An Uncanny Era: Conversations between Václav Havel and Adam Michnik 9780300207033

Citation preview

AN UNCANNY ERA

AN UNCANNY ERA C O N V E R S AT I O N S B E T W E E N V Á C L AV H AV E L AND ADAM MICHNIK

E D I T E D , T R A N S L AT E D , A N D W I T H AN INTRODUCTION BY

E L Z B I E TA M AT Y N I A

New Haven and London

Frontispiece: The original meeting on the Path of Friendship in August 1978. Clockwise from left: Marta Kubišová, Václav Havel, Adam Michnik, Jacek Kuron´, Antoni Macierewicz, Tomáš Petrˇivý, Janusz Majewski, and Jan Lityn´ski. Photo by Jirˇí Bednárˇ. Copyright © 2014 by Adam Michnik and Elzbieta Matynia. All rights reserved. Excerpts from To the Castle and Back by Václav Havel, translation copyright © 2007 by Paul Wilson. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House LLC for permission. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail sales. [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Gotham and Adobe Garamond types by Newgen North America. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Havel, Václav. An uncanny era : conversations between Václav Havel and Adam Michnik / edited, translated, and with an introduction by Elzbieta Matynia. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-300-20403-2 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. Havel, Václav—Political and social views. 2. Michnik, Adam —Political and social views. 3. Europe, Eastern—Politics and government—1989 –. 4. Europe, Central—Politics and government—1989 –. 5. Political culture—Europe, Eastern—History. 6. Political culture—Europe, Central—History. 7. Democracy—Europe, Eastern—History. 8. Democracy— Europe, Central—History. 9. Social change—Europe, Eastern—History. 10. Social change—Europe, Central—History. I. Michnik, Adam. II. Matynia, Elzbieta. III. Title. db2241.h38a25 2014 943.704′30922 — dc23 2013046046 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: The Path of Friendship Elzbieta Matynia

vii 1

“Dear Adam, here’s that essay I promised . . .”: Havel’s Instructions on Publishing “The Power of the Powerless” (1978)

23

“Welcome to freedom, Václav!” (May 1989)

29

The Uncanny Era of Post-Communism (Prague, November 1991)

31

A Completed Revolution and Belated Avengers (Prague, October 1995)

81

Everything Is Still in Motion (Prague, November 1998)

105

An Account of Our Victories, an Accounting of Our Freedom (Olomouc, October 2003)

121

The Times Are Favoring What’s Mean (Prague and Warsaw, October 2007)

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CONTENTS

The President and the Playwright (Warsaw, November 2008)

147

When Socrates Became Pericles: Václav Havel’s “Great History” (October 2011) Adam Michnik, translated by Agnieszka Marczyk

165

Notes

215

Index

243

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Acknowledgments

The conversations in this book began on the Polish-Czechoslovak border, and so fittingly the book is the outcome of a truly transborder alliance and support extended by my American, Czech, and Polish friends and colleagues. Needless to say, I was ecstatic to learn from Václav Havel that he was looking forward to seeing the book published, and I want to thank my Czech friends, the late Miloslav Petrusek, one of the cofounders of the Václav Havel Library Foundation, and Alena Miltová, the editor of SLON, for encouraging me to work on it. The generosity of the Poles goes beyond that of Adam Michnik (who is well known for it), and includes above all Andrzej Jagodzin´ski, present at most of the conversations in this book, a writer and journalist fluent in Czech culture, politics, and language, and a longtime contributor to Gazeta Wyborcza. And there are many friends from Gazeta, above all Jan Cywin´ski and Roman Stachyra, who helped me to assemble materials that are no longer available to the public, including underground publications from the 1970s that feature Havel. The American friends of the book-in-progress include Jonathan Schell, Dick Adams, and my New School colleagues Jeffrey Goldfarb, Robin Wagner-Pacifici, and Jim Miller. Irena Grudzinska Gross, editor of Michnik’s works in the United States, Agnieszka Marczyk, who translated his essay in this book, and Małgorzata Bakalarz, my research assistant at the New School, made up a nice Polish-American reinforcement team. vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A Czech-American-Polish trinity of support is embodied in Hana Cervinkova, a Czech alumna of the New School for Social Research who lives and works in Poland and assisted me in many ways, including the translation of Havel’s Czech manuscript into English. The book is dedicated to the memory of the University in Exile, the predecessor of the New School for Social Research, my intellectual home in New York. Elzbieta Matynia

