The Year that Changed the World Read online

  In fact, it mattered immensely, for during those few weeks a popular German resistance movement arose and gathered strength. But neither that nor anything else fully engaged Schabowski’s attention, neither the continuing refugee drama in Prague nor the growing protests in Leipzig and Dresden. “Getting rid of Honecker was the only thing that mattered—how to do it, and who would be with us.” So intent were he and Krenz on killing the king that they missed the mortal peril to themselves.

  Vaclav Havel sat calmly at lunch, smoking by the window of his favorite restaurant, a riverside barge on the banks of the Vltava. It was midafternoon, October 3. The sun sparkled on the water. Elvis Presley sang on the jukebox, “Blue Suede Shoes,” yet again. We joked about whether Havel would win the Nobel Peace Prize, to be announced in Oslo the next morning. (It went to the Dalai Lama.) Wouldn’t that make him popular with the secret police, waiting outside? We pretended not to notice them; they pretended not to be noticed.

  Havel was the face of East European conscience, a legend in his own time, more famous, perhaps, than even Poland’s Lech Walesa. He was Czechoslovakia’s dissident of dissidents in a nation of dissidence, the philosopher-playwright banned from the theater after 1968 and embodiment of the Charter 77 human rights movement in a land where the penalties of outspokenness were painful and high. Signatories were denounced by the country’s communist regime, variously, as “traitors,” “renegades” and “misfits.” They were barred from any but the most menial jobs, arrested frequently and interrogated harshly. The secret police were everywhere. Anyone involved in the liberalizations of 1968 was persona non grata. Former foreign ministers ran the elevators in downscale hotels. Future foreign ministers, once communism toppled, worked as boiler stokers, shoveling coal. Havel was jailed half a dozen times—once for four years, after which he wrote Largo Desolato, a play about a political writer who lives in fear of being sent back to prison. He was best known for his essays articulating the dilemmas of life under totalitarianism. His credo was to live “as if”—that is, as if he were free, and to deal with the consequences as humanly as possible. He was as close as you come, in our day, to a true hero—the very human face of all those who stood against an inhuman oppression.

  I’d first met Havel in early June, not long after his latest stint in jail. It was about six in the evening. We were drinking coffee in his library, resentfully offered and grudgingly served by his wife, Olga. She wanted her husband to rest and stop talking and talking and talking. He was pale, tired. Western reporters had been traipsing through the apartment overlooking the Vltava since early morning. Havel had been patient with them all, but he didn’t have the stomach for another long interview. Could we just have a conversation? I had come to ask Havel about the future—what would happen next, how events in Hungary, Poland and East Germany would affect Czechoslovakia, and what all that would in turn portend for him personally. But a conversation? “Of course,” I replied. And so we began simply talking, a sort of surreally quiet and reflective interlude in an otherwise frenzied dash of history.

  Leaning back on the pillows of his sofa, I mentioned that I had just seen two of his plays in Warsaw, Audience and Temptation. Havel himself had never seen them publicly performed, banned as they were in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, including Poland until recently. The audience’s reaction, I told him, was “electric.” It was as though they had been waiting, seemingly forever, for someone to speak out and say such things as they, too, were thinking, and wondering how those in power would react. Everyone knew, as well, that the leading character, Ferdinand Vanek, was Havel’s alter ego. He, too, had recently been released from jail for antigovernment activities. He, too, was stuck in a dead-end job—a brewery rife in bureaucracy, pettiness and paranoia. Driven to drink, on the verge of insanity, Vanek nonetheless lived “as if.” He refused to inform on his friends and colleagues, as most Czechs did in one way or another, despite the blandishments of better pay, perks and promotions within the communist hierarchy. The play evolves as a conversation: Vanek sitting in a chair across from his foreman, speaking his mind, and ending with him in the foreman’s seat, roles reversed by dint of his hidden strength of character, Vanek as Everyman. It closes with the question on which it opened, how’s life? But this time he responds as a leader, no longer the ordinary downtrodden Czech. No, things are not “okay.” In fact, they’re a “bloody mess.”

