The Czechs in a Nutshell

Czechoslovakia’s president Gustav Husák was by all accounts convinced he had made a good deal when he solemnly signed the final act at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in August 1975.

The Helsinki Agreement, approved by the USA, the Soviet Union and 34 other Western states, finally confirmed the new borders that emerged in Europe after the Second World War, and formally cemented the control that the Russians (and their local vassals like Husák) had taken over Central and Eastern Europe.

Yet the Western countries didn’t want to give the Russians the deal they so overtly longed for without anything in return. That’s why the Helsinki Agreement also contained paragraphs that obliged all countries, regardless of their ideology, to respect basic human rights. But just like his Soviet protector Leonid Brezhnev, Czechoslovakia’s Husák considered this to be liberal mumbo-jumbo without any practical relevance.

Surprisingly enough, it was not the rebellious Poles or the relatively liberal Hungarians, but the oppressed and resigned Czechs (see: Communism), who soon proved Husák completely wrong.

When a Prague court convicted a group of Frank Zappa clones called The Plastic People of the Universe of subversion (a term the Bolshevik regime used for any activity displaying the slightest expression of individual freedom), playwright Václav Havel and a group of his dissident friends published a document, in January 1977, titled Charter 77 (the name was inspired by the English Magna Carta of liberties from 1215) where they modestly reminded the regime of the human rights commitments it had solemnly signed a year and a half earlier in Helsinki.

This step formed the backdrop for one of the most amazing human rights movements in the former East Bloc. Contrary to Poland’s Solidarity trade union, Charter 77 never became a mass movement. It was neither a proper organization, with leaders and rules, but rather a society of people, ranging from socialists to hard-line Catholics, united only by a common adversary — the Bolshevik tyrants.

The first Charter 77 document, which Havel, his playwright-colleague Pavel Kohout, philosopher Jan Patočka, journalist Jiří Dienstbier, Prague Spring’s minister of foreign affairs Jiří Hájek and some 200 other people tried to publish via the national news agency ČTK (of course the agency rejected it, but Western media like Le Monde and The Times made it world famous overnight) caused wild panic among the Bolshevik leadership. Jaromír Obzina, Minister of Interior at that time, said in interviews after the Velvet Revolution that the comrades believed the Charter had great potential for becoming a mass movement, and therefore they immediately launched a hysterical counterattack.

Less than a month after Charter 77 was published in the West and broadcast to Czechoslovakia by Radio Free Europe, the regime summoned every actor, musician, composer, writer or painter in the country to a mass rally in the National Theatre.

After actress Jiřina Švorcová and a couple of other Bolshevik mascots had reeled off hair-raisingly pathetic proclamations condemning the Charter signatories as samozvanci a ztroskotanci (self-appointed [critics] and [morally] bankrupt people) who had willingly betrayed their “socialist mother country” to serve the Western imperialists, the entire cultural elite was marched in front of the television cameras to sign an “Anti-Charter” in defence of the regime. A week later, the depressing show was repeated with Karel Gott and hundreds of other pop music and television stars in the leading roles.

It’s both a comic and a tragic expression of life in Bolshevik Czechoslovakia that more than 7,000 Czech and Slovak cultural celebrities signed the Anti-Charter without hesitation, and thus condemned a document they not even were allowed to read. And if they had read it, they would have seen that the “subversive authors” only referred to laws that the Bolsheviks themselves had promised to respect when they signed the Helsinki Agreement a year and a half earlier.

Eva Kantůrkové, a writer and Charter 77 signatory, comments on this situation very aptly: “The Anti-Charter was a very effective weapon for the regime. The faithful had their faith strengthened, while the opportunists were assured that it paid to behave opportunistically.” Needless to say, many of the celebrities who blindly signed the Anti-Charter in 1977 are still celebrities.