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AN UNCANNY ERA

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Introduction The Path of Friendship Elzbieta Matynia

It was a perfect summer day in August 1978, almost exactly ten years after the armies of five Warsaw Pact countries had invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress the democratic aspirations of the Prague Spring. In the mountains between Poland and Czechoslovakia, a range spelled Karkonosze on the Polish side and Krkonoše on the Czech side, two separate clusters of tourists hiked up Mount S´niez˙ka toward a part of the border that since the early 1960s had officially been called the Path of Polish-Czechoslovak Friendship. The two groups emerged from opposite slopes onto this trail ostensibly approved for day-trippers and sat down to rest at one of several picnic tables fashioned from tree trunks. There were eight of them, “1968-ers” in their respective countries, members of a generation that had been shaped either by the Prague Spring’s promise of a nonauthoritarian version of socialism with a human face or by the March 1968 student rebellion in Poland calling for freedom of speech. They were already known in the West by name as dissidents whose inventiveness in outsmarting the authorities through social self-organization had frequently led to their

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arrest and imprisonment. Years later, Adam Michnik recalled: “We were rather amused by what the foreseeable reaction of the security service agents would be when they heard about our meeting. A few criminals from both countries, meeting illegally, declaring the need for friendship and cooperation between nations—there was something of the theater of the absurd in this.”1 From the viewpoint of their respective governments, they really were villains and criminals, though in little more than a decade they were to become parliamentarians, ministers, and presidents in Prague and Warsaw. Anna Šabatová, Czech dissident, who discovered the Path of Polish-Czechoslovak Friendship on an old tourist map, was no doubt feeling the irony of its name when she suggested that it would be the perfect place for a first meeting of the dissidents plotting democracy in both countries. The “path of friendship,” so designated for propaganda purposes and so redolent of socialist happy talk, would finally become what’s been called a “happy performative,” as the very name began to put its own implications into effect.2 These mountain meetings turned that path into what it had been promising all along—a site where the language of broken promises was exposed and authentic friendships were forged. That first meeting initiated more than thirty years of dialogue, cooperation, and mutual help. Over the next eleven years, the Polish-Czechoslovak border became the active edge of collaboration between two democratic undergrounds. After 1989, when former dissidents became key players in the new democracies, their dialogue continued to provide support and inspiration, though the problems they faced were now altogether different. Václav Havel was entrusted with the Czechoslovak presidency, and Adam Michnik became the editor in chief of the most influential daily newspaper in Central and Eastern Europe, but their conversations, meetings, and corre-

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spondence never ceased. The record of these exchanges provides a fascinating journey through the questions, challenges, and dilemmas of the first twenty years of democracy in a region held in the grip of totalitarianism for more than half a century. The letters, interviews, and essays in this book permit us to reconstruct significant portions of the Havel-Michnik dialogue and their insights into the many complex meanings of citizenship and democracy.

Frontier Friends

The initiative to meet had come from the Czech side. That first 1978 meeting was coordinated by a young Slovak from Bratislava, Tomáš Petrˇivý, luckily not yet known to the security service and therefore still in possession of a passport. He was thus able to cross the official border by train to Warsaw and make the arrangements. Members of the two groups all took precautions to avoid arousing suspicion on the part of the police or secret security apparatus. The four Poles “went under water,” as Michnik put it, for two days. On August 13 they left Warsaw in the early morning, each using a different means of transportation, and reached Jelenia Góra, a city in southwestern Poland, from which they started their trek toward the mountaintop rendezvous point. Among the Czechs, Marta Kubišová and Jirˇí Bednárˇ traveled together, while Václav Havel, released from prison in March, came directly from Hrádecˇek, his country home not far from the border.3 This meeting on the Path of Friendship was the first face-to-face encounter between people from two dissident circles, the Czechoslovak Charter 77—the Chartists—and the Polish KOR (Committee for the Defense of Workers). At a second meeting a month later, other key actors also showed up: Anna Šabatova, Peter Uhl, Jaroslav

