50 Years Ago Today...

Prague August 21, 1968, Photograph by Josef Koudelka

I'll never forget the look on my father's face the evening of August 20, 1968, as the news of the Soviet invasion of his homeland, Czechoslovakia, started trickling over the radio. What had begun early that year as an experiement in social and economic reform, or as the leader of the country Alexander Dubček referred to it, "Socialism with a human face", ended in late summer as you see above, with Soviet tanks rumbling through the streets of Prague.

Soldiers from the USSR as well as Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria, entered the Czechoslovak capital the following day, no doubt under the impression that they were on a noble mission to liberate their fellow Warsaw Pact brethren from the evil grips of capitalism whose false promises of  bourgois prosperity had blinded their government into taking a stand against the workers' paradise that the glorious revolution had created.

One can only imagine the soldiers' amazement when ordinary citizens came out in full force onto the streets of Prague to challenge them. Soldiers of course, train to fight other soldiers on the battlefield, not civilians, including old people armed with nothing other than words, their fists, and their rage. In his remarkable series of photographs, one of the few visual documents we have of the event, Josef Koudelka captured not only dramatic moments like the one above of a young man defiantly waiving the Czechoslovak flag while standing on top of a Soviet tank, but also banality as portrayed in the faces of Warsaw Pact troops, most of them just beyond puberty, bewildered by the absurdity of the situation in which they found themselves. A gallery of Josef's photographs on the invasion can be found here.

Absurdity is a central theme of the work of writer and dramatist. Vaclav Havel, whose work became known to much of the Czechoslovak people during the brief period of openness in 1968, popularly referred to as Prague Spring.

After the invasion, Havel at great risk to his safety not to mention his personal freedom, became a dissident who wrote extensively about totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia. Here I've borrowed a couple sections from my tribute to Havel written shortly after his death in 2011. Havel's words are in italics:

The fifties were a difficult time in Czechoslovakia. Havel wrote about the conflicting currents that defined life in those years. The revolution brought with it for some, excitement and hope for the future: 

Building sites were swarming with tens of thousands of young enthusiasts of the new faith singing songs of socialist construction. 

While at the same time: 

In the fifties there were enormous concentration camps in Czechoslovakia filled with tens of thousands of innocent people... There were tortures and executions, dramatic flights across borders.

As bad as all that was, Havel wrote that at the time, there was at least some sort of meaning to all the madness: 

The songs of idealists and fanatics, political criminals on the rampage, the suffering of heroes-these have always been part of history. The fifties were a bad time in Czechoslovakia, but there have been many such times in human history. It still shared something, or at least bore comparison with those other periods; it still resembled history. No one could have said that nothing was happening, or that the age did not have its stories.

After the invasion, life did not exactly return to pre-Spring days. Here is Havel in 1987, contrasting the totalitarianism backed with an ideology of the fifties, with a totalitarianism whose only purpose was self-preservation of the post-Prague Spring:

... the powers that be really did learn a lesson from the Prague Spring. They discovered how far things can go when the door to a plurality of opinions and interests is opened: the totalitarian system itself is jeopardized. Having learned this lesson, political power set itself a single aim: self-preservation. In a process with its own, mindless dynamic, all the mechanisms of direct and indirect manipulation of life began to expand and assume unprecedented forms. Henceforth nothing could be left to chance.

After the invasion of 1968, Czechoslovkia was swept up into a period of inertia (the official term for it was normalization), that lasted until November 28, 1989 when it was discovered the walls holding up the regime were made of glass, with nothing inside left to support them. The fall of the Czwchoslovak Communisr regime was called the Velvet Revolution, as not a drop of blood was spilled, and the Czechoslovak people elected none other than Vaclav Havel to be their new president. 

It would be nice to say that is all behind us and everyone lived happily ever after, but that is simply not the fate of the human condition. Soon after the Velvet Revolution, Czechoslovakia was no more, as Slovakia in the east, split from the Czech Republic in 1993. The Soviet Union is no more either but rumblings coming from Moscow over the past deecade or so seem to indicate that there is considerable nostalgia for the good ol' days of Russian hegemony over the countries who used to be behind what was once ominously referred to as the "Iron Curtain."

Most recently the unthinkable has happened. The current president of the United States has openly declared his admiration for the dictator of Russia. The jury is still out on exactly how much this president likes that dictator, exactly where that admiration comes from, and even more unthinkable, whether or not the dictator of Russia might have some dirt on the President of the United States, enabling him to exert considerable influence over him. Regardless of the verdict, there is a palpable and justifiable fear in Western and Central Eurpoe, especially among the countries formerly under the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union, that the United States no longer has their backs.

On top of all that speculation, what is crystal clear is that the POTUS has openly declared the free press, well at least the part of it who does not show its unfailing loyalty to him, the "enemy of the people."

There is certainly an ominous precedent for that; I don't have to enumerate it in all its ugly iterations. Interestingly enough, it has been stated that perhaps the greatest threat to the Soviet Union posed by the reforms of Prague Spring which led to the invasion, was the relaxation of governmental censorship of the press.