  It was a metaphor for life at that moment in communist Poland, Hungary and East Germany, as well as Havel’s own Czechoslovakia. Things were not okay. They were a “bloody mess,” and suddenly people weren’t taking it anymore. Prime Minister Rakowski was in the audience, I told him, though no doubt unofficially, accompanying his actress wife. The couple applauded. Havel delighted in the irony. His plays were opening in New York and Los Angeles, to good reviews. “Vienna bombed,” for reasons that eluded us both. But Hungary would stage a production soon. Everywhere but Czechoslovakia.

  Havel seemed to gain energy at this thought, and we talked about the special responsibility writers in a totalitarian society had to speak the truth when few others did. “I never wanted to be a political figure,” he told me. He was the country’s foremost dissident almost by default, the intellectual voice of an almost nonexistent opposition. There was no Solidarity in Czechoslovakia, no reform communists seeking to join the West, no Gorbachev. The Czech communist party was as hidebound and repressive, in its ways, as Honecker’s German Democratic Republic. “I live in such a strange and paradoxical world,” Havel said, “that to be a writer, and to write the truth, makes you something more than a writer. It has political consequences, and you acquire political authority. This is all the more so because people know I do not want power. And so, perhaps, they trust me.”

  We stood at one point to look out the window, over the river and across Prague’s rooftops, as picturesque as those of Paris. Did I know, Havel asked, that thousands of Czechs signed petitions demanding his release from prison? He received hundreds of letters every week from students, workers, people all over Czechoslovakia. This was significant, a sign of a coming thaw, as though the ice that had for so long bound the country might finally be breaking up. Writing to Havel, or petitioning for his freedom, was dangerous and deliberate. It was to choose sides, to stand up and be counted, declare yourself as one of those who resisted the regime and do so in the knowledge that those who watched Havel would now know you. “I read these letters, and I reread them, and each time I am again shocked at how things are changing.” Havel paused, sipped his coffee, drew on his cigarette. “We lived so long in a state of helplessness,” he went on reflectively, giving each word its weight. “There has been no progress, only stillness. So we wait, hoping for history to resume.”

  Havel delivered these lines almost diffidently, leaning forward in his easy chair, elbows on his knees, hands cupping his chin or stroking his mustache. Then he glanced directly into my eyes, a look almost more eloquent than his words. “We Czechs, we are finally finding our courage.”

  This was rather too good to be unrehearsed. Havel was a playwright, after all. But it excited me, even so. Czechoslovakia was an absurdity. The most talented people worked as bricklayers or night watchmen. The only good artists were those whose works could not be shown. The most honest people spent their days worrying whether the next would be spent in jail. The gentlemanly elevator attendant at the Hotel Esplanade, where I stayed, with his beautiful English and neat tweeds and bow tie, in such contrast to the brusque and unkempt manager, was a deputy foreign minister in 1968. Poles envied Czechoslovakia as a consumer paradise. Food was ample. Everyone seemed to have a weekend country house. Prague was a well-tended jewel. Czechs, on the other hand, envied Poles their freedom. For decades, Prague’s austere leadership enforced a tacit social contract: political subservience in exchange for a decent living standard. “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us,” the old joke went. It was a formula for stagnation. Czechoslovakia’s communist leaders were determined t
o cling to power and preserve the party’s “leading role” in society. They wanted nothing of Poland’s chaotic economy and political turmoil. They saw Hungary “reforming” and recognized it for what it was—the destruction of socialism and the communist party. The question was whether they could resist those very changes, and how? They, too, felt the movement from within and without their borders.