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Šabata, and from the Polish side Zbigniew Romaszewski. Recorded interviews with KOR’s new Czech friends were published in the Polish samizdat newspaper Biuletyn Informacyjny. Polish dissident Jan Lityn´ski, who was at every meeting with Havel, remembers that they always concluded with the writing of a joint statement, and though the text had to be somewhat formal, it amounted to a report of joy and hope that could be summarized very briefly: “We are here together and we want democracy!” The plans for the third and largest mountain gathering, scheduled for November, were leaked, leading to arrests in both countries. The crackdown was particularly heavy on the Czechoslovak side, and as a result face-to-face meetings had to be avoided for a time. Jan Józef Lipski remembers that even phone calls from Prague friends stopped coming in.4 At the same time, however, Charter 77’s successive teams of spokespersons continued releasing an impressive number of statements documenting human rights abuses in Czechoslovakia, including one about the action by Czechoslovak and Polish police to prevent the November gathering.5 That first meeting in August 1978 took place only two years after thousands of workers held protests in the Polish cities of Ursus and Radom. These had led to massive repression and imprisonments, but ultimately to the formation of the most resourceful platform for social self-defense and self-organization in the region: the Committee for the Defense of Workers (KOR). It was KOR that brought Polish intellectuals and workers together for the first time in this part of the world. The August meeting also came two years after the Plastic People of the Universe, a Czech rock band, had been arrested, tried, and convicted for “organized disturbance of the peace.” As a consequence surely unintended by the authorities, this crackdown on the alternative cultural scene brought intellectuals together in signing a

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letter of protest, and ultimately led to the drafting of Charter 77, signed on January 1, 1977, initially by 243 Czech citizens. When it became blatantly obvious that the Polish workers’ state had turned against the workers, and that the Czechoslovak state had—as Jan Patocˇka put it6—turned against its own children, the regimes could no longer be defended even by their diehard supporters. There is no doubt that emerging initiatives such as homemade publishing, independent research, and alternative education were emboldened by the 1975 Helsinki Agreement on Human Rights, which most of the Communist states had endorsed.7 This international instrument quickly began to lift the feeling of desolation, since the imprisonments, tortures, and detentions as punishment for spreading information could now be reported. There were addresses in Paris, London, and Munich where the reports could be filed and phone numbers where calls could be received. And those addresses provided a direct link to the other partners to the Helsinki agreement: Western governments and their organs of public opinion. So here they were, already emblematic dissident figures, sitting around a large picnic table. The hikers from the Polish side of the “border of friendship” were KOR members Adam Michnik, Jacek Kuron´, Jan Lityn´ski and Antoni Macierewicz. From the Czechoslovak side came Václav Havel, Marta Kubišová (a legendary singer of the Prague Spring ultimately banned from performing in public, who was now a spokesperson for Charter 77), Jirˇí Bednárˇ, who took photographs of the event, and Tomáš Petrˇivý. Kuron´, admired as a subversive “red scoutmaster,”8 opened a backpack full of wholesome provisions, while Havel pulled out a bottle of something stronger that immediately turned the somewhat weary gathering into a celebration. On the vodka bottle’s label was a smiling man in a feathered hat and green hunting outfit, an image straight out of the nineteenth

