in rushed, flat monosyllables. The polytechnic was quite nice. Dancing was all right. Zaporozhye was quite nice. But I wasn't really English?I settled with the students round our table, talking about poetry; one was eloquent on Blok, another passionate about Yesenin. Albert got fed up. He tried to join in, but he was irreversibly of the Jack London generation. In a moment, I thought, he would quote Burns. "They're just students," he said. "They don't know anything. They've no experience of life." And they seemed indeed to be of a different race. Alternately my gaze focused on them and on Albert through the deepening pool of my inebriation. I was not sure if I were looking at a generation gap or at some other, deeper human division. "You're my guest," Albert mumbled, "not theirs ..."
They were gentle with him, as with a child. They refused to take offense. His petty vanities and ritualized hospitality seemed to be as foreign to them as to me. When his talk turned crassly to politics, they deflected him. "No, no, no," they said. Politics threatened differences; they were less important than the flesh and blood of my presence. When Albert tried to force drinks on me, they tactfully dissuaded him.
I was dimly aware that I was witnessing two Russias. I hoped that one was the future and the other the past, although even in my drunkenness I realized that nothing was as simple as that. Yet Albert was typical of his deprived generation. He was practical, tough, and narrow. To him these others were too pampered and easy. They were, I sensed, apolitical. He resented them; and they, in turn, looked on him not only with the old Russian respect for seniority but with a feeling that he was somehow irrelevant, and belonged to a world of absolutes which was forever past.
"They're too young," he said.
I'll take a couple of more quotes from his book, on the major cities of the Ukraine (it's very interesting, especially for an armchair traveler like myself).
On Odessa:
I imagined the gossipy pre-Revolutionary port which I had read about somewhere: the Grrek, Jewish, and Italianite cosmopolis with its polyglot interchange of wares and ideas, its tang of French architecture. But morning disclosed a city quieter, tamer, more uniform. Its trade, once the highest in the Soviet Union, has been deflected to the satellite port of Ilyichovsk ... leaving Odessa becalmed among its 19th century streets and plane trees. It rises above the sea in terraced avenues fringed with old business houses ... The Odessans show an old humor and entrepreneurial cunning. One in every three families is employed by the sea, and a desultory life still revolves around the cafes.
On Yalta:
Once these shores were the evening playground of the tsarist aristocracy. Their lush slopes gleam and bristle with the architectural fancies of western Europe and the Orient. But now the palaces have been turned into sanatoria for the people (as inscriptions on the base of every Lenin statue remind you). Confections in the Moorish or Ottoman taste, overblown Swiss chalets and Renaissance palazzi, sprout and ramble among parklands or botanical gardens fat with oak and arbutus ... Yalta itself has doubled its size in twenty years; but its alleys still twine through a 19th century heart of parks and verandahed mansions, and its quay tinkles with a children's funfair; while higher inland, in a stone house and a garden jungly with lilies, Chekhov wrote The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.
On The Crimea:
The Crimea, like the Caucasus, is darkened by a displaced people. On a thin suspicion of collaboration with Germany, its two hundred thousand Tartars were deported en masse to Central Asia by Stalin in 1944, and their role in the partisan fight against Nazism was systematically distorted or suppressed. In 1967 the charges against them were withdrawn; but thousands had already died in the hardship of exile, and their efforts to filter back into the Crimea have been harassed ever since.
