The Magic Lantern

The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague

Timothy Garton Ash

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782396840
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Prague: Inside the Magic Lantern

My contribution to the velvet revolution was a quip. Arriving in Prague on Day Seven (23 November), when the pace of change was already breath-taking, I met Václav Havel in the back-room of his favoured basement pub. I said: ‘In Poland it took ten years, in Hungary ten months, in East Germany ten weeks: perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take ten days!’ Grasping my hands, and fixing me with his winning smile, Havel immediately summoned over a video-camera team from the samizdat Videojournál, who just happened to be waiting in the corner. I was politely compelled to repeat my quip to camera, over a glass of beer, and then Havel gave his reaction: ‘It would be fabulous, if it could be so …’ Revolution, he said, is too exhausting.

The camera team dashed off to copy the tape, so that it could be shown on television sets in public places. Havel subsequently used the conceit in several interviews. And because he used it, it made a fantastic career. It was repeated in the Czechoslovak papers. An opposition spokesman recalled it in a television broadcast just before the general strike—on Day Eleven. It was on the front page of the Polish opposition daily, Gazeta Wyborcza. It surfaced in the Western press. And when I finally had to leave Prague on Day Nineteen, with the revolution by no means over, people were still saying: ‘You see, with us—ten days!’ Such is the magic of round numbers.

I tell this story not just from author’s vanity, but also because it illustrates several qualities of the most delightful of all the year’s Central European revolutions: the speed, the improvisation, the merriness, and the absolutely central role of Václav Havel, who was at once director, playwright, stage-manager and leading actor in this, his greatest play. I was only one of many—indeed of millions—to feed him some lines.

Next morning I received a complimentary theatre ticket. A ticket to the Magic Lantern Theatre, whose subterranean stage, auditorium, foyers and dressing-rooms had become the headquarters of the main opposition coalition in the Czech lands, the Civic Forum, and thus, in effect, the headquarters of the revolution. The ticket changed. At first it was just a small notelet with the words ‘Please let in and out’ written in purple ink, signed by Václav Havel’s brother, Ivan, and authenticated by the playwright’s rubber stamp. This shows a beaming pussy cat with the word ‘Smile!’ across his chest. Then it was a green card worn around the neck, with my name typed as ‘Timothy Gordon Ash’, and the smiling cat again. Then it was a xeroxed and initialled paper slip saying ‘Civic Forum building’, this time with two smiling cats (one red, one black) and a beaming green frog. I have it in front of me as I write. Beneath the frog it says ‘très bien’.

In any case, the tickets worked wonders. For nearly two weeks I, as an historian, was privileged to watch history being made inside the Magic Lantern. For most of that time, I was the only foreigner to sit in on the hectic deliberations of what most people called simply ‘the Forum’. But before describing what I saw, we must briefly rehearse the first act.

Students started it. Small groups of them had been active for at least a year. They edited faculty magazines. They organized discussion clubs. They worked on the borderline between official and unofficial life. Many had contacts with the opposition, all read samizdat. Some say they had formed a conspiratorial group called ‘The Ribbon’—the Czech ‘White Rose’. But they also worked through the official youth organization, the SSM. It was through the SSM that they got permission to hold a demonstration in Prague on 17 November, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the martyrdom of Jan Opletal, a Czech student murdered by the Nazis. This began, as officially scheduled, in Prague’s second district, with speeches and tributes at the cemetery.

But the numbers grew, and the chants turned increasingly against the present dictators in the castle. The demonstrators decided—perhaps some had planned all along—to march to Wenceslas Square, the stage for all the historic moments of Czech history, whether in 1918, 1948, or 1968. Down the hill they went, along the embankment of the River Vltava, and then, turning right at the National Theatre, up Narodní avenue into the square. Here they were met by riot police, with white helmets, shields and truncheons, and by special anti-terrorist squads, in red berets. Large groups were cut off and surrounded, both along Narodní and in the square. They went on chanting ‘Freedom’ and singing the Czech version of ‘We Shall Overcome’. Those in the front line tried to hand flowers to the police. They placed lighted candles on the ground and raised their arms, chanting, ‘We have bare hands.’ But the police, and especially the red-berets, beat men, women and children with their truncheons.