We have no further to look than Josef Koudelka, whose photographs of the people of Prague resisting Soviet tanks, as I said one of the few visual documents we have of the invasion, were not released to the public for several months after the event. Koudelka processed the film and printed the negatives in hiding, and had the finished work smuggled out of the country to be published as the work of P.P. (Prague Photographer). Shortly thereafter he left his country and lived in exile for twenty years. It was only after returning home after the Velvet Revolution that Koudelka claimed responsibility for his pictures.

Here is a film published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 2008, that tells the story from the viewpoint of individuals who were on both sides of the tanks during the invasion, inside and out. The film describes the importance to both sides of the Prague offices of Czchoslovak Radio, the last "source of uncensored news":




It would do us well on this anniversary, to remember our own country's long and imperfect history of justice, liberty, democracy, and a free press.

We take these things for granted, which is a terrible mistake.

Listening to the words of people like Vaclav Havel and seeing the images of Josef Koudelka can only remind us of how much we have to lose.

Above all, take heed of a memory of the Czech woman in the film, Ivana Dolezalova, whose thoughts on the urgency of protecting the offices of Czechoslovak Radio bear repeating:

Once they get hold of the media, the country (will) pretty much be lost.

Because hard as it may be to conceive, something like this could in fact happen here, if we as a people don't care enough to prevent it.

Brush with greatness

There were two tables of guests at our wedding rehearsal dinner almost fifteen years ago. At one table sat the parents of the bride and groom and their friends. After dinner, the guests at that table, commenting on the raucous goings from across the room, lamented that they sat at the wrong table. The topic of conversation that caused the commotion at our table was this: personal encounters with celebrities. As you might expect, the most memorable events involving genuine face-to-face contact with well known people came at the beginning of our conversation. The dinner became really fun however once the big names got out of the way and we began to search our memory banks to "top" each other with what turned out to be less and less meaningful encounters with more and more obscure celebrities. Perhaps the highlight, or the nadir depending on your point of view, came when my friend and I discovered that his mother and my maternal uncle, were both high school classmates of the late comedian known as "Lonesome" George Gobel.

My wife-to-be remained silent during most of the dinner. I knew why she kept to herself; it would have ground the entire conversation to a screeching halt as her story of meeting a famous celebrity was head and shoulders above all the rest. As the dinner was coming to an end and our friends and family members couldn't scrape the bottom of the barrel any farther than poor old Lonesome George, I asked my bride to recount the tale of her most memorable celebrity encounter. Grudgingly she told of how one day she and her friend who at the time were working at an upscale Chicago restaurant, were invited to spend the evening with Jack Nicholson. With typical modesty, my wife claims that it was her friend that the movie star was interested in but I'm sure he was quite happy to spend the evening with not one, but two lovely young women. Before your imagination runs wild, the evening my wife assures me, was spent watching the French Open, and discussing philosophy and New Wave Cinema. In the end I'm happy to report, Mr. Nicholson was the perfect gentleman as he bid a fond adieu to the ladies sans shenanigans, when they told him it was time to leave.

Anyway that's my wife's story, she's sticking to it and I'm perfectly content to believe it.

It's no secret that our fascination with celebrities comes from the fact that all of us at one time or other, dreams of one day becoming famous, to have the world as they say, at our feet. Like any typical American boy, I once dreamed of being a great athlete. That dream was brought down to earth one day as I was riding my bike up Michigan Avenue and saw a large group of people gathered on the sidewalk and spilling out into the street. I had to see what was going on and it turned out the crowd was gazing intently into the window of a closed shoe store. Inside the store was Michael Jordan, presumably buying shoes. It dawned on me that living in a fish bowl as he did, was not all that it was cracked up to be. The guy couldn't even buy a pair of shoes without extreme measures taken to insure his safety and privacy. From that moment on, I no longer wanted to "be like Mike."

When I was a teenager, I set my sights upon being an artist. My other uncle, the brother of my father, was my inspiration. I first met my Uncle Jenda when he came to this country after emigrating from Czechoslovakia in early 1968. Jenda and my other relatives could not have been more different.  He had traveled extensively, and was uncompromisingly independent. He lived life exactly as he saw fit. In his case that meant residing in a cell-like one room apartment, with the bathroom down the hall. Like any artist, he wanted his work to be shown, but he refused to create work to please other people. He could not care less what others thought of him. As an adolescent, Jenda was hands down the coolest person I knew.

All these memories came flooding into my head these past few weeks as I just had my own brush with greatness, the honor and privilege of working with Czech artist Josef Koudelka. In all my years of working in the Department of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, I have met many great photographers, some of them personal heroes of mine. Koudelka is both those things to be sure, yet on a very personal level, much much more.