On Kiev:
Kiev, "the mother of Russian cities," still keeps the unrest, the size and a trace of the refinement of a great capital. From the 9th to the 12th centuries it was the heart of a Russia which flowered in the sunlight of Byzantium, standing where the Dnieper headwaters gathered the Viking traffic before flooding south united to the Black Sea. Now, on one bank, the apartments sprawl in a colder-than-usual rhetoric -- within 15 years the population has doubled to two and a half million -- while opposite, where the Church of St. Andrew rises like a trumpet-blast from the old city, the boulevards are plump with spaced gardens and parklands ...Kiev is still the capital of the Ukraine, and was a strategic lodestar for the Germans in 1941. War memorials reach a deafening crescendo: mounds of immortality, obelisks of glory, parks of eternity. I noticed more than ten which had been built as late as the 1960s and 70s. Russians and Germans between them destroyed much of the central city, and in the rambling complex called the Monastery of the Cross, once Russia's holiest shrine, the 11th century cathedral was reduced to a shattered body upholding a single dome. Far down the monastery's gardened slopes, a covered way plunges to a little square and a church. The place has been disused for two decades. Nothing gives you to expect what is coming. But within the church the plaster-smooth walls suddenly close around the monks' catacombs. For hundreds of yards, past dimly gleaming chapels and down water-dripping steps, the corridor beetles and bifurcates through a ghastly mausoleum. Robed in white silk, their faces covered by purple velet or black embroidery and their feet slippered in silk, the abbots lie in their glass-topped coffins, with a single claw-like hand exposed on the breast. The cell-shrines are stacked with bones. Blackened skulls gape in their powder or leer from glass jars. Eight centuries of skeletons and mummified cadavers lie in their niches, hung with anti-religious plaques -- the intolerance of Marxism hounding them even in their dust -- until the defiled labyrinth washes you up again before the church's tarnished icon-screen...
You would not know, from its exterior, that Kiev's cathedral of Haghia Sophia contained a pure 11th century core, built at the zenith of Russia's early power...Inside, the Byzantine glory breaks like an ocean in wave upon wave of fresco and mosaic, embracing for ever the divine and earthly order of things, engulfing arches, pillars and galleries in its petrified and self-existent splendour. In the dome hovers the soft mosaic presence of Christ the Ruler... He looks unfit to rule...
The tourist groups were attending doggedly to their guides, and were being dealt a Marxist interpretation of theocratic art ... Once this Byzantine world had exercised so profound an appeal to the Russian spirit that despite all persecution its decline would be inexplicable had not its power so clearly been deflected into a new redemption on earth. Sometimes in the past months I had almost envied this entirety of vision. Now, wandering in the forest of pillars, I felt old and alienated ... And as I walked through these aisles of faded certainty, it seemed that after even the most tragic failings had been counted, despite the public tyranny and private dissimulation, the travestied history and the sallow men on the edge of crowds, there yet remained a bruised grandeur about this race who could still dream, however faintly, of a perfectible community on earth.
But all around me the frescoed ancestors of this foolishness were thinning away. The blemished saints and Church fathers no longer held the heart and gaze. They were draining back into the paster, into their unimaginable centuries.
"It was just superstition," a guide said. "Primitive daydreams..."
Thubron was tailed by the KGB his entire time in Kiev. He was afraid to visit the friends he had there, because it would have gotten them into trouble. His room was searched, his diaries gone through. He writes:
It seems foolish, in retrospect, that Kiev should be so contaminated for me. I thought it a handsome city, but it remains discolored in my mind. I remember staring into foodshops whose stock was wretchedly little and expensive: in one only a heap of decapitated chickens, in another some crates of aubergines. And this was the capital of the Ukraine, of the Black Earth!
Thubron meets up with Julian in the Crimea. Julian lives in the Ukraine. He is Russian. They travel together for a couple of days. This final anecdote brings tears to my eyes.
It was our last evening. He had bought a bottle of Caucasion dessert wine -- we never normally drank much together -- and we celebrated a somber farewell. From time to time his gaze wandered uneasily to the restaurant television. "You've heard the news?"It came non-committally from the television announcer: the outbreak of war between Iran and Iraq.
We stared at one another, wondering where the Soviet and Western governments would stand, what we would be told to feel. "It looks like Moscow and Washington are hanging back," Julian said. "It's not time for us to report for duty." He tried to laugh. But we touched glasses unhappily, as if already clothed in invisible battledress. The news had momentarily reduced us.
"Sometimes I think of my father," Julian said, "and of that whole war generation, and I think: 'Let the dead bury their dead.' " He grimaced. "Is that in the Bible or Longfellow?" Then out of his schoolboy memory, he began to quote Burns. I suppressed a moan as My Heart's in the Highlands came up. But the words rolled out of him with a kind of ponderous wonder, restoring the poem to itself ...