This was the spark that set Czechoslovakia alight. During the night from Friday to Saturday—with reports of one dead and many certainly in hospital—some students determined to go on strike. On Saturday morning they managed to spread the word to most of the Charles University, and to several other institutions of higher learning, which immediately joined the occupation strike. (Patient research will be needed to reconstruct the precise details of this crucial moment.) On Saturday afternoon they were joined by actors, already politicized by earlier petitions in defence of Václav Havel, and drawn in directly by the very active students from the drama and film academies. They met in the Realistic Theatre. Students described the ‘massacre’, as it was now called. The theatre people responded with a declaration of support which not only brought the theatres out on strike—that is, turned their auditoria into political debating chambers—but also, and, so far as I could establish, for the first time, made the proposal for a general strike on Monday, 27 November, between noon and two p.m. The audience responded with a standing ovation.

On Sunday morning the students of the film and drama academies came out with an appropriately dramatic declaration. Entitled ‘Don’t wait—Act!’, it began by saying that 1989 in Czechoslovakia might sadly be proclaimed the ‘year of the truncheon’. ‘That truncheon,’ it continued, ‘on Friday, 17 November spilled the blood of students.’ And then, after appealing ‘especially to European states in the year of the two hundredth anniversary of the French revolution’, they went on to list demands which ranged from the legal registration of the underground monthly Lidové Noviny to removing the leading role of the communist party from the constitution, but also crucially repeated the call for the general strike. (Within a few days the students had all their proclamations neatly stored in personal computers, and many of the flysheets on the streets were actually computer print-outs.)

It was only at ten o’clock on Sunday evening (Day Three), after the students and actors had taken the lead, proclaiming both their own and the general strike, that the previously existing opposition groups, led by Charter 77, met in another Prague theatre. The effective convener of this meeting was Václav Havel, who had hurried back from his farmhouse in Northern Bohemia when he heard news of the ‘massacre’. The meeting included not only the very diverse opposition groups, such as the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS), the Movement for Civic Freedoms and Obroda (Rebirth), the club of excommunicated communists, but also individual members of the previously puppet People’s and Socialist Parties. The latter was represented by its general secretary, one Jan Škoda, who was once a schoolmate and close friend of Václav Havel’s, but had carefully avoided him through the long, dark years of so-called normalization.

This miscellaneous late-night gathering agreed to establish an Občanské Fórum, a Civic Forum, ‘as a spokesman on behalf of that part of the Czechoslovak public which is increasingly critical of the existing Czechoslovak leadership and which in recent days has been profoundly shaken by the brutal massacre of peacefully demonstrating students.’ It made four demands: the immediate resignation of the communist leaders responsible for preparing the Warsaw Pact intervention in 1968 and the subsequent devastation of the country’s life, starting with the president, Gustav Husák, and the Party leader, Miloš Jakeš; the immediate resignation of the federal interior minister, František Kincl, and the Prague first secretary, Miroslav Štĕpán, held responsible for violent repression of peaceful demonstrations; the establishment of a special commission to investigate these police actions; and the immediate release of all prisoners of conscience. The Civic Forum, it added, supports the call for a general strike. From this time forward, the Forum assumed the leadership of the revolution in the Czech lands. (In Slovakia there sprung up a different organization with a different name: The Public Against Violence.)

Over this weekend there had been tens of thousands of people, mainly young people, milling around on Wenceslas Square, waving flags and chanting slogans. Students had taken over the equestrian statue of the good king, at the top of his square, covering its base with improvised posters, photographs and candles. But the popular breakthrough came on Monday afternoon. For now the square was not merely teeming; it was packed. Dense masses chanted ‘Freedom’, ‘Resign’, and, most strikingly, a phrase that might be translated as ‘Now’s the time’ or ‘This is it’. And neither the white helmets nor the red berets moved in. As in East Germany, when the authorities woke up to what was happening, it was already too late. (But the then prime minister, Ladislav Adamec, went out of his way to emphasize that martial law would not be declared, thus implying that the option had been considered.)