Koudelka has had a long, illustrious career producing works that combine a strong personal vision with a powerful sense of humanity. Unlike the cool reserve and distance of most contemporary street photography, Koudleka's photographs of people, just like the photographer, are filled with passion; they are intimate works that could only be made by a man who spent a great deal of time, and in some cases, even lived with his subjects.

Koudelka's first monumental work was a series of photographs made in the early sixties of Gypsies living in Romania and the former Czechoslovakia. The original prints from his first exhibition of that work in Prague, have been assembled together for the first time in forty years and are currently on display in Koudelka's first American retrospective exhibition currently on view at the Art Institute. The sub-title of the exhibition, Nationality Doubtful, refers to the period after the creation of the original Gypsy pictures.

It was a twist of fate that made Josef Koudelka for a very brief period a photojournalist, and for a very long time, a man without a country. Koudelka arrived in Prague on August 19th, 1968, after a trip photographing in Romania. As it so happened, on the very next day, the brief period of the experiment of "Socialism with a human face" known as the Prague Spring, came to an abrupt end as Czechoslovakia was invaded by troops of the Warsaw Pact nations under the leadership of the Soviet Union. Armed with a 35mm Exacta still camera and hundreds of feet of bulk-loaded East German movie film, Josef documented the invasion from the streets of Prague, as citizens of that city confronted Russian tanks with nothing more than their fists and their rage. His photographs, for all intents and purposes the only visual documentation we have of that tragic event, (which from a distance, I can still remember almost as if it happened yesterday), show the emboldened public demonstratively expressing their outrage, as well as the perplexed faces of the soldiers, few of them over twenty, who were told by their superiors that they would be welcomed into the city as liberating heroes. Placing himself in harm's way, Koudelka was as much a part of the citizen's revolt as a documenter of it. Not only did he shoot pictures of unarmed individuals on top of Russian tanks, but at times he too was on top of those tanks as some of his pictures testify.

Koudelka spent the weeks after the invasion processing his film and printing the negatives. The prints were smuggled out of the country and fell into the hands of the Magnum photo agency. They were published shortly thereafter, first in the London Sunday Times magazine, then all over the world under the credit line of "P.P." (Prague Photographer). Koudelka high-tailed it out of Czechoslovakia in 1970 by seeking a three month work visa, then applying for political asylum in England. He would not return to his home country until the Velvet Revolution, some twenty years later, when he would finally claim authorship of the invasion photographs.

During his years in exile and continuing to this day, Koudelka has traveled the world making pictures. For much of his career, his was a hand-to-mouth existence, relying on grants and the kindness of strangers (and friends) to keep him going. He once said:

For 17 years I never paid any rent. Even the Gypsies were sorry for me because they thought I was poorer than them. At night they were in their caravans and I was the guy who was sleeping outside beneath the sky.

It has been a peripatetic existence as well. Koudelka by his own admission never stays in one place very long:

I never stay in one country more than three months. Why? Because I was interested in seeing, and if I stay longer I become blind.

Perhaps Koudelka's most evocative and poetic work was produced between 1968 and 1987, culminating in a book appropriately titled Exiles. The book opens with the photographer's most iconic image, a view up a deserted Wenseslaus Square (Vaclavske Namesti) in Prague moments before the invasion. A watch on a borrowed wrist in the foreground marks for eternity the time, (12:22PM) of the impending doom.

The late playwright Vaclav Havel described the period in Czechoslovakia between the invasion and the Velvet Revolution and his own ascendance to the presidency of his country, as a time of great inertia. It was as if the wristwatch in Koudelka's picture stopped functioning at that very moment, and time had stood still.

Unlike his native country, Joseph Koudelka was just getting started in 1968. The pictures from his wandering years found in Exiles are drastically different from his earlier work. No longer were his images exclusively of people. Instead, found objects, discarded little fragments of things that once meant something to someone began to populate his pictures. One picture is of an impromptu meal of Josef's, spread over a copy of the International Herald Tribune. When he did photograph people, rather confronting his subjects head on as in the Gypsy photographs, Koudelka began photographing people from the side or behind. One memorable picture is of a man from behind, as he looks toward a massive hovercraft in the background. Another, an ambiguous photo of several older men in a bunker-like structure, also seen from behind, suggests that these are pictures of wanderers who like himself were in search of something. Perhaps that something is profound. Or perhaps they're just looking for a place to take a pee; life is funny that way.

Death is a recurring theme in Koudelka's work. In one picture, a dead raven is strung up on a clothesline. In a heartbreaking image, a young woman is laid to rest as the lid is placed over her coffin while her grieving mother and family wail in the background. In a most peculiar picture, one that did not make the cut in our exhibit, we are in a room which appears to be a preparation room for a mortuary. An elderly man with sunken eyes reclines on a gurney, looking over at a bier with flowers strewn upon it. In the photo the man appears to be awaiting his turn on the bier.

For the past few decades, Koudelka has almost entirely excluded people form his pictures. Instead, photographing with a panoramic format camera, he has been documenting the hand of man on the landscape. Barriers and borders abound in these pictures. One project represented in book form in the exhibition, depicts the wall in Jerusalem that was built to separate the Palestinian and Jewish communities in that divided city. From his last words in the Art Institute produced video below shot by my friend Bill Foster, you can tell exactly where his sentiments lie.