Dusk had turned to night, and the wine glasses empty. Above us, as we wandered back to our huts, the one crag stood out in moon-streaked solitude from the consensus of the rest. "In the Kruschev years, the golden years," Julian said, "I managed to buy a copy of Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero -- the book of a pacifist. Have you read it? It had a deep influence on me." We stopped in front of our hut doors. The noise of a radio sounded in the trees: Iraqi advance, Iranian casualties, American silence. We listened. "I don't know how to talk about our meeting like this" -- he was suddenly fumbling for phrases. "It's important, you and I ... like two people meeting in outer space ... " He ran his fingers over his face, as if to order its expression, his thoughts. Outer space. His country immaterial.
As we said goodbye, he clasped my hand and said, "If in some future time I see you in the sights of my rifle -- I'll miss."
"And I won't fire at all."
We laughed, but with deep emotion. I've never felt so brief a friendship more.
Another essay on The Ukraine, this one about the extraordinary events of 1991.
For example:
In January, 1990, thousands joined hands to celebrate that first independence in 1918. This would have been unheard-of, even two or three years before. But the tone of the world at that time was one of upheaval, change, hope. Countries breaking free of their chains. Pope John Paul ratified the structure of the Ukrainian Catholic Church.
Once we hit 1990, history starts speeding up again. After decades of silence.
In March of 1990, elections are held throughout the republic. The democratic opposition comes to power.
On June 16, 1990, there is a Declaration of Parliament stating that the Ukraine will be neutral and nonatomic.
In autumn of 1990, there were student strikes, and miners' strikes. The students were demanding the resignations of all the Soviet leaders (many who had been incorporated in this new government.) The country was sliding into chaos.
In August, 1991, there was the infamous coup d'etat attempt in Moscow. Which is interesting on 5,000 different levels, but basically what the coup d'etat did was reveal (once and for all) the indecisive incompetence of the leaders in Moscow.
The Ukraine decided immediately to choose its own destiny, and the Supreme Council proclaims the Ukraine's independence on August 24, 1991.
Since then, the Ukraine's executive branch has basically been taken over by gangsters. Many of the former countries of the USSR have nearly identical experiences following the collapse.
The governement is like a mafia. It embezzles cash. It manipulates elections, appropriates businesses, destroys the media, blackmails people it doesn't like. It's a netherworld of vaguely criminal activity.
More and more Ukrainians are emigrating.
I have to admit I don't know the steps in between 1990 and now, which would lead to this development (except for the fact that it's the same old story in all the former republics -- they have no experience with representative democracy, the Soviets crushed the infrastructure of the government, there is a power vacuum and so these gangster mafia types have a very easy time filling up the gap).
There is also the little matter of ethnicity and ethnic cleansing, which is such a common theme in these former republics. In the 1980s and the 1990s a virtual war was fought in the Ukraine over language. 350 years of Russification had obliterated Ukrainian. There was a ban on printing books in Ukrainian. Etc. Well, the Ukrainians started rebelling. There was a desire to get rid of all Russian. To go back to their roots.
A lovely theory, no? The only problem is is that there are millions and millions of Russians who live in the Ukraine, and who have lived there for generations, and who consider themselves Ukrainian. They speak Russian, but they think of themselves as belonging to the Ukraine, as well. The Ukrainians beg to differ. This is the same old "we belong here, you don't" bullshit which causes so much trouble all over the world.
It is like the colonists who ended up fleeing Angola when the revolution occurred. These were Portugese people, yes. They were the "colonizers". Whatever. These people had lived in Angola for generations. Angola was their home. But the natives disagreed and rode them out of the country on a rail. As it turns out, of course, the Portugese were the only people in the country who knew how to do the things which would keep a country running. But the natives weren't thinking logically. They were thinking ethnically.
So now, the Ukraine has been described as two countries: Eastern and Western. These two sides have almost completely different characters. None of this has been resolved yet, by the way. The nation has not cohered, or worked it all out. The current president, Kuchma, was re-elected in 1999 by intimidation and fraud. The Ukraine is losing it, quite frankly.
The Western side of the Ukraine belonged to Poland before the war. It is definitely more Ukrainian than the eastern side of the country. They speak Ukrainian here. The soul of the country and the people survived here, through the Soviet tyranny.
