Growing up or selling out? - social and economic changes in the Czech Republic - Cover Story

She got pregnant in Prague about the time of the Velvet Revolution. Those were careless days in November and December 1989, breathless, drawn with danger. Nobody slept much. Every day around midnight they waited in the cold outside the Magika Laterna theater to hear what the Civic Forum leaders had decided to do next. Everything was up for grabs. Some would say four years later that it still is.

They were married the next spring, when words like "marriage" and "children" were still blossoming with a promise the young Czechs had not known in several decades. Daughter of Communists old enough still to believe in socialist ideals, she wore a crucifix hidden beneath her clothing for much of her pregnancy. Late in her term, her husband flipped it free at lunch one day. The three of us stared at it exposed on its string against her chest. She blushed to the bone.

They were not Christians. My look shot a question toward them. Her husband shrugged. "Everything is so uncertain for the baby," he said. "Why take chances?" "I do believe there is something," she said. But she was still blushing as though surprised in an unworthy act. Both the blush and the belief in something said a great deal about where many Central Europeans still find themselves.

More than forty years ago Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism that one day totalitarianism would "simply disappear, leaving no other trace in the history of mankind than exhausted peoples, economic and social chaos, a political vacuum and a spiritual tabula rasa." That is remarkably close to what happened, especially in Czechoslovakia.

In August 1968, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia crushed more than a bid for a political reform. Tank tracks chewed into the spiritual landscape as well. An exhausted people turned inward, hunched its shoulders against the dead weight of oppression. Many who had yearned for freedom and truth settled for a new car and a cottage in the country. Generally, only those with little to lose (or to gain) dared to be seen in church.

A few hundred dissidents, artists, and intellectuals, Vaclav Havel prominent among them, shunned exile and pressed on in their opposition to the regime. Apart from that, most people lapsed into apathy and ennui, worked the system for what they could get without getting into trouble. Even so, state socialism had its compensations. Not the least of them was a generous amount of leisure time. Everyone had a job, but too many cooks for the economic soup left a lot of people working part-time for full-time pay. Czechs hiked, camped, skied, biked, and partied with a vengeance. Theaters (where it was a little easier to disguise mildly subversive material from dimwitted censors) sold out a year in advance.

People had time to become friends, hedge the meaner realities of oppression with casual communities they could count on. Before the '89 revolution, I had fallen in with such a bunch in Prague. There were about thirty-five of them, late twenties to early middle age, carpenters, journalists, TV producers, filmmakers, printers, truck drivers, models, computer technicians, and a professional chef. No one had much money (you could make more peddling newspapers than you could as a medical doctor), but always they made do. They bicycled into the mountains, chipped in for festive meals, drank all night, sang Czech lyrics set to American folk tunes, indulged their theatrical flair with costumed weekends in storybook castles, slept on the floor, repaired their own cars, all with grace and good humor, wit, wonder, and a run of children underfoot.

It seemed real--at its best a witness to truth against that tortured lie communism had become--and, yet by the winter of 1992, hardly more than two years after the revolution, all of this was gone. Western ways had set in. Everyone was scrambling for a living, overworked and worried, with no time to spare. The group no longer met. A few had grown rich. One truck driver now owned a small fleet, had an international business and three gold chains for his neck. No one saw him much. Whatever envy some felt was far more passing than their regret.

Another of the old crowd was being divorced, devastated about losing his wife to a newborn entrepreneur, afraid he would lose his apartment, too, because apartments at less than London rates were almost impossible to find and it was still uncertain who owned what. He was leaving his job; prices had exploded; government TV hardly paid a producer enough to survive.

Once devoted journalists, following the money, jumped into advertising, often with American-owned firms. Americans were overrunning Prague. That, at any rate, was the local perception. "We have exchanged one occupier for another," one journalist lamented. Suddenly there was an underlying air of anger, bitterness, disillusionment, and distrust. When their ironic sense of humor fails them, Czechs can be a melancholy lot.

Now that they were free to read whatever they wanted, many Czechs stopped reading anything but the new blaze of tabloids, and looked at the plethora of pornography. Theater seats went begging while some of America's worst movies were sold out. Politicians old and new, from free-marketeers to "converted" Communists, writers to rock musicians, scrambled to fill the political vacuum Hannah Arendt had predicted. The Civic Forum disintegrated, polarized between hard-nosed capitalists and more traditional humanists still holding out for the promise of a "third way" between socialism and free-market shock therapy. The big winners were the unbridled capitalists and a clutch of ex-communists. In 1992 shock-therapy zealot Vaclav Klaus became the Czech prime minister, while Slovaks elected Vladimir Meciar, nationalist demagogue, an economic "go-slow" advocate, and former Communist thug. The two of them, refusing to call the national referendum they knew would defeat them, proceeded to negotiate an end to the seventy-four-year-old union between Czechs and Slovaks.

