The laurels being heaped on former Czech president Václav Havel, who died at the weekend, by reactionary world leaders should not blind us to his courageous role in the break-up of Stalinist rule in eastern Europe.
Havel grew up in the aftermath of the grotesque anti-Semitic Slansky show trials in 1952 in which 11 leaders of the Czech Communist Party were put to death in a Stalinist purge. He reflected in an intense way the contradictory, often tormented lives of his countrywomen and men before and after the Prague Spring of 1968, when Soviet tanks rolled into the country and crushed the reform movement led by Alexander Dubcek.
Havel served five years in jail – some of them with hard labour - for founding the Charter 77 movement and the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted. Being a liberal under Stalinism was no easy road to take. He broke what a fellow writer called the silence of the swamp in the grim years that followed the Soviet crackdown.
Along with other Czech writers and musicians, including the Plastic People of the Universe, Havel went outside and beyond his youthful calling as a playwright to mock and defy Stalinist officialdom.
Havel called his country Absurdistan, and this sense that reality was more surreal than the imagination pervaded his work and also his life. For someone with such undoubted talents as a playwright and political thinker to become a political leader, a president no less, is a tribute not only to the man’s inherent strengths but also the creativity of the Czech nation.
I had the privilege of seeing one of his last plays, Leaving, performed in Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre in 2008 during a Havel season. Havel’s ironic send-up of a politician on his way out of power brought together the ironic-surreal traditions of Czech culture with a self-mocking contemporary twist. On that score alone, Havel’s ability to embrace and deploy a host of contradictions with humour and grace revealed that no ordinary mind was at work here.
In 1978, he wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless which championed the notion of the self-movement of people from below and encapsulates both Havel’s political strengths and weaknesses. Havel wrote that “latent social crises can at any time... provoke a wide variety of political change...evoke unexpected and unforeseen social unrest and explosions of discontent.”
He saw the “dissident” movement against Stalinism as only one of many factors in political development focusing above all on the “defence of people” – clearly a vital issue for those living under bureaucratic, authoritarian rule. Although he did not like the word dissident, he saw the movement as addressing the “hidden spheres of society, since it is not a matter of confronting the regime on the level of actual power”.
Havel was acutely aware that the policies adopted by superpowers can bring about sudden changes and upsets. It was, in fact, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision to hold multi-party elections in the Soviet Union in the spring of 1989 and his refusal, made clear in July of that year, to deploy Warsaw Pact troops again in Eastern Europe that gave the green light to the 1989 political revolutions, first in Poland and Hungary and then in Czechoslovakia.
Havel was elected President of Czechoslovakia in December 1989 and installed in Prague castle where he lightened up the atmosphere by zooming around on a child’s scooter. But while the end of Stalinism was a great achievement, the Czech people were before long embroiled in the rush to impose free market capitalism in the region.
In 1992 pro-capitalist leader Václav Klaus was elected and the movement for separating the country into two separate states gained momentum. Klaus and another politician Vladimír Mečiar pushed through the dissolution of Czechoslovakia into two states even though it was supported by only a third of the population. Havel refused to back the break-up of the country.
His ethical but also highly practical approach, his espousal of green politics and vision of transcending present society, deserve respect. What outlives Havel is the task of embracing the spirit of 1989 in developing creative ways to mount a successful challenge to today’s ruling political-corporate elites who have created a global aburdistan.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
For revolutionary solutions to create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of global capital alongside a real democracy based on People’s Assemblies. Visit our web site at www.aworldtowin.net
Showing posts with label Prague Spring. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Prague Spring. Show all posts
Monday, December 19, 2011
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
A chilling anniversary
People in Eastern Europe will feel particularly chilled by the entry of Russian tanks into Georgia in response to its attack on South Ossetia. For 40 years ago today, the Soviet army and other Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia and began the brutal crushing of the Prague Spring of 1968 led by Alexander Dubcek.
A truly poisonous brew of international forces encouraged Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to launch a ferocious assault on South Ossetian separatists on August 8. Israel provided massive arms sales to Tbilisi over the past eight years, 40% originating in the US. NATO leaders agreed in April that Georgia should become a member and Washington was pushing Poland to install a new interceptor missile system near to its border with Russia. Last but not least, Georgia has Senator John McCain's principal foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann on its payroll.
Saakashvili’s military adventure was aimed at bringing America in on his side. He arrogantly stamped on the aspirations of the people of South Ossetia, who had voted by a massive majority in September 2006 for an independent state, which allowed the Russians in turn to prey on their frustrations (Georgia had already killed up to 2,000 civilians when South Ossetians made a bid for independence in 1991-1992).
