1968 (66 page)

In April 1968 Dub
ek had given an interview to the French communist newspaper
l’Humanité:

I do not know why a socialism that is based on the vigorous functioning of all democratic principles and on the people’s free right to express their views should be any less solid. On the contrary, I am deeply convinced that the democratic atmosphere in the party and in public life will result in the strengthening of the unity of our socialist society and we shall win over to active collaboration all the capable and talented citizens of our country.

Dub
ek, the bureaucrat with the pleasant smile, was a confusing blend of contradictions. He spent his entire career as a cog in a totalitarian engine and then, when he emerged on top, declared himself a democrat. He was a pragmatist and a dreamer. He could be a skilled maneuverer in the baroque labyrinth of communist politics. But in the end even he admitted that he could be incredibly naïve.

By the end of 1968 the Soviets were worried, but they had not yet discovered how much they lost when they killed the dream of the Prague Spring. Dub
ek had tried to come back the way Gomułka had come back in 1956, curbing great ambitions, lowering the people’s expectations, getting along with Moscow. But Dub
ek was not a Gomułka. At least that was what Moscow concluded—while the people of Czechoslovakia were still trying to decide what he was. It is often forgotten that in 1968 Alexander Dub
ek was the one leader who was unshakably antiwar, who would not contemplate a military solution even to save himself—a leader who refused to be bullied or bought by either communism or capitalism, who never played a cold war game, never turned to the capitalists, never broke a treaty or agreement or even his word—and he stayed in power, true power, for only 220 exciting days. They were days in which impossible things seemed possible, like the slogan written on a Paris wall in May: “Be realistic, ask for the impossible.” After he was gone, no one felt that he had ever really known him.

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1968, marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. When the end finally came more than twenty years later, the West was shocked. They had already forgotten. But at the time of the invasion, even
Time
magazine was predicting the end. It was the end of heroic Russia: a country widely admired because it had bravely dared to stand alone and build the first socialist society, because it was the big protector in the fraternity of socialist countries, because it had sacrificed millions to rid Europe of fascism. It was no longer viewed as benign. It was the bully who crushed small countries. After the fall of the Soviets, Dub
ek wrote that the Soviet Union had been doomed by one essential flaw: “The system inhibited change.”

The downfall took longer than most people predicted. In 2002 Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, told his long-standing friend, former Dub
ek government official Zden
k Mlyná
:

The suppression of the Prague Spring, which was an attempt to arrive at a new understanding of Socialism, also engendered a very harsh reaction in the Soviet Union, leading to a frontal assault against all forms of free-thinking. The powerful ideological and political apparatus of the State acted decisively and uncompromisingly. This had an effect on all domestic and foreign policy and the entire development of Soviet society, which entered a stage of profound stagnation.

Dub
ek’s dream, a path that was never found, was very different from what happened—the collapse of communism. He and many other communists always believed that the abuses of the Soviet system could be reformed, that communism could be made to work. After the Soviet invasion, no one could believe this, and without that belief, there was little left to believe in.

Without that dream, reform-minded communists had no choice but to turn to capitalism, which they found unacceptably flawed. They made the same mistake that was made in 1968—they now thought capitalism could be reformed and given a human face.

In Poland the students and intellectuals of 1968 finally got the workers to stand with them in the 1980s and drove out communism. Jacek Kuroń, near tears in a 2001 interview, said this about the new system: