1968 (41 page)

It was difficult to go far with reforms while Novotny´ was still president. But a series of outrageous corruption scandals involving him and his son made it possible to remove him from his second post only months after he was ousted as Party chairman. At the last moment he tried to develop a following, by suddenly becoming a “regular guy,” being seen having beers with the boys in working-class bars. But he was a deeply disliked figure. On March 22, with no other possible choice, he resigned from the presidency.

Dub
ek did not have a free hand in naming Novotny´’s replacement because it was critical that the new president be someone who would not only work with him, but also please, or at least not enrage, Brezhnev. Various groups wrote letters suggesting different candidates. It was the only open discussion of an appointment for head of government in the history of the Soviet bloc. The students favored forty-seven-year-old Cestmír Cisar, a known reformer and somewhat charismatic television personality whose liberal ideas had met with disfavor in the Novotny´ regime. He was exactly the kind of candidate who would not ease Moscow’s fears.

The intelligentsia and some of the students also liked Josef Smrkovsky, age fifty-seven, whose popularity was enhanced by an attack on him from the East German government. In the end, Dub
ek chose the least popular of the three top candidates, seventy-two-year-old retired general Ludvik Svoboda, a hero of World War II who had fought with the Soviets. The other contenders were given important but lesser positions. The students in the new Czechoslovakia let their disappointment be known by demonstrating for Cisar. The demonstration, in itself something unheard of, went on for hours undisturbed, and at midnight the students moved to Communist Party headquarters and shouted their demand to speak with Dub
ek.

This was in March, when in neighboring Poland students were being clubbed to the ground for demanding freedom of speech. Dub
ek was at home when he was told of the student demonstration. He reacted as though this were the normal way things were done here in the Communist People’s Republic: He went over to Party headquarters to talk to the students. He tried to explain his choice to them, saying the other candidates were needed in other places in government, and he assured them that Cisar would have an important role in the Central Committee. One student asked Dub
ek, “What are the guarantees that the old days will not be back?”

Dub
ek responded, “You yourselves are the guarantee. You, the young.”

Was it possible to have a communist democracy in the Soviet bloc? Some were daring to hope. But the students took Dub
ek at his word, that they were the guarantors, so when Svoboda was installed as president, as protest, and perhaps also just to say that the students of Czechoslovakia could have a sit-in, too, they staged one that lasted for hours.

When spring, with all its promise, came to Prague, not everyone was happy. In the month of April there was an average of a suicide a day among politicians, starting with Jozef Brestansky, the vice president of the Supreme Court, who was found hanging from a tree in the woods outside of the capital. He had been working on a massive new project attempting to undo miscarriages of justice from the 1950s. It was believed the judge feared that his role in the sentencing of several innocent people was about to be revealed. Such revelations were surfacing every day, and television was playing a prominent role. Victims were being interviewed on television. Even more shocking, some of the perpetrators were interviewed on television, with viewers across the country watching them squirm as they gave their evasive answers. Camera crews also traveled throughout the country, filming the points of view of ordinary people. What resulted was a national debate about the injustices of the past two decades under communist rule.

The mass rallies and public meetings that began in the winter became widespread in the spring, and many were shown on televi-sion. Students and workers were seen challenging government officials with tough, even hostile, questions. In a country where most officials were gray bureaucrats little known to the public, the officials who played best to cameras and spoke best to microphones—like Josef Smrkovsky—were now becoming national media stars.

If, as some suspected, Dub
ek hoped to satisfy the public with a small taste of democracy, that was not what was happening. The more they got, the more they wanted. Increasingly the demand was heard for opposition political parties. The
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frequently championed this idea, as did playwright Václav Havel and philosopher Ivan Svitak, who wrote an article contending that there had been no reforms, just a few measures that had slipped by because of a power struggle. According to Svitak, the entire Party apparatus had to be uprooted. “We must liquidate it or it will liquidate us.” The press, both print and broadcast, were in the vanguard of political reform. They were well aware that although the state censors were not censoring anymore, they still had their positions. The press wanted a law that banned censorship. One radio editor said, “We have press freedom only on the promise of the Party, and that is democracy on recall.” Dub
ek warned of excesses. Though he did not say so, he must have understood that Brezhnev would never tolerate relinquishing the Communist Party’s monopoly on power.