Surrounding Russia with NATO members and missiles was certain to inflame Russia’s desire to retain influence and control in the Caucasus area. The massive attack on Georgia by Russian armour was the response, as Moscow cocked a snoop at Washington. US secretary of State Condoleeza Rice pronounced self-righteously: “This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia where Russia can threaten a neighbour, occupy a capital, overthrow a government, and get away with it." Strange indeed from the woman who travels the world justifying the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the overthrow of governments!
The use of brute force to quell the Prague Spring in 1968 became counter-productive in maintaining control over Eastern Europe. As a veteran of the Prague Spring said in a BBC radio discussion, countering those who denied the possibility of Dubcek’s idea of socialism with freedom and a human face. “Socialism without freedom is not socialism. It is nonsense.” The invasion was a turning point in the unravelling of Stalinist power. Despite Gorbachev’s attempts to introduce a new, democratic constitution, the Soviet Union itself broke up under the weight of its own internal contradictions in 1991.
As in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the inhabitants of smaller nations, especially those in strategically sensitive regions, are paying the heavy price for other people’s power struggles. The people of Tskhinvali in South Ossetia suffered a cruel bombardment by Georgian air power while those living in the areas occupied by Russian troops – up to 31 miles of the Georgian capital – are equally shell-shocked by what the Russian forces have done.
The fact that NATO and Russia cynically seek to exploit these legitimate aspirations to further their own interests in no way means that the people of Ossetia or any other small nation or oppressed minority should not have the right to decide their own future. Indeed, it was the recognition by Lenin and Trotsky of the right to self-determination in the founding years of the Soviet Union which led to the formation of the Terek Soviet Republic in North Ossetia between March 1918 to February 1919. Today’s Ossetian leaders blame Stalin for dividing their country into north and south in 1922. In fact, Putin and his clique are seeking to keep control in a similar way to Stalin, who wanted to hold on to the borders of the Tsarist empire.
Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary
A truly poisonous brew of international forces encouraged Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to launch a ferocious assault on South Ossetian separatists on August 8. Israel provided massive arms sales to Tbilisi over the past eight years, 40% originating in the US. NATO leaders agreed in April that Georgia should become a member and Washington was pushing Poland to install a new interceptor missile system near to its border with Russia. Last but not least, Georgia has Senator John McCain's principal foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann on its payroll.
Saakashvili’s military adventure was aimed at bringing America in on his side. He arrogantly stamped on the aspirations of the people of South Ossetia, who had voted by a massive majority in September 2006 for an independent state, which allowed the Russians in turn to prey on their frustrations (Georgia had already killed up to 2,000 civilians when South Ossetians made a bid for independence in 1991-1992).
Surrounding Russia with NATO members and missiles was certain to inflame Russia’s desire to retain influence and control in the Caucasus area. The massive attack on Georgia by Russian armour was the response, as Moscow cocked a snoop at Washington. US secretary of State Condoleeza Rice pronounced self-righteously: “This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia where Russia can threaten a neighbour, occupy a capital, overthrow a government, and get away with it." Strange indeed from the woman who travels the world justifying the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the overthrow of governments!
The use of brute force to quell the Prague Spring in 1968 became counter-productive in maintaining control over Eastern Europe. As a veteran of the Prague Spring said in a BBC radio discussion, countering those who denied the possibility of Dubcek’s idea of socialism with freedom and a human face. “Socialism without freedom is not socialism. It is nonsense.” The invasion was a turning point in the unravelling of Stalinist power. Despite Gorbachev’s attempts to introduce a new, democratic constitution, the Soviet Union itself broke up under the weight of its own internal contradictions in 1991.
As in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the inhabitants of smaller nations, especially those in strategically sensitive regions, are paying the heavy price for other people’s power struggles. The people of Tskhinvali in South Ossetia suffered a cruel bombardment by Georgian air power while those living in the areas occupied by Russian troops – up to 31 miles of the Georgian capital – are equally shell-shocked by what the Russian forces have done.
The fact that NATO and Russia cynically seek to exploit these legitimate aspirations to further their own interests in no way means that the people of Ossetia or any other small nation or oppressed minority should not have the right to decide their own future. Indeed, it was the recognition by Lenin and Trotsky of the right to self-determination in the founding years of the Soviet Union which led to the formation of the Terek Soviet Republic in North Ossetia between March 1918 to February 1919. Today’s Ossetian leaders blame Stalin for dividing their country into north and south in 1922. In fact, Putin and his clique are seeking to keep control in a similar way to Stalin, who wanted to hold on to the borders of the Tsarist empire.
Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary
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