ALEXANDER DUBČEK
The name of Alexander Dubček is for ever associated, in the minds of Czechs and Slovaks, with the surge of liberal reform that culminated in the famous Prague Spring of 1968, and with his slogan that summed it up, “Socialism with a human face”. He led an administration that sought to reform Communism from within, to redress its injustices, and to make it answerable to the people. Its policies not only elicited vast popular support, they were in many ways the product of deeply felt popular aspirations. This was a notable case of a government and an electorate being at one: the leadership spearheaded the reform movement, but its real strength lay in the widespread belief that reform was overdue and vitally needed.
After the Soviet-led invasion, in August 1968, turned the clock back to a reinstatement of what one might call Communism with an inhuman face, some critics were rather dismissive of Dubček, characterizing him as a mere figurehead, and as a naif who should have foreseen Brezhnev’s stab in the back, and should have slowed down the hectic pace of radical change in the hope of averting intervention. This appraisal is both innocent and unfair. It is innocent in its assumption that Brezhnev and his henchmen would have tolerated a reform program introduced more gradually: their whole tradition was to resist, if need be violently, any threat to the sanctity of the police-state; notions of reform were, to their way of thinking, a kind of blasphemy. And the appraisal was unfair because, as a recent biography of Dubček has shown, far from being a naif, he was a subtle and wise man: his only failing was an idealistic faith that human decency, in the end, is bound to overcome the forces of evil; that faith suffered a tragic setback; but twenty-one years later it was vindicated, in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, and happily he lived to see that come to pass.
Who was this man?
The son of a Slovak carpenter, he served as a partisan fighting the Nazis in World War II. During the war years in Slovakia, the partisans took up arms out of patriotism and hatred — that is, because they loved their country, and they loathed the Fascism that was engulfing Europe. It took great resource and courage to do what they did; and among the most resourceful and courageous in their ranks were the Communists. In the last years of the war, their efforts were massively supported by the Red Army, as it rolled back the Wehrmacht to defeat. So it is not surprising that many young partisans like Dubček, in the joy of the moment, should have joined the Communist Party, and should have viewed the Communist cause as representing the best hope for their country’s future. Euphoria puts blinkers on many an eye: everyone was rejoicing in victory; and even if the Soviet record, at home, was marred with some unfortunate disfigurements, there was no reason to suppose that Slovaks of the left could not conduct themselves with reasonable decency. So peace came, and Dubček settled in to a political career, at an apprentice level, believing that this might be true.
It was not possible for a Party functionary, in the nineteen-fifties, to be unaware of how the Communist regime, far from fulfilling idealistic dreams, was imposing a brutal tyranny. A fundamentally decent man, like Dubček, had two choices: either he could, at some risk, break with the Party, give up on his country, and finish out his days in some humdrum job (this was called “interna1 emigration”); or else he could stay the course and try, with like-minded colleagues, to steer the Party in a better, more humane direction. Dubček chose the latter approach.
By the mid-nineteen-sixties, Dubček had risen to the top, locally: he was First Secretary of the Slovak branch of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Throughout his career, he had given every appearance of being an orthodox apparatchik, making no waves, faceless. He must have seemed like an unobjectionable candidate for promotion, in January 1968, when the increasingly unpopular Federal First Secretary, Antonin Novotny, was forced to resign. That resignation had been engineered by high-ranking Party officials, who were well aware of mounting popular discontent with old, hard-line policies. In appointing Dubček to replace Novotny, Dubček with his reputation for efficient obedience, they probably thought they had picked a nonentity who would endorse whatever program they formulated. Instead, they found they had happened on a genuine leader. Nor was this a leader of the type so familiar behind the Iron Curtain: ruthless, avid of power, self-centered. Rather, this was a wholly unfamiliar kind of leader: consultative, at one with the citizens, whose servant he deemed himself to be. One of Dubček’s early public pronouncements, after his accession, was evidence of this: “Dear friends, dear citizens,” he said, “I know the ideals you fight for: socialism, humanism, independence, sovereignty; and I say this to you all, nothing else ever can or ever will supplant the fulfilment of those ideals as my life’s work”.
His policies were proof of what he said. Freedom of the press, of travel, and of worship were all restored. The economy was to be decentralized, and subjected to shop-floor decisions. The police were to be accountable. The government was to be answerable to parliament, and the parliament to be answerable to the people, by secret ballot. Past injustices were to be redressed.
Matching those administrative measures, Dubček’s personal behavior was like a breath of fresh air. He stayed put in a modest flat on Mouse Street. He continued to drive a battered old car, lining up for gas like everyone else and paying for it out of his own pocket. Armed with a pencil and notebook, he sunbathed on the grass by a public swimming-pool, and asked the voters if they had any good ideas on how to govern the country. Mrs. Dubček joined the line-up for groceries with other housewives; and they had help from one cleaning-lady three mornings a week.
This was no mere figurehead. This was a man of the people, helping them proceed where they all wanted to go.
When Brezhnev sent in the tanks, to suppress this dangerous outburst of liberty, Dubček and his senior aides were arrested, flown to Moscow, and ordered to toe the Kremlin line. They had no choice but to obey, for the Czechoslovak people had unanimously backed Dubček during the invasion, and refused to accept the puppet regime that Brezhnev tried to install: only by returning to Prague, with his reforms reversed, could Dubček hope to save his nation from a chaotic and suicidal resistance to overwhelming and murderous military force.
It was, of course, a tragic end, for him and for his millions of supporters, to a brief fling of happiness. And once things had quietened down a little, no time was lost in removing him from the scene. He was stripped of his powers and sent to work at the Embassy in Turkey — no doubt in the hope that he would defect and cease to be a thorn in the Kremlin’s side. Returning home, he was expelled from the Communist Party and given a menial job in Slovakia, supervising the maintenance of trucks in the Forestry Service. There he lived in silence and obscurity. But so great was the official fear of him that one time, when he fell ill and had to be hospitalized, the entire wing he was in was evacuated, lest he infect others with his radical ideas.
Twenty-one years went by, from the invasion of 1968 to the Velvet Revolution of 1989. During those years, a grim regime of neo-Stalinism plunged Czechoslovakia back into the abyss. But a tyranny of that sort, inevitably, produces a groundswell of popular discontent. For the most part, it rumbled away below the surface, like an uneasy volcano. But above ground it showed its hand in the protests of many dissidents, especially the signatories of Charter 77 and their spokesman, Václav Havel. And their efforts were eventually and publicly endorsed by Dubček, in a statement issued from his internal exile in Bratislava. So when the Communist government finally resigned in the face of inarguable popular disgust, loudly articulated by half a million citizens in Wenceslas Square, it was only appropriate that Havel, their future President, should appear on a balcony to receive their acclamation and to signal the dawn of a healthy future. At his side, significantly, stood the still-beloved figure of Alexander Dubček: smiling, at peace. Ever flexible, he joined the Social Democratic Party, which was where in truth he properly belonged; and he was appointed Chairman of the Parliament. He died, sadly early, in an automobile accident.
