20 Years Too Late for Czechs : In Time of Glasnost, Restraint Still the Rule

When Soviet spokesman Gennady Gerasimov accompanied Mikhail S. Gorbachev to Prague last year, he was asked what the difference was between the policies of glasnost and perestroika and those of the Prague Spring. “Twenty years,” he replied.

The spectacle of reforms in the Soviet Union take on a surreal quality when viewed from Prague, where the memory of the Prague Spring has a mythical quality. “Sixty-eight,” as it is referred to there, is the Faulknerian moment in 1968 after which public history stopped. Thereafter, personal memories became the measure of time; in public, one kept one’s peace. So the sudden, very public transformation of the political climate in the Soviet Union has given life there an eerie quality of absurd drama. In Prague, where access to information is increasing geometrically, even Pravda’s stories have occasionally been modified, their content softened.

Some loosening has taken place in the official Czech media: Exposes of corruption have become routine, television crews investigate complaints of inefficiency, some films tackle social problems such as drug addiction and organized crime. It is an open secret that the Soviets, who once brought a wintry end to the reforms of Alexander Dubcek, now play fast and loose with controvery and criticism by comparison with the party newspaper Rude Pravo.

But beneath the changes, which many Czechs regard as window dressing, there remains an undertone of powerful restraint. Those in positions of power seem to regard Gorbachev as a Johnny-come-lately who may not be able to maintain his hold on power, and they are unwilling to risk their own futures by jumping too whole-heartedly onto his bandwagon. The Czechs themselves also point out that, in all things, they are “more Catholic than the Pope.” Ignoring the fact that the current pontificate has changed the poles of catholicity in the Eastern bloc, they imply that Czechoslovakia will always be more rigid, and more cautious,than others in the Warsaw alliance.

But more important, the demographics of Czechoslovakia were fundamentally changed by the aftermath of ‘68, and that change may indicate a great deal about where Czechoslovakia is going--and when. As Jiri Pehe said in the New York Times last year, the Gorbachev reforms are directed in large part toward satisfying the demands of a growing professional class upon whom the Soviet Union’s ability to become a truly modern society hinges. he emergence of a similar class 20 years ago provoked the reforms of the Dubcek era--and the conservative retrenchment that followed. An estimated half million members were removed from the party’s rolls after the Soviet intervention; over 100,000 people have emigrated to the West since, many of them economists, artists, intellectuals and other professionals who had been the base upon which the Prague Spring was built.

Thus, Czechoslovakia faces an acute demographic gap in relation to the contemporary Soviet Union. One senses this gap among young people, too young to remember ‘68, who regard the government apparatus as alien and remote and the dissident movement as quixotic and unlikely to succeed. They admire Gorbachev and his reforms, but they expect little substantive impact on Czechoslovakia. “Who would lead us?” one waiter asked.

In the place of political aspirations, young people turn to Prague’s perennial form of alternative social participation: culture. Theater and opera are crowded with people under 30; punk and heavy-metal concerts occur unofficially but are well attended. Artists, film makers and writers--many working under the shadow of government censorship--produce material as finely crafted and with as jagged a bite as anything in the West. In the absence of a climate that supports the political aspirations of a professional class, Czech youth seems to have leaped into post-modernism.

What this will produce over time is hard to imagine. But in a Prague cinema I witnessed a vignette that suggests one long-term view.

Before the feature film began, a short, boiler-plate paean commemorating the 1948 “revolution” was shown. In it, a young pioneer of about 10, charged with the honor of presenting flowers to the 74-year-old president, Gustav Husak, suddenly pulled out a pencil and paper and asked for Husak’s autograph. Caught completely off guard by this breach of normal public protocol, Husak searched confusedly for somewhere to put the flowers so that he could comply with the girl’s request. Meanwhile, the camera pulled back, showing hundreds of onlookers clapping ceremonially, too far away to see the president’s predicament.

But the theater audience exploded with a sudden burst of laughter uncommon in most public settings. For here was the man who had overseen the housecleaning that followed the Soviet invasion, reduced now to the role of a confused grandfather by a child’s innocent but unorthodox request. The spontaneity of someone too young to remember the backdrop from which stiff socialist decorum springs, and too modern to suppress a private desire in a public place, had shattered that decorum for everyone in the theater.

It may well be that, in time, and aided by changes in the Soviet Union if they continue, Czechoslovakia may simply outgrow the limitations of its post-’68 past. For just as the demographics of today work against the possibility of reform, the demographics of tomorrow may make them inevitable.