The Eastern side of the Ukraine is a different story, resting, as it does, right up against the Soviet Union. 13 million native Russians live here. The "Russification" campaign was brutal on the eastern side of the Ukraine. The entire Ukrainian intelligentsia was murdered by Stalin, in the 1930s, and, of course, the country has not yet recovered from that loss. It will take generations more.
Somehow, it's all been about Communism today. Along those lines - here are three short pieces I wrote about the Ukraine, on my old blog. Actually, the third piece is a compilation of excerpts from Colin Thubron's wonderful book Among the Russians.
The first piece is on the horrific famine in the Ukraine, engineered by the Soviets in the 1930s. My piece barely scratches the surface at all. Robert Conquest's book The Harvest of Sorrow is the most thorough explanation of exactly how this man-made famine occurred.
But for now:
Until 1917, the Ukraine was one of the world's tapestries of culture, religion, and language. Peoples overlapped here. Then the Bolsheviks conquered the nation. The Ukraine was one of the countries most severely damaged by Communism, the people were some of the most trapped and terrorized: mainly because the Ukraine was the most valuable commodity the Soviets had. The Ukraine fed the entire empire. There was no way on earth that the Ukraine would ever break free of the Soviet Imperium. They had no independence, no freedom of movement, no slack was ever given (like was given to some of the other more remote republics). The Ukraine was crushed like a bug under the thumb of the Imperium.
They declared independence in 1918, directly following being conquered. This was very short-lived, of course. And then the relentless crushing began.
The Great Famine was caused by the collectivization of the farms, a "program" (or a pogrom) implemented across the Soviet Union. Tens and tens of millions (this is not an exaggeration) died as a result of collectivization. And the world did nothing. Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Charles Lindbergh traveled to Russia in the middle of this great hidden famine. I have her journals from that time, and she writes in glorious positive terms about the "busy" Russians. She loved seeing everybody so "busy", so productive. She had never been in a country which had such industry, such commitment to public works. It's disgusting to read her journals now (at least her journals during World War II), because of 20/20 hindsight. They were willfully lied to. The happy productive Russians were trotted out for their benefit. And 200 miles away, the fields of the Ukraine were piled high with corpses.
In brief: collectivization began in 1929. Lenin was long gone. Trotsky was long gone. Stalin was now king. All of the USSR had to be moved off of their own little farms into kholkozes (collectivized farms). People were herded into barracks, there were armed guards around the peripheries, there were gates outside the collective farms with lovely slogans like: Work is Beautiful. Or whatever. Communist bullshit. The peasants resisted this move. They did not want to go. They hunkered down.
Stalin sent hundreds of thousands of people into the gulag, the massive prison camp structure he erected throughout Siberia, and none of these people were ever heard of again.
The rest of them he decided to starve out. This was a conscious decision. Public policy.
The famine began in 1930 and lasted seven years.
Moscow determined the quotas that each village had to deliver to the state. These quotas were purposefully greater than whatever the land could yield. Authorities confiscated everything that was edible. Schools were closed. Three year olds had to work in the fields, to try to squeeze the quotas out of the land. No one was allowed to leave the villages. People who tried were shot.
The main element of Ukrainian identity is the peasantry. The Ukrainian spirit resides in the peasantry. So Stalin had to destroy that peasantry.
In 1932, a terrifying edict came down called The Law of the Blade of Grain. It's a heartless law. One could be shot or sent to prison for life if one stole one blade of grain.
Meanwhile, the famine is reaching massive proportions. There were villages which resorted to cannibalism. There were not enough graves to contain all the dead. People lay in the streets, in the fields, in their own beds. Entire families dead from starvation in their own homes. Howling filling the streets, people crazed from hunger.
The Law of the Blade of Grain was Stalin's final screw. Outside each village were enormous grain fields. Every single blade of grain, due to the unrealistic quotas, was "earmarked" for Moscow. Within the village, people were starving. They had to work these fields, they had to harvest this grain which could conceivably save their lives and the lives of their families, but the punishment was not just severe, it was basically the end of your life. Nobody came out of the gulag. Soldiers and secret police were posted on watchtowers around the fields, to make sure nobody stole even ONE BLADE of grain.