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century, who was raising a glass of Stará Myslivecká. Michnik remembers Havel turning to them and saying: “Since there is no socialism with a human face, let’s at least drink a vodka with a human face.”9 Kuron´, coauthor of the 1965 Open Letter to the Party, a passionate critique of the system’s deceptive mechanisms, was meeting for the first time an only slightly younger Václav Havel, author of the 1975 Open Letter to Dr. Gustáv Husák, in which he writes about a society driven by fear and reveals the close association between the socialist system’s moral and social maladies.10 Havel, a playwright who just a few years earlier had been a laborer at the Trutnov Brewery in Krkonoše, sat next to Michnik, a historian who had been a worker at the Rosa Luxemburg Light Bulb Factory in Warsaw. He had been sent there for resocialization after a year in prison for being a student ringleader of the March 1968 protests. “These mountain get-togethers,” Michnik wrote later, “were for me an extension of the climate of the Prague Spring and our own students’ assemblies. We all felt that through our conversations we were creating some new quality that might turn out in the future to be a precious ingredient of democracy in our countries. . . . We were thinking about freedom and not revenge; we were thinking about openness and tolerance, and not how to replace the Communist orthodoxy with another one.”11 In this first conversation, Havel must have talked about his belief in the value of moral acts of resistance against the system. Unlike KOR, which had thousands of people supporting its activities in big and small ways, the circle around Charter 77 was relatively isolated. No longer teaching at universities or acting in theaters, they were working as bricklayers and window washers, and many saw them as “a bunch of Don Quixotes.”12 The wave of repressions after 1968 had been serious and long-lasting, and an atomized Czech society

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seemed indifferent to gestures that might have appeared foolishly heroic. With the heightened police court actions against the Charter 77 signatories, the dissident community, in order to inform the public about the situation and to seek support for the imprisoned and their families, established a Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS) just four months before the meeting on the border. One can easily imagine that during the intense exchanges on ´Sniez˙ka, Havel argued about the political effectiveness of simple moral gestures, something that he had articulated in a private letter to Dubcˇek in 1969 and that later became his most frequently quoted assertion: Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance. Lityn´ski remembers that when Havel prompted this discussion on the workings of the system, Michnik, the coeditor of a new underground journal, seized the moment: “You’d better write that up, and we’ll publish it.13 At the time of these meetings an underground publishing scene had begun to emerge in Poland, with a growing number of journals and books printed in thousands of copies in nondescript sheds and garages outside the cities and circulated outside the reach of the tight state censorship. The scene in Husák’s Czechoslovakia was vastly different. The normalization period effectively thwarted the possibility of a large-scale underground infrastructure for publishing;14 so Michnik simply commissioned the essay for the newly established Polish underground quarterly Krytyka, a journal dedicated to broader political reflection on democracy and its prospects in the region, of which he was a coeditor. And this is how Havel’s hugely influential essay “The Power of the Powerless” came about. At the end of the meeting Michnik also asked Havel to join the editorial board of

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Krytyka, and thus the project of a new volume with contributions from Polish and Czech dissident thinkers was launched.15 Kuron´, a seasoned organizer, always insisted that these meetings conclude with a written statement to be published in the underground press and given to Western media, arguing that in case of a roundup there would at least be something left in writing about the meeting. At this first meeting they also drafted a joint statement marking the tenth anniversary of the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies, as well as a separate letter to human rights activists in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union expressing solidarity with all political prisoners of the Soviet bloc.16 “We left the meeting,” recalls Lityn´ski, “with the feeling that this had been an epochal turning point. We were all charged with positive energy, and that included Macierewicz, who declared then that we were closer to the Czechs than to Leszek Moczulski,” a radical leader of the right-leaning opposition in Poland.17 Three months later, in November 1978, an undercover courier from Prague delivered to Michnik’s home the completed essay and a letter that shows Havel as a man whose large vision did not preclude his being a meticulous organizer. The letter contains thorough instructions on the precarious logistics and timetable for gathering the texts and smuggling them to Poland, and an indication that a Czechlanguage version of the Polish samizdat publication was to follow. The letter is included in this book.

Uncommon Criminals

While the story of that picnic along the mountain ridge reveals the extraordinary circumstances in which the “The Power of the Powerless” was conceived and published, the collaboration that followed il-

