Prague’s Rendezvous With History

Human history can move with glacial slowness, leaving life all but unaltered from generation to generation, even from century to century. Or it can move with hypersonic speed, exploding like a force of nature to produce unexpected and tumultuous change. Eastern Europe, whose Soviet-installed Communist regimes have used fear and repression to hold power for 40 years, is having its rendezvous with history. Communism as a political monopoly is dead in Hungary, dead in Poland, and tottering in East Germany. Now it is Czechoslovakia’s turn to confront the demands of change.

What recent days have brought to Prague and Brno, to Bratislava and Ostrava--the demonstrations, the calls for ending one-party rule, the simple courage of hundreds of thousands of protesters--is something to cheer and to cherish. Czechoslovakia has always held a special place in Western concerns, because it was Eastern Europe’s only democracy between the world wars, because it was so shamefully sacrificed to Nazi terror at Munich in 1938 and because its bid for independence in 1968 was brutally crushed by Soviet tanks. For two decades the memory of that terrible time has worked to keep Czechs sullenly passive. But now the tide of change hurtling across Eastern Europe and encouraged by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has reached Czechoslovakia. Fear has been set aside and demands for freedom echo in city streets.

Milos Jakes, the rigid and widely hated Communist Party leader, may be on the way out. Vaclav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s best known dissident, says he has been told by high party officials that Jakes’ departure isn’t a matter of whether but of when. The signs of revision are already appearing. In the space of 48 hours, a regime that had insisted it would make no concessions has been forced to offer to talk with its opponents.

Contrast all this with nearby Romania, where Communist Party boss Nicolae Ceausescu is keeping a death-grip on power, seemingly oblivious to the disasters that his 24 years of corrupt, brutal rule have inflicted on the country. Like Czar Nicholas II, Ceausescu won’t acknowledge that autocracy’s day is ended. Like a Black Sea King Canute, he tries to command the waves of reform not to dampen his shore. Until recently the Communist leaders of Poland, East Germany and Bulgaria thought that they too only had to say “no” to prevent change from coming. It came anyway, as it is rightly coming now to Czechoslovakia, as it will come in due course to Romania, if there is any justice.

History moves at its own velocity. Right now, in Eastern Europe, it is moving rapidly indeed.