Desperate mothers would send their toddlers into the field, to see if they could steal a couple of blades, in the hopes that their size would keep them better-hidden than an adult. Of course, many toddlers were shot dead because of this.
It is estimated that 30 million people starved as a result of collectivization and the Law of the Blade of Grain. This estimate may even be low.
Today, in the Ukraine, the collectivized farms still exist, but they are now abandoned. Derelict barracks, gates swinging on the hinges, peeling murals of sickles and clasped hands ... The ghost of the famine still exists in the Ukrainian psychology, in the same way it does in the Irish psychology, but it also exists because of these falling-down buildings haunting the countryside. Relics from that brutal time.
A compilation of all of the essays posted below on Uzbekistan.
I. The People
III. Bukhara
IV. Tashkent
V. The Aral Sea
VI. Uzbekistan Today
This will be my last piece on Uzbekistan. I just wanted to give a brief picture of what is going on there now, since I have spent so much time back in the dark ages with Genghis Khan and Tamerlane.
Islam Karimov is the president of Uzbekistan, and has been so since 1990, when he was elected by the still-in-power Supreme Soviet. It says a lot about who the people of Uzbekistan are that Karimov, emblematic of the old regime, a symbol of the Communist state which wrecked their country, continues to be elected as their leader. Other countries, Eastern European countries, (the Czech Republic is a perfect example) had purges of their entire government. Anyone connected with Communism at all had to GO.
Uzbekistan is not really a country yet, not really a nation. They don't know what it really feels like to be free citizens, to participate in the government of their country ... there is a disconnect between the leadership and the citizenry, which, of course, existed during Communism, but it continues today.
The regime in Uzbekistan is run by former Soviet-Brezhnev-style bosses, and Karimov heads up a sterile dictatorship which, so far, has kept the country from fracturing. Democracy would be useless here, at the moment, since there is no infrastructure, nothing set up to support and uphold democratic institutions.
Karimov is a very isolated leader. He came up through the ranks of the bureacracy, very much insulated within the Communist hierarchy. He is a Communist, for God's sake. What that means, in a practical sense, is that he doesn't understand economics AT ALL. He has been unable to help the country modernize, or integrate into world markets. He doesn't get it.
On the flipside, however, he is not averse to allowing businessmen come from all over the world to set up businesses here, to get things going. Some of the other "stans" take a "we can do it on our own" attitude (Turkmenistan), and because of that, their people are starving and ignorant. Uzbekistan at least has interaction with other cultures in this way. Karimov is also very authoritarian, very uncompromising. He doesn't really behave like a Western leader. His regime is very tribal. He looks out for his tribe. He sees the Uzbeks as his tribe, he is responsible for them. They need a strong hand.
Uzbekistan also has the worst human rights record of any of the former Soviet republics.
The police are completely corrupt. The mafia is everywhere. It is a completely unsafe place for Westerners to travel. Westerners have to shack up in the local fleabag hotel, and must carry all their money on them at all times, and never leave anything of value in the room, because it will not be there when they return. A Westerner coming to town is still a relatively rare thing, and word is out on the street in a matter of moments. The Westerner is prey, here. The criminal element is highly visible. Everyone is broke, poor, with no prospects, and many people are raging alcoholics. This is a powder-keg.
In the early 1990s, as I mentioned in another post, there was a mass exodus of Russians from Uzbekistan. The Uzbeks had harassed them into leaving. However, this had a result which could have been foreseen if the Uzbeks had thought about it at all: the Russians leaving decimated the ranks of professionals in the republic, and institutions and businesses were left empty, with nobody there who could train the Uzbeks, nobody knew how to do anything.
From their history, the people of Uzbekistan assume that the government is not there to serve them. They have no experience with representative government. They were not ready for nationhood.
Karimov's dictatorship became less severe throughout the 1990s ... but at all times it is a modern-day version of Genghis Khan's and Stalin's regimes of absolute power.
Some of the issues for present-day Uzbekistan:
Chaos is breaking out all around them. In Afghanistan, in Tajikstan. There is a worry in regards to Tajikstan, which has a massive Uzbek population. (Tajikstan is an ally of Iran, due to ethnic similarities, and Iran is a mortal en