On Tuesday, Day Five, the demonstration—at four p.m., after working hours—was even larger. The publishing house of the Socialist Party, under Jan Škoda, made available its balcony, perfectly located half-way down the square. From here the veteran Catholic opposition activist, Radim Palouš, a dynamic banned priest, Václav Malý, and then Havel addressed the vast crowd, repeating the Forum’s demands. Next morning the first edition of the communist party daily Rudé Právo had a headline referring to a demonstration of ‘200,000’ in the square. The second edition said ‘100,000’. Someone made a collage of the two editions, xeroxed it and stuck it up on shop windows, next to the photographs of the pre-war President-Liberator, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the cyclostyled or computer-printed flysheets and the carefully typed declarations that this or that shop would join in the general strike, declarations signed by all the employees and often authenticated with a seal or rubber stamp.

On Wednesday and Thursday, Days Six and Seven, there were yet larger demonstrations, while first talks were held between Prime Minister Adamec and a Forum delegation, which, however, at the prime minister’s earnest request, was not led by Václav Havel. The prime minister, Havel told me, sent word via an aide that he did not yet want to ‘play his trump card’. At the same time, however, Havel had direct communication with Adamec via a self-constituted group of mediators, calling itself ‘the bridge’. ‘The bridge’ had two struts: Michal Horáčk, a journalist on a youth paper, and Michael Kocáb, a rock singer.

The revolution was thus well under way, indeed rocking round the clock. And its headquarters was a just a hundred yards from the bottom of Wenceslas Square, in that theatre called the Magic Lantern.

Through the heavy metal-and-glass doors, past the second line of volunteer guards, you plunge down a broad flight of stairs into a curving, 1950s-style, mirror-lined foyer. People dart around importantly, or sit in little groups on benches, eating improvised canapés and discussing the future of the nation. Down another flight of stairs there is the actual theatre. The set—for Dürrenmatt’s Minotaurus—is like a funnel, with a hole at the back of the stage just big enough for a small monster to squeeze through. Here, in place of the Magic Lantern’s special combination of drama, music and pantomime, they hold the daily press conference: the speakers emerging from the hole designed for Dürrenmatt’s monster. Journalists instead of tourists are let in for the performance.

At one end of the foyer there is a room with a glass wall on which it says, in several languages, ‘smoking room’. There is another guard at the door. Some are allowed in. Others not. Flash your magic ticket. In. Familiar bearded faces, old friends from the underground, sit around on rickety chairs, in a crisis meeting. A television mounted high on the wall shows an operetta, without the sound. The room smells of cigarette smoke, sweat, damp coats and revolution. I remember the same smell, precisely, from Poland in autumn 1980.

This, you think, is the real headquarters. But after a few hours you discover a black door at the other end of the foyer. Through the door you go down a metal stairway into a narrow, desperately overheated corridor, as if into the bowels of an ocean liner. Here, in dressing-rooms ten and eleven, is the very heart of the revolution. For here sits Václav Havel, with his ‘private secretary’ and the few key activists from the Forum who are thrashing out the texts of the latest communiqué, programmatic statement or negotiating position.

In front of the dressing-room door stands a wiry, bearded man in a combat jacket, with his thinning hair knotted at the back, hippy fashion. This is John Bok, a friend of Havel’s now in charge of the personal bodyguard, composed mainly of students. During the war, John Bok’s father was a Czech pilot in the Royal Air Force, and the spirit lives. Don’t try to mix it with John Bok. He, and Havel’s other personal security chief, Stanislav Milota, a former cameraman married to a famous actress, are highly visible characters throughout the performance, surrounding Havel as he dashes around in clouds of nervous flurry, John Bok barking into his walkie-talkie, Milota forever saying ‘SHUSH, SHUSH!’ in a stage-whisper somewhat louder than the original interruption. In every hectic move, they confirm the playwright’s unique status.

A political scientist would be hard pressed to find a term to describe the Forum’s structure of decision-making, let alone the hierarchy of authority within it. Yet the structure and hierarchy certainly exist, like a chemist’s instant crystals. The ‘four-day-old baby’, as Havel calls it, is, at first glance, rather like a club. Individual membership is acquired by personal recommendation. You could draw a tree diagram starting from the inaugural meeting in the appropriately named Players’ Club Theatre: X introduced Y who introduced Z. The majority of those present have been active in opposition before, the biggest single group being signatories of Charter 77. Twenty years ago they were journalists, academics, politicians, lawyers, but now they come here from their jobs as stokers, window-cleaners, clerks or, at best, banned writers. Sometimes they have to leave a meeting to go and stoke up their boilers. A few of them come straight from prison, whence they have been released under the pressure of popular protest. Politically, they range from the neo-Trotskyist Petr Uhl to the deeply conservative Catholic Václav Benda.