His most recent work centers around the ruins of ancient civilizations scattered throughout Europe and the Middle East.

Had he only made the invasion photographs, Josef Koudelka's place in history would be secure. As the one piece of visual evidence of that event, the photographs served to bring the acts of a brutal, morally bankrupt regime to the attention of the world. It may not be an overstatement to say that the invasion and Josef's document of it, freezing the moment forever in time, helped contribute to the eventual downfall of the Soviet Union.

But in a career that has spanned well over fifty years, Koudelka has produced many distinct bodies of work, all of which hold up to the highest scrutiny. He is the consummate perfectionist, never satisfied with resting upon his laurels, constantly striving to get better and better with each new project. My guess is that if you asked him what his favorite picture is, he would reply, "the next one."

As such he is a constant source of frustration for anyone who has to work with him.

"Who has the bigger ego, the artist or the curator?" he is fond of asking whenever he is in a museum setting. The fact that he feels compelled to ask such a question should give us the answer.

Those of us who struggled for several months putting together his show at the Art Institute were not slightly taken aback when we met with Koudelka and our colleagues from the Getty Museum, the next venue for the show. Josef said: "We will make the next show even better than this one." Sensing that he had stepped on a few toes, Josef added that we all must strive to get better in everything we do, never stay the same.

If you were a film producer casting the role of the quintessential eccentric, difficult artist, Koudleka would fit as the model; it's as if he walked directly out of central casting.

The day his show opened, there was a public event featuring Koudelka, Matt Witkovsky, the curator of the exhibition, and Amanda Maddox from the Getty. Josef got the rock star treatment as the museum's Fullerton Hall was filled to the rafters, SRO with people lining the aisles and sitting on the stairs. He had the crowd eating out of his hands with his typical charm mixed with occasional irascibility. Never one to pull any punches, Josef said exactly what was on his mind, even as it often came at the expense of the two curators sitting beside him.

Had I had known of Josef Koudelka while I was in art school in the late seventies, I certainly would have liked to model my life after his. To this day part of me longs to live the life of an uncompromising artist, completely devoted to his work at the expense of everything else.

Yet as with being like Mike, that's all a fantasy. Koudelka's work consumes him; he eats, sleeps and drinks photography. Fixer flows through his veins; bus, train and plane schedules are his pacemaker. The man brags that he owns only two shirts and continues at 76 years of age to be restless at being in the same place for any period of time. More than twenty years my senior, he can run circles around me.

My life by contrast is consumed by many diverse passions. I have lived in the same city all my life and for the last 13 years, (not coincidentally, the age of my eldest child), have seldom strayed more than couple hundred miles from home. I don't exactly live in the lap of luxury but I live like a millionaire compared to Josef. Contrary to what he says about himself in the Art Institute film, I don't have a trace of his courage either. Meeting Josef Koudelka for the first time, no matter who you are, you are treated as if you have been lifetime friends. The consummate man about town, Josef can converse in several languages. I witnessed him in one conversation with people of at least four different nationalities, speak without any hesitation to each person in his or her own language.

But it was when he spoke Czech to my friend Milan from Prague, that part of my life's history flashed before my eyes. It brought back the long lost conversations of my father and his brother in a language that I cannot speak, yet still remains very much a part of me. Except for Koudelka's great fame and success, he and my late uncle are almost like two peas in a pod.

Koudelka and my friend Milan. They had just met
but you'd think they were bosom buddies.

Koudelka has certainly earned enough money to slow down in his "golden years", but that just doesn't seem to be in the cards. His daughter who lives in Paris (one of three Koudelka children scattered across the globe) joined him on this trip to the States. My colleague asked her what is was like to be Josef's daughter. "He was always working" was her terse response. After he introduced me to his daughter he added: "Imagine having an asshole like me for a father."

During our two weeks together Josef expressed a great deal of genuine interest in my own children whose pictures are prominently displayed above my desk. For a brief moment I had the feeling that my conventional life was as intriguing to him as his spartan, globetrotting, earth-shattering existence was to me.

At the end of his visit, we parted with a great bear hug, exchanging thanks and our mutual respect. Josef left for Prague or Paris or London or wherever his muse would lead him. I left to watch my son play baseball.

That last day as I left for home, it occurred to me that both of us were headed exactly where we belonged.

---

The Exhibition Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful, will run until September 14th in the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago.

After that it will travel to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles where it will be on display from Novermber 11, 2014 until March 22, 2015.