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luminates workings of what many considered the hopeless project of building a democratic opposition against both countries’ autocratic regimes. An enduring political collaboration and personal friendship began with the written word at its very center: forbidden books, journals, essays, and poetry. By the time the sizable volume of Krytyka had reached various underground “shops” in private apartments a few months later— or the backpacks of student-distributors—Havel had already been arrested for his “antistate” activities, and a whole wave of arrests, raids on homes, and seizure of records on the Czechoslovak side had forced a temporary hiatus upon the regular mountain meetings. Among those arrested with Havel were Jaroslav Šabata and Tomáš Petrˇivý, who was badly beaten by the police, kicked out of the university, and forced into military service. But this did not put an end to the dissident Polish-Czechoslovak collaboration. On October 3, 1979, three weeks before the trial in which Havel was sentenced to four and a half years in prison, twenty key members of the Polish democratic opposition, to protest the arrest of their Czech and Slovak friends, began a solidarity hunger strike in the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw, opposite the main gate to the Warsaw University campus. Among those on the hunger strike were Havel’s Polish friends from Mount S´niez˙ka—Kuron´, Michnik, Lityn´ski—as well as the well-known actress Halina Mikołajska, theater director Jerzy Markuszewski, poet Jacek Bierezin, and writer Anka Kowalska. Warsaw was informed about the action through thousands of flyers published underground. Two days later a group of Polish peasant activists joined the solidarity strike in support of “our Czech brothers” in a village church in Zbrosza Mała, and on October 7 a hunger strike was undertaken by dissidents in Prague. The protest in Warsaw lasted a week, with Dr. Marek Edelman, the

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last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, providing medical care and the distinguished historian Jan Józef Lipski serving as spokesman. Separate protests were organized by SKS, the Student Solidarity Committee, in front of Czechoslovak Cultural Centers in Warsaw and Krako´w. The secret police in both countries were extremely agitated and blamed “antisocialist elements” for disturbing the peace with these illegal outbursts. Meanwhile, “The Power of the Powerless” began its real life in Polish.18 Havel’s essay, highlighting the importance of small acts of courage to resist living in a lie, landed on well-prepared ground and spoke to readers immediately. It harmonized with an argument introduced by Leszek Kołakowski in his 1971 “Hope and Hopelessness” and advanced by Michnik in his 1976 “The New Evolutionism.” Michnik opened up new horizons for the region’s dissidents, arguing for a strategy of gradual nonviolent change entailing small, speechbased steps forward. A Polish philosopher at Oxford, an unemployed historian in Warsaw, and a Czech playwright who could not get his plays performed in Prague asked in a succession of writings not to wait for help from abroad or for the system to correct itself, not to seek quick fixes or to count on miracles. They argued that small step-by-step changes could be advanced in three ways: by exposing as widely as possible the contradictions, absurdities, and incompetence within the system itself; by being cautious about the temptations of either collaboration or violent confrontation with the authorities; and by taking advantage of the human rights instruments provided by the international Helsinki agreements. For Michnik, the Prague Spring showed how fragile totalitarian stability was, and how desperate and ruthless an empire under threat could be. The Czechoslovak lesson, he wrote, is that change is possible but that it has its limits. He warned against the lure of classical

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revolutionary theories, since to overthrow the dictatorship by force brings about another repressive regime, reduces civil and human rights, and therefore any space for freedom and self-organization. Hence “an unceasing struggle for reform and evolution that seeks an expansion of civil liberties and human rights is the only course East European dissidents can take.” Thinking in terms of self-limiting revolution requires a critical shift as its program has to address not the totalitarian power but an independent public. It should help people to think about how to behave, and not how to help the powers that be to reform themselves.19 Kuron´, always the educator, said to oppositional activists: “You want to fight? Then read, read a lot. . . . Ask your family and friends to bring you books from trips abroad; read books and lend them to others.”20 Havel’s piece, crafted with lucidity and sincerity, quickly reached a broad readership, as Krytyka—furtively printed in musty cellars in nearly three thousand copies—was distributed in both universities and factories. Zbigniew Bujak and Zbigniew Janas, two young workers who a year later emerged as key leaders of the Solidarity Union in the Ursus Tractor Factory near Warsaw, said, “We read Havel, and we knew what to do.”21 Paul Wilson quotes a more detailed recollection by Bujak: “This essay reached us at the Ursus Tractor Factory in 1979, at a point when we felt we were at the end of the road. . . . We had been speaking on the shop floor, talking to people, participating in public meetings, trying to speak the truth about the factory, the country, and politics. There came a moment when people thought that we were crazy. Why were we doing this? Why were we taking such risks? Not seeing any immediate and tangible results, we began to doubt the purposefulness of what we were doing. . . . Then came the essay by Havel. Reading it gave us the theoretical underpinnings for our activity. It maintained our spirits; we did not give up, and a