In addition, there are representatives of significant groups. There are The Students, brightly dressed, radical and politely deferred to by their elders. After all, they started it. Occasionally there are The Actors—although we are all actors now. Then there are The Workers, mainly represented by Petr Miller, an athletic and decisive technician from Prague’s huge ČKD engineering combine. All intellectual voices are stilled when The Worker rises to speak. Sometimes there are The Slovaks—demonstratively honoured guests. And then there are those whom I christened The Prognostics, that is, members of the Institute for Forecasting (Prognostickỳ Ústav) of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, one of the very few genuinely independent institutes in the whole of the country’s official academic life.

The Prognostics are, in fact, economists. Their particular mystique comes from knowing, or believing they know, or, at least, being believed to know, what to do about the economy—a subject clearly high in the minds of the people on the streets, and one on which most of the philosophers, poets, actors, historians assembled here have slightly less expertise than the ordinary worker on the Vysočany tram. The Prognostics are not, of course, unanimous. Dr Václav Klaus, a silver-grey-haired man with glinting metal spectacles, as arrogant as he is clever, favours the solutions of Milton Friedman. His more modest colleague, Dr Tomáš Ježek, is a disciple (and translator) of Friedrich von Hayek.

All these tendencies and groups are represented in the full meetings of the Forum which move, as the numbers grow from tens to hundreds, out of the smoking room into the main auditorium. This ‘plenum’—like Solidarity in Poland, the Forum finds itself inadvertently adopting the communist terminology of the last forty years—then appoints a series of ‘commissions’. By the time I arrive there are, so far as I can gather, four: Organizational, Technical, Informational and Conceptional—the last ‘to handle the political science aspect’, as one Forum spokesperson/interpreter rather quaintly puts it. By the time I leave there seem to be about ten, each with its ‘in-tray’—a white cardboard box lying on the foyer floor. For example, in addition to ‘Conceptional’ there is also ‘Programmatic’ and ‘Strategic’.

As well as voting people on to these commissions, the plenum also sometimes selects ad hoc ‘crisis staffs’ and the groups or individuals to speak on television, negotiate with the government or whatever. When I say ‘voting’, what actually happens is that the chairman chooses some names, and then others propose other names—or themselves. There is no vote. The lists are, so to speak, open, and therefore long. ‘For the Conceptional commission I propose Ivan Klíma,’ says Havel, adding: ‘Ivan, you don’t want to write any more novels, do you?’ Generally the principle of selection is crudely representative: there must be The Student, The Worker, The Prognostic etc. Sometimes this produces marvellous moments to a Western ear. ‘Shouldn’t we have a liberal?’ says someone, in discussing the Conceptional. ‘But we’ve already got two Catholics!’ comes the reply. Thus Catholic means liberal—which here actually means conservative.

To watch all this was to watch politics in a primary, spontaneous, I almost said ‘pure’ form. All men and women may be political animals, but some are more political than others. It was fascinating to see individuals responding instantly to the scent that wafted down into the Magic Lantern as the days went by. The scent of power. People who had never before been politically active suddenly sat up, edged their way on stage, proposed themselves for a television slot: and you could already see them in a government minister’s chair. Others, long active in the democratic opposition, remained seated in the stalls. Not for them the real politics of power.

Like Solidarity, the Forum was racked from the very outset by a conflict between the political imperative of rapid, decisive, united action, and the moral imperative of internal democracy. Should they start as they intended to go on, that is, democratically? Or did the conditions of struggle with a still totalitarian power demand that they should say, to paraphrase Brecht:

we who fight for democracy
cannot ourselves be democratic.

On the face of it, the Forum was, after all, hardly democratic. Who chose them? They chose themselves. Yet already on the second day of their existence they wrote, in a letter addressed to Presidents Bush and Gorbachev, that the Civic Forum ‘feels capable of acting as a spokesman for the Czechoslovak public.’ By what right? Why, by right of acclamation. For the people were going out on the streets day after day a...