A Conversation
As the van approached Stříbro Pavel pointed out of the window and cracked a sardonic smile. ‘Comrade! That is where I trained to be a soldier!’ A shabby concrete-walled military compound lined the road ahead. Beyond it I could see a row of disused buildings and barrack blocks. This revelation came as a surprise to me as although Pavel and I had been working closely together on a research project, and are of a similar age, we had never talked about our early lives. The chance remark nevertheless aroused my curiosity and later that evening, as we sat drinking Chodovar beer, we started to exchange stories about our experiences of growing up on either side of the Iron Curtain.
We had both left home and entered university in the 1980s. In my case that meant leaving a small town on the border of southeast Wales to study prehistory and archaeology at a university in the north of England. Pavel had also studied archaeology at Charles University in Prague and at Humboldt University in East Berlin. But at this point our stories diverged. Our formative years had been spent under politically opposed regimes and as our recollections unfolded it became clear that the circumstances of our early lives had been very different. These days the Cold War is often portrayed in fiction as a glamourous high-level geopolitical contest. But it is important to remember the quotidian actualities that sprang from such diametrically opposed regimes. All states impose rules and regulations upon the populations which they govern. They also establish behavioral expectations, and what it means to be a good or a bad citizen. Political ideology is projected into domestic settings, shaping individual and family life and determining everyday interactions and routines.
When Pavel entered Charles University in 1985, military training was an obligatory part of all university degrees. University students were trained on a part-time basis for two years during their studies to become future reserve officers. After completing their studies graduates were required to spend one year in the Czechoslovak Peoples’ Army. Military tuition was organized by the Military Department, which was made up of seconded military personnel. Lectures and training took place every Friday and filled the whole day. Pavel recalls the student saying, ‘we have a war on Fridays!’ Following Soviet principals all students were trained together, however, the Peoples’ Army assigned specialized duties to students from different university faculties. Arts and Natural Science students were assigned to mechanized infantry units. Lawyers became tank crews, electrical engineers radio operators, and civil engineers joined the pioneer corps. Finally, sculptors and other young artists, from the Faculty of Plastic Arts, with their interest in the human form, became medics.
Pavel was trained in the base at Stříbro to command 30 men in three armed vehicles as part of the 57th mechanized infantry regiment. In the event of the outbreak of hostilities with the West, the battle plan was simple. The Czechoslovak Peoples’ Army together with Soviet troops deployed in Czechoslovakia would destroy the NATO forces in Bavaria and advance through Germany via Nuremberg, and Stuttgart, cross the Rhine, and establish a bridgehead around Strasbourg. The whole operation was to take no more than 15 days. Then the attack of French territory would follow until the ‘Western Imperialists’ were totally defeated.
In comparison with Pavel’s early life, my twenties had been relatively easy going and uneventful, and I had never been in the army. Casting my mind back to the early 1980s I recalled a period of political turmoil in the UK, and yet my life had been relatively comfortable and untroubled. Following the industrial disputes and political infighting of the late 1970s, Margaret Thatcher had risen to power in May 1979, four months before I entered university, and set about dismantling the public sector and ushering in a new era of unfettered free market capitalism. Thatcher went on to win three successive general elections and to become the longest serving twentieth-century British Prime Minister. The UK was, however, deeply divided during her time in office and stark divisions existed between north and south, and rich and poor. In common with other leftist students at the time, I felt at odds with the right-wing Tory government, and saw the overzealous use of police force to quell public dissent as a sign that Britain was edging toward becoming a police state.
In 1981 a deep recession, which had its greatest impact upon manufacturing industries in the north of England, caused unemployment to rise to more than 3 million. One response to this was the People’s March for Jobs which marched from Liverpool to London, echoing the poverty marches of the Great Depression and culminating in a mass rally in Hyde Park. In the same year racial tensions among black communities aggravated by a distrust of the police following the introduction of new ‘stop and search laws,’ which had been used to target black youths disproportionately, along with long-standing inner-city deprivation, led to riots in Brixton in London, with others in Birmingham, Leeds, and Toxteth in Liverpool. Pavel was by now hunched over, with his arms resting on the table, but still listening intently. ‘Well, we don’t have such racial diversity as the Czechs have never had colonies. And it was illegal to be unemployed during Communism. If you did not work you would be sent to prison in forced labor camps!’
I decided to change tack and to turn to the subject of nuclear weapons. In 1976, the Soviet Union started to deploy a new generation of SS-20 nuclear missiles at various locations in eastern Europe. These intermediate-range ballistic missiles were capable of striking all NATO capitals, with the exception of Washington, within 15 minutes of being launched. Their deployment caused alarm in the West, as it signaled a shift in Soviet military strategy away from a capacity for a nuclear second strike to the capacity for a pre-emptive tactical nuclear strike. The NATO response, announced in 1979, was to follow a similar dual track strategy and to station US Pershing II and Cruise medium range nuclear missiles on sites in western Europe. It was decided that the missiles would not be deployed until 1983, however, allowing a four-year period in which a possible arms control treaty might be negotiated with the Kremlin.
NATO’s decision to delay the deployment of the missiles co-incided with elections in the UK and the USA, and it was the incoming Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and President Ronald Reagan, who eventually implemented the proposal. The delay also allowed a window for popular protest before the missiles would arrive in the UK. In September 1981 a group of protestors marched from Cardiff to the Greenham Common US Air Force base in Berkshire and established the Greenham Women’s Peace Camp. Elsewhere, many students and others joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) to made a stand against Thatcher and Reagan’s increasingly strident militarist rhetoric. I remember traveling on a coach with fellow students from the north of England to a CND rally in Trafalgar Square in October 1980. Some 80,000 people filled the square and were entertained by rock bands playing on the steps of the National Gallery. The following year more than 250,000 people joined a second CND march against the siting of nuclear missiles in the UK. This march took more than five hours to pass through central London before assembling to hear political speeches by anti-nuclear MPs in Hyde Park.
Pavel seemed puzzled by the sense of pride which must have accompanied my recollection. ‘Hmm!’ he snorted. ‘So, you were a radical student! The army officers who trained us had heard of the protests in the West. They told us that you were ‘useful idiots’ who were simply undermining your own governments and helping the USSR.’ ...