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year later—in August 1980 —it became clear that the Party apparatus and the factory management were afraid of us. We mattered.”22 The Ursus worker Bujak encapsulates as well as anyone what an enormous impact Havel’s essay had on the democratic opposition in Poland, a text which, like his plays, could not be published in his own country. Its dissemination in Poland was surely one of the greatest fruits of the Path of Polish-Czechoslovak Friendship, and like the growing Havel-Michnik friendship, it is at the heart of the prodemocracy collaboration between Poles and Czechoslovaks. With the upsurge of Solidarity in 1980, Wrocław, a robust and buoyant center of the movement in southwestern Poland, and only ninety miles from Karkonosze, became a staging center for joint Polish-Czechoslovak activities, a hub of connections and collaborations. In October 1981, with the help of Peter Uhl and Anna Šabatová, these were formalized as Polish-Czech-Slovak Solidarity, a structure that was quickly forced underground with the imposition of martial law in Poland and the closing of the borders that December. An early enthusiastic reader of Havel, Janas was one of this structure’s leading activists even in hiding. The group’s main activity was to smuggle large monthly loads of samizdat into Czechoslovakia. When the link was reestablished in early 1982, all of the Poles were either in internment camps or in hiding, and those who showed up were largely unknown students active in underground Solidarity, while the Czech side was represented by Anna Šabatová and Václav Malý, then secretly a priest and a future bishop of the Roman Catholic Church. Poles hiked to the border carrying huge mountain backpacks filled with books and journals, and their Czech and Slovak colleagues took the very heavy baggage from there. The “exchange of backpacks,” as the activity was called, even though meticulously executed, was risky, and there were frequent arrests on both sides. Furious

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Czechoslovak forces searched frantically throughout the country for obviously quite sophisticated printing equipment, not realizing that the publications were printed on the other side of the mountains and carried in by students on their backs.23 In 1987 they arrested in Brno a popular network courier, Petr Pospíchal, accusing him of distributing Polish independent publications and maintaining contacts with the activists of underground Solidarity in Poland. His arrest became an opportunity for the Polish underground to organize petitions and street demonstrations to free Pospíchal and above all to rally the public around the work of Charter 77 and VONS, launching a series of lectures on the struggles of the democratic opposition on the other side of the border and organizing an exhibition of Czech samizdat. The regular mountaintop meetings of Polish, Czech, and Slovak dissidents resumed in July 1987, when perestroika and glasnost had traveled beyond the Kremlin, most of the leaders were out of prison, and Poles were beginning their overture to the Roundtable Talks.24

Negotiating Revolution

In the meantime, reality seemed to endorse the strategies put forward by Kołakowski, Michnik, and Havel. The principle of a nonviolent, self-limiting revolution, guided by an unrelenting commitment to create alternative institutions outside the state’s control, had by the end of 1988 led to the first solid promise of democratic change in Poland. Michnik, one of the key architects of the negotiations with the regime in February–April 1989, found himself involved in a formal political process that until then would have been unheard of. Wałe˛sa, Michnik, Kuron´, and forty-seven other members of Solidarity, many of them recent political prisoners, sat around one side of a round table big enough to seat one hundred and actually talked with the