  Still, Havel was right. Something was changing. Dissidents such as himself were speaking out, and being jailed for it. But for the first time, new voices were joining them. In January, five thousand demonstrators rallied in Prague’s central Wenceslas Square to commemorate the death, twenty years previously, of a young student named Jan Palach, who set himself on fire to protest the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Police dispersed them using truncheons, water cannon and tear gas. In February and March, half a million people signed a petition demanding greater religious freedom. A more recent manifesto called for an end to censorship and drew thirty thousand signatories. A bizarre group calling itself the Society for a Merrier Present had lately taken to marching around the streets of Prague outfitted in helmets carved from watermelons, spoofing fellow citizens into a sort of irreverent consciousness—always a threat to communism. A friend of mine, Tomas Ruller, went about setting himself on fire. He was a performance artist and had some technique for not getting burned. But it was weird to see this human torch stalking around like Frankenstein’s monster, stiff-legged and arms out as flames enveloped him from head to toe. He did this in public spaces, abruptly appearing and lighting a match. He lurched around for a few moments, then fell facedown into a pool of mud. Crowds loved it. The authorities kept beating him up. “For some reason, they see it as a political statement,” Ruller complained, an echo of young Jan Palach. For some reason.

  To Havel, these were important signs. “We see what is happening next door to us, in Poland and in Hungary. We are frustrated and want change, too. People know it is necessary to do something. But they do not know what or how. So they seize on slogans. ‘Freedom!’ ‘Reform!’ Or my name, ‘Havel!’ But these are only feelings. All is embryonic. We have no Solidarity. We have no political ‘reformers,’ dismantling communism from above, as in Hungary. This is something new in history. I do not know what will happen in my country, but personally I think the trend is irreversible. It is Europe-wide and not an affair of this country or that. This puts the regime in a complicated situation. They are in a corner. One day they permit a rally, the next they do not. One day they jail me for eight to ten years, three months later they release me. They do not know what to do.” One day, Havel predicted, the authorities would make a mistake. “The police would beat some student protesters and forty thousand people will turn out in Wenceslas Square.” It would be up to him to channel that anger, when it finally broke.

  Such was the situation in early October, when I met Havel once again during my romp through Eastern Europe with my Newsweek colleague. Prague is in the midst an “invisible crisis,” he told us at lunch. Everyone was waiting, watching, seeking a sign, a spark, like the herds of the Serengeti. “The government knows it,” said Havel. “We keep telling the people in power that they do not have to wait until the bitter end before starting a social dialogue, much like Poland’s. A lot of suffering could be prevented.” Yet that was precisely the problem: paralysis. “The leadership is tired and growing old. They are becoming petrified and cannot respond to these new things.” Amid the waiting lurked dangers. “A dictatorship in crisis typically makes contradictory moves,” said Havel. “I can imagine a situation that one day my play will open in Prague, and the next day I’ll be in prison. This may seem implausible, but at the moment of crisis, when power is shaken, anything can happen.”

  Rumors were that party chief Milos Jakes would be ousted, Havel said. Others reported that the secret police were planning a coup. “It will happen. The only question is when and how. Even those plotting against him do not know.” Havel suggested that we think of Prague’s subterranean politics as a poker game. “Each player sits with many cards under the table and none on the table. They wait for each other to show his hand. Not until then will they make their calculation. It is also possible that no player will show his hand.”

  Looking back on this conversation, I am reminded of Gunter Schabowski’s description of Politburo intrigue. What would it take to move a player to action, to tip his hand? Would the impetus come from inside or outside? At the critical moment, who would side with whom? “Do not forget,” said Havel, “in a totalitarian system we can observe an interesting phenomenon. People in power, like their citizens, speak out only when the time is ripe. Our leaders all wear a uniform mask and declare identical phrases. Perhaps at the moment of history, the masks will fall, and it is only at that moment that we know who is who. It is possible then that we may be surprised to find that the masks concealed an intelligent face.”