A man for all seasons

War heros play a huge role in a nation's lore. Their images grace currency, stories are written and movies are made about them, pigeon covered monuments dedicated to them adorn parks and public squares. Be they great military leaders or regular grunts who perform heroic deeds, placing the lives of others above their own, they inspire us to greatness and serve as symbols of their country:

• The Americans have George Washington, Audi Murphy and Chicago's own Milton Olive.
• The Russians have Aleksandr Nevskii, Gyorgi Zhukov, and Ekaterina Mikhailovna-Demina
• The Poles have Tadeusz Kościuszko, Casimir Pulaski and Wojtek the Soldier Bear.
• The Czechs have Josef Švejk.

In case that last name is not familiar to you, don't search through accounts of Czech military history. The Good Soldier Švejk is the eponymous character of a series of satyrical novels written by Jaroslav Hašek, set during World War I. Not your typical war hero, this Josef was an incompetent ne'er-do-well of sorts, on the surface not all that different from the bumbling Marine, Gomer Pyle of the TV series of the same name. Unlike Gomer Pyle, Švejk was a subversive; crazy like a fox, his incompetence, whether intentional or not, served to undermine the military system and the society to which he belonged.

Much has been made of Soldier Švejk's being a symbol of the Czech people. The Czechs and their on again off again brethren, the Moravians and the Slovaks, are goegraphically sandwiched between major powers on the world stage. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany and Russia, all occupied their small country at one time or other over the last several hundred years. The Czech character is built some would say, out of the years of subjugation under oppressive foreign regimes. Much the same can be said for their Slavic cousins the Poles, yet the temperaments of the two nations could not be more different. The Poles by and large are hot blooded, patriotic, and devoutly Catholic. As for the Czechs, well not so much. The Czechs combine irreverence with a strong sense of self-preservation, mixed with a hint of cynicism. The legendary but far outnumbered Polish Army valiantly fought against the Germans in the first days of September, 1939. The Polish Underground was a formidable force in World War II and as a result, their country was devastated by the War. By contrast, the Czechs understood the futility of standing up to the German war machine. Where the Poles were defiant, the Czechs like Soldier Švejk, were subversive in their resistance.

That's not to say that the Czech people did not suffer under Nazi occupation. In May of 1942, the Nazi administrator for Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated by Czechoslovak Resistance paratroopers in Prague. To avenge his death, Hitler ordered the annihilation of a town just outside of Prague whose inhabitants were suspected of anti-Reich sentiments and for aiding Heydrich's assassins. On June 9th, 1942, German troops rounded up all 173 men and several women of Lidice, and shot them. The children of the town who were acceptable racial specimens were taken away from their mothers and sent off for adoption to German families. The rest of the women and children were sent to concentration camps where most of them perished. Their town was burned to the ground.

All around the world, you will find streets and towns named Lidice in memory of that tragic city.

Save for a few blocks which were blown up by the Nazis in retaliation for various acts of resistance against them, the city of Prague was not physically damaged during the war. The same cannot be said for its populace. Tens of thousands of citizens of Prague, mostly Jews, were deported to Theresenstadt, the concentration camp that was created by Heydrich.

This was the world of Václav Havel's childhood. My father and Havel (who shared first names), were born in Czechoslovakia during a brief moment in history (between the two world wars) when their country was free and independent. The young Havel would know that independence for all of two years.

With the Munich Agreement of 1938, England and France handed over the western part of Czechoslovakia (the Sudatenland) to Hitler on a silver platter, and by March of the following year, the much weakened country became a protectorate of Germany. In 1940, a Czechoslovak government in exile was formed in London. That government led by President Edvard Beneš, was recognized by the Allied Powers and in 1943, signed a far reaching treaty with the Soviet Union which resulted in the agreement to nationalize heavy industry and create local people's committees in the country at the end of the war.

The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, the KSČ, which was loyal to Moscow, had been in existence since 1921. The Soviet liberation of most of Czechoslovakia from the Nazis, combined with lingering resentment toward the West since the Munich Agreement, resulted in the KSČ gaining considerable support in the 1946 elections, during the brief existence of the Czechoslovak Third Republic after the War. For the three years the tenuous Republic existed, Czechoslovakia was the only neighbor of the Soviet Union that had a democratically elected government. Soon, under pressure from Joseph Stalin and the influence of the Red Army knocking at the door, President Beneš capitulated in February of 1948 (the month and year of my half sister's Eva's birth), and formed a new government with the KSČ squarely in control. By the time the elections rolled around in May of that year, there was only one party on the ballot, the National Front. The National Front would be the only political organization allowed in the country for the next 41 years.

In 1948, Vacláv Havel was twelve years old. As we read in his obituaries last week, he came from an influential upper middle class family in Prague. By the time he came of age in the 1950s, his pedigree did not prove favorable in the new worker's paradise of Communist Czechoslovakia, and his opportunities proved limited. College was not an option for him, so he left school at 15 and before his compulsory military service he worked in various positions in the national service primarily as a laboratory assistant. After the military service ended he enrolled in a correspondence course in drama which led to his next career as a playwright.

The fifties were a difficult time in Czechoslovakia. Havel wrote about the conflicting currents that defined life in those years. The revolution brought with it for some, excitement and hope for the future:

Building sites were swarming with tens of thousands of young enthusiasts of the new faith singing songs of socialist construction.

While at the same time:

In fifties there were enormous concentration camps in Czechoslovakia filled with tens of thousands of innocent people... There were tortures and executions, dramatic flights across borders.

In 1955, my father's departure from his country took place during one of those dramatic flights.

Havel wrote about the harassment Czech citizens endured at the hands of the Secret Police. Any number of excuses sufficed for this treatment but one of the biggest causes for concern were people with relatives living in the West. As we traveled from Paris to České Budějovice in Southern Bohemia in 1993 to meet her mother (my father's first wife), my half sister Eva described to me in great deal what the two of them endured after my father left for greener pastures. For ten years, Eva and her mother were harassed, usually with knocks on the door in the middle of the night by the police trying to glean information about my old man, but mostly to send a message. Even though our father and her mother were divorced and no longer in contact, the two women lived in constant fear as the continuous harassment lasted until her mother remarried. Eva and her mother paid dearly for my father's actions and benefitted nothing. This was a story that would be retold countless times for generations of Czechosloavaks.

As bad as all that was, Havel wrote that at the time, there was at least some sort of meaning to all the madness:

The songs of idealists and fanatics, political criminals on the rampage, the suffering of heroes-these have always been part of history. The fifties were a bad time in Czechoslovakia, but there have been many such times in human history. It still shared something, or at least bore comparison with those other periods; it still resembled history. No one could have said that nothing was happening, or that the age did not have its stories.

An idealist could argue that the atrocities against the people were merely the growing pains of a nascent  society. They were after all driven by a powerful ideology, trying (in vain) to build an ideal society, one where there would no longer be poverty and everyone (theoretically) would be equal. The end justifies the means after all, at least in the mind of an ideologue.

That idealism still existed in the late sixties and came to fruition during the Prague Spring, a brief, wonderful period in 1968. Prague Spring was not at first a grass roots movement but a realization that the economic model set into motion from on high (i.e.; the USSR) did not work as a one size fits all solution. It particularly didn't work in a highly educated and industrially sophisticated Czechoslovakia. Alexander Dubček, a Slovak, was appointed president in early 1968 and immediately set into motion a series of reforms including the lifting of restrictions on speech and the press. He suggested the possibility of a multiple party system, and to bolster the stagnant economy, hinted at a limited free market. This was not meant to be a rejection of Communism. The goal in Dubček's words was:

...to build an advanced socialist society on sound economic foundations ... a socialism that corresponds to the historical democratic traditions of Czechoslovakia, in accordance with the experience of other communist parties.

In other words, again in Dubček's words: "Communism with a human face."

For one brief, shining moment, it was a tremendously liberating experience, as if a veil had been lifted over the eyes of the entire country. The works of many Czech dissident writers including Havel, previously banned, became publicly known in their own country. Dubček's reforms opened up the flood gates for everyone in society with a bone to pick about the government, especially the influence of the Soviet Union, whose leaders were all ears. On the pretext of its right to intervene if a Warsaw Pact nation were to embark on a path toward capitalism, troops from other Warsaw Pact nations, Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary and the Soviet Union, invaded Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1968. Here is a link to a gallery of pictures of the invasion made by the great Czech photographer, Josef Koudelka.

The creation of Prague Spring may not have been a grass roots movement, but the opposition to its fall certainly was. As you can see from the photographs, young people took to the streets in a defiant, if quixotic stance in opposition to the invasion. In some cases, busses were overturned in the streets to prevent the tanks from advancing, other tanks were set ablaze. More creative tactics included the Švejkian removal of all street signs except the ones that pointed the way back to Moscow. 72 Czechoslovaks were killed in the invasion.

After the invasion, life did not exactly return to pre-Spring days. Here is Havel in 1987, contrasting the totalitarianism backed with an ideology of the fifties, with a totalitarianism whose only purpose was self-preservation of the post-Prague Spring:

... the powers that be really did learn a lesson from the Prague Spring. They discovered how far things can go when the door to a plurality of opinions and interests is opened: the totalitarian system itself is jeopardized. Having learned this lesson, political power set itself a single aim: self-preservation. In a process with its own, mindless dynamic, all the mechanisms of direct and indirect manipulation of life began to expand and assume unprecedented forms. Henceforth nothing could be left to chance.

The past twenty years in Czechoslovakia can almost serve as a textbook illustration of how an advanced or late totalitarian system works. Revolutionary ethos and terror have been replaced by dull inertia, pretex-ridden caution, bureaucratic anonymity, and mindless, stereotypical behavior, all of which aim exclusively at becoming more and more what they already are.

The songs of zealots and the cries of the tortured are no longer heard; lawlessness has put on kid gloves and moved from the torture chambers into the upholstered offices of faceless bureaucrats. If the President of the Republic is seen in the street at all, he is behind the bulletproof glass of his limousine as it roars off to the airport, surrounded by a police escort, to meet Colonel Qaddafi.