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regime that had put them in prison; the dissidents were now negotiating major systemic changes. Six weeks later, when the talks were concluded, Solidarity was permitted to establish its own first aboveground daily newspaper, independent of the government, to address the electorate in upcoming elections that were at least partly free. The paper was called Gazeta Wyborcza—Electoral Gazette; Adam Michnik became its editor in chief, and the staff consisted of people who had worked in the underground media since 1976. Its original task was to make known to the larger public the nonparty candidates who would never have been covered by the official media. While the Roundtable Talks were in full swing and Poland was undergoing astonishing shifts, prefiguring the regional changes that would take place later that year, Havel was in prison on a charge of hooliganism. Evidence of the vast political gap between the two countries was vividly dramatized in February 1989, soon after the commencement of the Roundtable Talks, when a Warsaw theater staged three one-act plays by Havel. The opening of Audience, Unveiling, and Protest—known as the Vaneˇk plays for their protagonist, Vaneˇk, a dissident who resembles Havel himself—was attended by Mieczysław Rakowski, Poland’s last Communist prime minister.25 As soon as the final curtain went down, Michnik jumped onto the stage and read aloud a declaration protesting the imprisonment of Václav Havel. But his final words were nearly drowned out by an unexpected surge of sound from the loudspeakers: a song by the Czech pop star Karel Gott, who enjoyed both approval and popularity throughout the Communist bloc. Havel’s conditional release in May 1989 was celebrated in an exuberant public letter from Michnik to Havel, “Welcome to Freedom, Václav!,” published on the ninth day of Gazeta Wyborcza’s existence.

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The June 1989 elections in Poland brought an overwhelming victory for Solidarity, and many of those who had joined the excursions to Mount S´niez˙ka over the years became members of the new Parliament. In July 1989 a large delegation of Polish parliamentarians, among them Michnik, Janas, and Bujak, descended the far side of the mountain to visit Havel’s home, Hra´decˇek. Between beer and champagne with “Vašek” and his wife, Olga, Michnik—fresh from the midst of his self-limiting revolution—prophesied that the same thing would soon happen in Czechoslovakia. Havel replied that given the mentality of Czech society, which hovered between the self-irony of Švejk and the fatalism of Kafka, change would not come soon. “Whereupon,” wrote Michnik in his piece commemorating the end of Havel’s tenure as president—“somewhat fortified by a magnificent bilberry infusion, I announced to Havel, ‘You’ll see—before year’s end you’ll be President.’ Václav looked at me as though I were mad, but for many years thereafter he would recount how I had predicted his future fate.”26 There were no roundtable negotiations in Prague: Havel, remarkably, was elected president by a still-functioning Communist parliament. Whether peaceful, velvet, self-limiting, or negotiated, the nature of these “revolutions” was such that they did not open a clear path to a new beginning, but led instead to an epoch that for the actors themselves turned out to be quite uncanny.

Postrevolutionary Conversations: The Gift of Friendship in an Uncanny Era

Though the conversations published here unfolded in part because Havel and Michnik had become friends, the president also knew

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that the editor in chief would publish them in his daily newspaper. With Michnik at its helm, Gazeta, soon to be the largest newspaper in the region, became a forum for debates on democratic transformation, crafting a language that could convey the new reality and provide the reading public with an education in democracy. Almost from the beginning, Michnik published authors who were unlikely choices for any regular daily press, turning Gazeta into a real school of thought and ideas. He introduced—perhaps to their largest audiences ever, reaching in 2002 a readership of 350,000 —his mentors, Leszek Kołakowski and Czesław Miłosz; his multinational circle of intellectual friends, including János Kis, György Konrád, Timothy Garton Ash, and Jonathan Schell; and an army of major European thinkers: Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Jan Patocˇka, and above all Hannah Arendt. A passionate and influential voice for a normal, “gray,”27 inevitably messy but ultimately liberal democracy in the post-Communist Eastern Europe, Michnik traveled everywhere in the region, talked to everyone, and captured for his readers the thrill of making a new beginning. He enabled them to follow developments, form their own opinions, and share in both the excitement and the concerns. A reporter from the uncanny, he was also a curator of Poland’s young democracy, a role for which he has at times been harshly criticized. The democracy was still very young in April 1990 when Michnik wrote from Bratislava about the first meeting of a Central European alliance of neighbors—Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary—later known as the Visegrád Group. He wrote with evident relief: “This was what any beginning of a long road looks like. Amid improvisation and stop-gaps, poorly prepared discussions, and misunderstandings, something new and significant was being born. In Bratislava nothing actually happened except for this first historic meeting of