Klaus had been finance minister in the first postrevolution government of another ex-communist, Marian Colfa. No one could accuse the aristocratic Klaus of having been a Communist. His economic reforms had pushed unemployment in Slovakia, with its antiquated heavy industry, from near zero to about 12 percent. Like so many of those who have been carrying Milton Friedman's colors across Central Europe, Klaus, who drove a BMW while colleagues were still riding in Soviet clunkers, has never had to suffer the everyday effects of his own economic shock therapy.

Even at that, privatization in what is now the Czech Republic has been slow. No one quite knows how to go about it. The result is a kind of quiet economic chaos. Only look at the tribulations of the U.S.-based Kmart corporation.

Kmart jumped in early, buying thirteen government-owned department stores in the Czech lands and Slovakia. After the January 1 split, the corporation finds itself with stores in two countries, unable to ship merchandise from one region to the other without paying a value-added tax. Sources close to Kmart's Michigan headquarters revealed that, even before the split, operations in Czechoslovakia were not going well. Czech and Slovak managers snubbed their American counterparts. Renovations are under way to Americanize the stores, but what do you do with all that extra help (850 in one store alone), and all that inefficiency (wait in one line to buy something, a second to pay for it, and a third to pick up what you bought)?

Corporate conflicts aside, most of the local born-again entrepreneurs profiting from privatization are ex-Communists, former party functionaries who were about the only ones who knew the system and had any (usually ill-gotten) capital to invest. Public resentment simmered. What sort of revolution was this, when so many of the old guard, state socialists turned capitalists, Stalinists turned democrats, wormed their way back to the top, sloughing their pasts like snake skins?

Against warnings from President Vaclav Havel and others not to "become like them" (referring to the political witch hunts of the old regime), parliament in 1991 passed a lustration law designed to cleanse state employment rolls of anyone who had collaborated with the Communist government, especially the secret police (StB). Havel, probably with a wistful glance back to the purer days of political dissidence, eventually signed the lustration bill.

Trouble is, more names than almost anyone might have imagined had found their way into the StB files as informers. Sometimes the collaboration was an outright fiction created to make some StB agent look good, but at this distance it is hard to sort it all out. Havel had long ago written that Stalinist oppression endured because the people, even those who openly opposed it, helped create the monster that devoured them, and the StB files, blatant injustices notwithstanding, provided troubling evidence of that. Many believe that the deepest impulse of the lustration campaign was a reaction against that complacency, an appeasement of collective guilt. It was, in any case, a negative attempt to fill the spiritual tabula rasa Arendt foresaw.

Given the political, economic, and social turmoil, what else was there? The church in Czechoslovakia played nothing like the vital role of the Polish church, or of the Protestants in East Germany, in opposing Stalinist oppression. And it still is not offering any compelling alternative, especially to the generation that came of age after 1968.

Drawn though they might be toward spiritual alternatives, many Czechs do not trust the church. Some still have not forgiven it for its betrayal and execution of religious reformer Jan Hus in 1415, whose monument dominates Prague's Old Town Square and is one of the city's most popular warm-weather gathering places. Others believe that all the Catholic church really wants is to regain the property and power it held in the years before the Communists took most of it away.

More evidence of that possibility has surfaced in Slovakia than in the Czech lands (Slovakia is about 60 percent Catholic; the Czech Republic, 40 percent). The church in Slovakia has been frozen in the fifties. I interviewed the Jesuit, Jan Korec, shortly after the revolution. The doorbell at his Bratislava apartment still flashed a table lamp instead of ringing, so that spying neighbors would not know he had visitors. His sacrifices under totalitarianism were deep and impressive. Yet even Korec (now a cardinal), like most of the Slovak bishops, has turned out to be an ardent nationalist. The church in Slovakia has even tried to resurrect the Nazi collaborator Monsignor Jozef Tiso as some sort of Slovak national hero. Given that kind of example, it is no wonder that many Slovak Catholics are disillusioned, and even more Czechs, with their predominately humanistic bent, are less than inspired by a Christian alternative.

I remember my friend's bone-deep blush when her hidden crucifix was exposed. Today her baby is a toddler. She and her husband want nothing more than to emigrate and raise their daughter outside the environmental and moral contamination they now see little chance of righting in their lifetime. These are bright, committed people. Where would the country be without the likes of them?

Many now believe that the Czech revolution has not really happened, and that when the real one does come it will be wrapped in a cloth far coarser than velvet. However that may be, what happens as the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe struggle for political and economic order, social integrity, and spiritual renewal could be crucial for all of us, a way out of our own environmental and moral contamination.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Commonweal Foundation
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