X
X is many things: in Latin inscriptions, it is the numeral ten; in algebra, it is the unknown quantity; in arithmetic, it is the symbol for multiplication; in law, it is the acceptable signature of an illiterate; and in elections, it is the voter’s endorsement of a candidate.
All of these meanings, obliquely, touch on the condition of politics in a society like Communist Czechoslovakia. Elections there were manifestly rigged to endorse the regime’s hold on power. Its successful re-election, every few years, could be guaranteed into any foreseeable future, a multiplication table stretching into infinity. Voting was compulsory for adults; and because there were no opposition candidates, the government could proudly claim that it had been returned by unanimous consent. Admittedly, a few voters, at most ten per cent, wrote in alternate names on their ballots: significant names like Spartacus, or derisive names like Mickey Mouse; but these were rejected as “spoiled ballots”, thus allowing the scrutineers to substantiate the claim of unanimity in the “valid ballots”. There were, of course, no illiterates in the electorate (allegedly); but the X inscribed on ballots, reluctantly but compulsorily, did reflect a kind of political illiteracy sedulously cultivated by the Communists — they repressed all freedom of expression, so that alternative points of view could never be part of public discourse.
In the electorate at large, there were two minorities that sincerely voted for the return of the government: the simple-minded souls who believed the official propaganda, and who knew they could continue to lead unexamined lives of full employment with adequate pensions to follow; and the Party apparatchiks, who knew their salaries and privileges depended on preservation of the system. By contrast, the vast majority of the voters were fully aware that the system was both brutal and corrupt: they obeyed the dictum, “Know thine enemy”, but they felt powerless to do anything about it; to them, the regime was all too well known, and was detested.
If there was such a thing in the body politic as the algebraic X, the unknown quantity, it lay elsewhere: in the dissident community. That world of resistance, small but vital, was populated by men and women who had varying political aspirations, but who forged a consensual unity in their pursuit of liberation. However, their ranks were always vulnerable to infiltration by moles from the secret police. These moles were X, so to speak. Two unpleasant cases are worth remark.
Waves of Czechs, while they briefly could, left the country in 1948, when the Communists seized power, and in 1968, when the Prague Spring re-opened the frontier. Most of them were merely seeking freedom elsewhere. But a few of them, settling in West Germany, carried on the opposition struggle from outside: they worked for Radio Free Europe; they helped smuggle seditious literature into Prague, some of which they wrote themselves, and they helped smuggle out literature and manifestoes written by proscribed authors at home; they funneled in money, to help fund dissident activities; and they maintained encouraging contacts with the patriots they had left behind. One of the more prominent of these émigrés was widely respected by his colleagues in West Germany for his contributions to all this work. But it turned out that those contributions were simply a front, created to serve as credentials, while he was secretly working for the Prague Ministry of the Interior: he had constantly informed on his fellow émigrés, on dissidents back home, and on their various activities; he eventually went home, helped the police to conduct a massive round-up of local dissidents, and went on television to denounce them.
The other mole, worthy of note, never left the country. He was a writer who steered a tricky course between writing stuff that was inoffensive to the regime, while also writing stuff that was mildly critical but restrained enough that the regime would allow it to be published and could thus polish its reputation for tolerance. On the side, he worked clandestinely and supportively with many dissidents; and he endeared himself to them with many a sardonic joke about the regime — Czechs are famous for using wit as a subversive weapon. On one occasion he solidified his reputation as an anti-Communist by cleverly and riskily avoiding having to vote in a federal election: he was a diabetic, surviving on carefully regulated doses of insulin; by diligent research, he was able to calculate how quickly abstention from insulin would result in a diabetic coma, and he timed it so precisely that he was taken to hospital in a diabetic coma on election day. This was a sure-fire way to dispel any doubts that might have been harboured about the genuineness of his stance. All this time, however, he was abusing the dissidents’ trust by informing on them to the secret police. And he got away with it, until the fall of Communism. Only then did his treachery come to light. For years, earlier, he had been X, the unknown quantity. Finally the Velvet Revolution bore out the old Czech slogan, “The truth shall prevail”.
Until that year of liberation, truth lived underground. Those who valued it, and wished to live by it, had to pay the price for not being willing to toe the Party line. If they were defiantly activist, they went to prison or to forced-labour camp. The more modestly active were punished by exclusion from professional work, and were compelled to survive on unskilled manual labour. Among the latter was an intellectual known to the present writer, named Oldřich Knitl: he was a gifted broadcaster, active during the Prague Spring; subsequently he had to get by as a window-washer. The following poem is for him.