The twenty one year period between the crush of the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution provided most of the fodder for Václav Havel's diatribes against the Czechoslovak totalitarian state. Havel said that during those years. it was if time stood still.

Havel was no Soldier Švejk. He was as defiant as any Polish Cavalry soldier. The only difference was his choice of weapon was not a gun, but the written word. His plays and essays spelled out in no uncertain terms that the socialist government of Czechoslovakia was an absurd travesty. In an open letter to then President Gustáv Husák in 1973, Havel wrote that although the outward signs of prosperity were evident, the totalitarian system that Husák presided over, undermined general well being and human dignity:

The basic question one must ask is this: Why are people in fact behaving in the way they do? Why do they do all these things that, taken together, form the impressive image of a totally united society giving total support to its government? For any unprejudiced observer, the answer is, I think, selfevident: They are driven to it by fear.

For fear of losing his job, the schoolteacher teaches things he does not believe; fearing for his future, the pupil repeats them after him; for fear of not being allowed to continue his studies, the young man joins the Youth League and participates in whatever of its activities are necessary; fear that, under the monstrous system of political credits, his son or daughter will not acquire the necessary total of points for enrollment at a school leads the father to take on all manner of responsibilities and "voluntarily" to do everything required. Fear of the consequences of refusal leads people to take part in elections, to vote for the proposed candidates, and to pretend that they regard such ceremonies as genuine elections; out of fear for their livelihood, position, or prospects, they go to meetings, vote for every resolution they have to, or at least keep silent: it is fear that carries them through humiliating acts of self-criticism and penance and the dishonest filling out of a mass of degrading questionnaires; fear that someone might inform against them prevents them from giving public, and often even private, expression to their true opinions. It is the fear of suffering financial reverses and the effort to better themselves and ingratiate themselves with the authorities that in most cases makes working men put their names to "work commitments"; indeed, the same motives often lie behind the establishment of Socialist Labor Brigades, in the clear realization that their chief function is to be mentioned in the appropriate reports to higher levels. Fear causes people to attend all those official celebrations, demonstrations, and marches: Fear of being prevented from continuing their work leads many scientists and artists to give allegiance to ideas they do not in fact accept, to write things they do not agree with or khow to be false, to join official organizations or to take part in work of whose value they have the lowest opinion, or to distort and mutilate their own works. In the effort to save themselves, many even report others for doing to them what they themselves have been doing to the people they report.

Life in Czechoslovakia was in fact a lie, according to Havel.

And if the life of the dissident/playwright turned president could be summed up in one word, that word would be, truth.

Václav Havel paid dearly for speaking the truth. He was put in prison on numerous occasions and forced to work in menial jobs to support himself. Havel's work was banned in his own country and he was known to his own people mostly through the government's condemnation of him.

Havel gained international attention in 1977 when he and a group of similar minded political activists wrote and signed Charter 77.  A Bill of Rights of sorts, Charter 77 was a petition, and later a movement that took the petition's name, to "call attention to the systematic violation of human rights and democratic freedoms" that had been already agreed upon during the Helsinki Accords of 1975 (and signed by the Czechoslovak government), the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, and the Czechoslovak constitution.

The primary concern of the petition was the failure to afford its citizens the right to freedom of expression, and the fear of official retribution for expressing personal opinions. Citizens expressing points of view not in accordance with the government's, the charter claims, were routinely denied the right to education, the right to be gainfully employed in one's chosen occupation, and were ostracized from society.

Other rights enumerated by Charter 77 guaranteed in the Czechoslovak constitution but not in reality were:

• freedom of information
• freedom of religion
• the right to legal recourse
• freedom from unreasonable search
• freedom of movement

Although Havel in his own writing made no bones about the fact that he did not suscribe to the tenets of Socialism, Charter 77 was not in any way a radical document and it took pains to point out that it did not quarrel with the basic premises of Socialism or advocate political change or social reform.

Still the government came down with a vengeance on the petition's creators and signers. The document proved to be prophetic. As if on cue, the government's reaction was spelled out in detail by the document itself. The creators and those with the courage to sign it were publicly vilified, lost their jobs, they and their children were deprived of educational opportunities, some were forced into exile, others were coerced into becoming secret service informants, and others including Havel, were sent to prison. His five year sentence was reduced by six months because of poor health.

Here is another quote from Charter 77:

In prisons, persons thus sentenced (for political crimes) are treated in a manner violating human dignity, their health is endangered and attempts are made to destroy them morally.

In Havel's case, all of that was true, but the attempts to morally destroy him were unmitigated failures. Nor did the government succeed in silencing him. Despite the perpetual threat of retribution hanging over him, Havel continued to write and speak out against the evils of totalitarianism, right up until the fall of the government and his ascendence to the presidency in 1989.

More words of his would prove prophetic when in 1989, once again in prison, he wrote an essay that was to be delivered at the award ceremony of the German Booksellers Association where he was to be presented with that group's Peace Prize. Appropriately enough, the essay was titled: "A Word about Words."