  This, also, was an echo. Around Poland’s Round Table, enemies became partners, even friends in common cause. Hungary’s reformers took power in late 1988 wearing one mask, then dropped it to reveal the visage of a wise humanity devoted to a better future. Meeting Gorbachev many years later, I asked why he had not cracked down when he saw how events were coursing. “In the name of what?” he asked indignantly. “In the name of… brutality? In the name of… coercion, or slavery?” He did not intend to destroy socialism, not by any means. But he acted with intelligence and out of essential humanity. Perhaps Havel, too, would soon recognize the faces of potential partners? I had heard from mutual friends that the opposition was in frequent and highly secret contact with disaffected members of the government, including the state security forces. “Perhaps,” Havel replied, smiling.

  After lunch, we walked to the West German embassy. Honecker’s “solution” to the problem of the East Germans encamped inside had predictably proved illusory. It served only to highlight his regime’s weakness. Within days, thousands more would-be refugees had descended on Prague, vaulted the fences around the German mission and were again encamped in the gardens inside. Havel wanted to see them but feared he would be arrested. “I have my own policeman,” he joked at lunch, considering it perfectly conceivable that he would be arrested leaving the restaurant, as he often was when authorities suspected trouble. As we neared the embassy, Havel grew more nervous; he had already recognized five secret police, he told us, as we made our way along a twisting cobblestone street packed with scurrying East Germans and curious Czechs. Steve Smith and I linked our arms through Havel’s, walking on either side, and shouldered through the crowds. “Don’t worry,” we assured Havel with cocksure bravado. “We’re meeting Jakes tomorrow. He won’t dare arrest you today!”

  It was an extraordinary scene. The squares and street around St. Nikolaus Cathedral near the embassy were crowded with abandoned Trabants. They were parked everywhere: on streets, sidewalks, in parks. The keys were often left in the ignition. Some were even left running, as East Germans, loaded with belongings, jumped out to dash for the embassy, fearing that they would somehow be stopped. A crowd of a thousand or more stood before the ornate wrought-iron gates of the embassy itself, an ancient baroque palace in the heart of the old city. Hundreds more trooped up the street behind us, lugging their belongings in suitcases and rucksacks, holding young children aloft so they would not be hurt in the crush. Czech police tried to cope, pitifully. “Where are you going?” one Czech policeman demanded. “To West Germany,” responded a young couple with their suitcases, defiantly pushing past.

  Not all waited patiently to be let in the front door. Many worked their way around to the back of the embassy, where a shoulder-high fence surrounded the gardens. By now, roughly five thousand people were there, living in tents, their numbers growing by the hour as East Germans vaulted, climbed or were pulled up and over the barrier. “Entschuldigen,” said one young man, politely accosting me as I stood by the fence talking with a few of those inside. “Excuse me.” I moved to the side so he could loft a heavy sui
tcase into the embassy compound. Then he clambered up, holding a hand to his wife to help her over. With a boost from me, she quickly joined him.

  The first trains to the Federal Republic had left on September 30 and run steadily ever since. Every evening, with almost military precision, the West Germans marched refugees out of the embassy and into waiting buses for the trip to the station. As soon as one group left, the space they occupied filled with new arrivals. But soon the flow would stop. At 3 p.m. that afternoon, October 3, East Germany closed its borders. “I was on the last train from Dresden,” one young man told me, speaking through the embassy fence as a light rain pattered on the plastic-sheet tents. “I knew we had to get out now or we never would. I fear a crackdown is coming. A catastrophe as in China. This regime would fire on its own people.”

  We escorted Havel away. He was elated, not only by the size of the crowds but by the reaction among Czechs. “This is solidarity,” he enthused. “People are taking children into their houses and offering the East Germans food. This speaks not only of the social situation in the German Democratic Republic, but also of the situation in Czechoslovakia.” Standing on a street corner, he politely thanked us, turning to give a diffident little wave as he departed. He would be fifty-three the next day. I remember wondering, could this shaggy-haired, amiable man with his well-worn army jacket and gentle manner have what it takes to channel an uprising, if and when it came?