Havel said in the essay:

Yes, I do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions...

Just as Havel accepted the award in absentia in October of 1989, Havel's and others' words began the revolution that would be resolved in a little over a month, without one shot being fired. Months after being released from prison, Havel became the President of Czechoslovakia.

1989 was a watershed year in the history of the world as it marked the fall of Communism in Europe. None of the dramatic changes that took place in the old Soviet Bloc could have happened without the vision and courage of Mikhail Gorbachev who understood that the price of militarization due to the Cold War came at the cost of feeding its people. The General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union introduced a new openness (glasnost) and economic restructuring (perestroika), all to encourage a dialogue with, and encourage support from the West. Ironically it was the workers in Poland who brought an end to their "workers' paradise."The Solidarity Labor Union and Movement in Poland and its charismatic leader Lech Wałęsa, with the support of the influential Catholic Church of that country, became so powerful that it forced the government to negotiate with it.  In 1989, Gorbachev discarded the Brezhnev Doctrine where the USSR reserved the right to intervene if any of the Warsaw Pact nations got out of line, just as they did in Hungary in 1956 and of course Czechoslovakia in 1968. Poland quickly fell and soon thereafter, Hungary did the same. However the governments of Bulgaria, East Germany, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia remained intent on staying the course.

The government that Husák and his cronies tried so desperately to save, crumbled overnight as there was nothing left to hold it up, its foundation built on a flawed ideology that eventually rotted to the core. In the end it only took a little push from the opposition led in part by Havel and it all came tumbling down on Novermber 28, 1989. Not a drop of blood was spilled, hence the term, Velvet Revolution.

In the following June the first democratic elections were held since 1946. Alexander Dubček was elected speaker of the Federal Parliament and Václav Havel was elected president.

Photograph by Martin Kozák

With impeccable credentials as a man of truth, Václav Havel was the moral compass for his country. Successful politicians need to determine which battles to fight, they need to understand the art of compromise, and they need to tell people what they want to hear.  Havel was no politician. As president, he knew it was time to turn the attention inward and look at the Czech people themselves. Years of oppression had created what he called "totalitarian nihilism", the systematic dissolution of the public's ability to think, to dream, and to believe. It created a nation of complacent, indifferent cynics, and Havel would have none of that. He insisted that his fellow citizens take a stand and take ownership of their country. He also controversially rejected the movement to prosecute ordinary citizens who snitched on their neighbors to the police. Havel understood that no one should be punished for not acting heroically.

Havel saw his presidency as an obligation rather than a reward. During the Dissolution of Czechoslovakia when Slovakia split from the Republic to form its own government, Havel stepped down from office so as not to preside over the breaking up of his country. He was reinstated shortly thereafter and became the first president of the newly formed Czech Republic, where he remained until 2003.

In the press, Václav Havel was often the neglected stepbrother to his fellow leaders in the freedom movements of the late eighties, and early nineties namely, Wałęsa, Gorbachev, and Nelson Mandela of South Africa. All but Havel received Nobel Peace Prizes, and named in numerous lists as the most important people of the last century.

Even his death was overshadowed by the death on the same day (well, the official announcement of it anyway) of North Korean dictator Kim Jung Il. Death indeed makes for strange bedfellows. My guess is that never before had the two men ever been mentioned together in the same sentence, no two leaders could have been more diametrically opposed. It seemed to me at first that the ultimate indignity to Havel was being upstaged on the day of his death by the death of a tyrant.

Then came the images from their respective countries and it occurred to me that Havel got the last laugh. In Prague's Wenseslaus Square, (appropriately named after Havel's namesake, the famous good king and patron saint of the Czechs), and in cities all over the former Czechoslovakia, there were images of spontaneous gatherings of people who assembled to celebrate the life of the man who helped set the course for the future of their country. Tens of thousands showed up for his funeral in Prague.

In Pyongyang came the images of a clearly not spontaneous gathering of hundreds of North Koreans, beating their chests, some on their hands and knees, appearing like a casting call for the latest telenovela, all in hysterics over the death of their "beloved leader."

The contrast of the two images was stunning. The genuine show of love and respect for Václav Havel versus the absurd theater (which Havel the artist would certainly have appreciated) of a totalitarian regime propagating obvious falsehoods illustrated for me anyway, the victory of truth, morality and humanity over the false promises of ideology. That was exactly what Havel fought for throughout his struggles and his successes.

Now and perhaps for the ages, Václav Havel has replaced Soldier Švejk as the enduring symbol of the resiliency of the Czech people. He fought a heroic battle, defiantly taking on a formidable opponent and winning in no uncertain terms. He stood by his principles without flinching, even if it meant jail or even worse, disfavor from his own people.

He was a bright shining light in a time of great darkness, truly a man for all seasons.


Post script:


Today, Christmas Day, December 25, 2011, marks the twentieth anniversary of Mikhail Gorbachev stepping down from power thereby declaring the official dissolution of the Soviet Union.