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the highest representatives of three states and four nations. What’s most important is that the meeting finally took place.”28 A year later he described the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact, or—as it was officially called—the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance, signed in Warsaw on May 14, 1955. The “burial,” as he called it, took place in Prague with the final protocol stating that the participants at the meeting unanimously recognized the Treaty as invalid and that they did not lay any financial claims on each other. “From noon on, the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist once and for all,” Michnik wrote, and he quoted President Havel’s concluding remarks: “Our decision today has indeed an historical dimension, because thanks to it we are definitely bidding farewell to the era of a Europe divided by ideological hatred. Before us lies the prospect of a democratic, secure, and united Europe.”29 But the subsequent conversations afforded these friends the time and space for a more nuanced and less innocently optimistic consideration of the postrevolutionary era, in which they ponder the anxieties and insecurities that come with freedom. The Havel-Michnik conversations that follow begin with a prelude, the 1978 letter from Havel to Michnik that accompanied his manuscript of “The Power of the Powerless,” outlining a plan to launch a larger discussion around the essay with an impressive international dimension. In many ways his plan was a logistical hell, and the management of possible responses to his text appears to have been rather daunting. This was before the existence of e-mail or Web pages, in a place where there were no copy machines for private use and where the purchase of large quantities of paper was impossible. Ink for printing machines was unavailable on the free market; a private formula had been invented by a dissident activist who was a

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INTRODUCTION

biophysicist. One constantly had to worry about the availability of spojki, people who were not suspected by the police and could therefore travel safely across the border as liaisons. Havel’s imprisonment in 1979 and the emergence of Solidarity in Poland in 1980 put his plans on a back burner, but the letter provides an insight into that little known transborder collaboration and its author’s ultimately successful vision for bringing about change. The first extensive conversation published in this volume was conducted in Prague on the second anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, in November 1991, and that revolution is a central character in the conversation. This exchange, entitled by Michnik “The Uncanny Era of Post-Communism,” introduces many of the themes that were to return in their conversations over the next twenty years. The conversation already reveals a general perplexity: how is it that out of this miraculous, consensual revolution, aimed at what’s noble and good, there has emerged so much maliciousness and nastiness? Is this perhaps somehow due to the very nature of the 1989 revolutions, which had sought to deliver hope without bloodshed, reject the principle of divine violence and lawlessness, and end the long illiberal tradition of revolutionary thought and practice that had put the use of force at its center? Or is the malice—as Havel suggests—a normal process of fermentation that one simply has to go through? Is there a danger of counterrevolution and a restoration of the old order? Michnik, the historian, worries about the towering past within the postrevolutionary present. What brings it back to life, what gives oxygen to the demons of various pasts? Has the revolution been completed? How to deal with the unanticipated maladies of post-Communism: the resurgence of nationalism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ethnic intolerance, stigmatizing of the Roma, and contempt for former dissidents? Most important, what is the best

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INTRODUCTION

way of dealing with the people of the ancien régime? Could amnesty for them also mean amnesia, and a lack of accountability for what happened under their rule? How much forgiveness and how much retribution? Michnik would like to know “where the need for justice ends and the need for revenge begins.” The problem of postrevolutionary justice, above all the controversial policy of lustration introduced in Czechoslovakia in October 1991—a combination of the screening and cleansing from public life of the former Communist elite— comes up often in these conversations. The issue brings to light the lingering presence of the moral principle in politics expressed by both thinkers in their dissident writings, though remarkably and rather admirably it becomes clear to them that the moral absolutism cultivated in the antitotalitarian underground can easily turn into fanaticism. The Manichean vision of the world does not belong in a democracy, which, unlike dictatorship, is neither black nor white but, as Michnik argues, gray. The task is to challenge not just Communism but all kinds of fundamentalism. The initial conversations between Michnik and Havel reflect the quickly evolving geopolitical situation in the region, above all the disintegration of the Soviet Union in December 1991, as recounted by correspondent Michnik for the readers of his Gazeta. Michnik, perhaps more than Havel, argues for sustaining close regional ties among the neighboring countries, to ensure a stronger voice for the new democracies within the broader community of Europe and the world. He attends the “burial” of the Warsaw Pact in Prague and reports enthusiastically on the launching of a formal regional alliance known first as the Visegrád Triangle (Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia), and later as an alliance of four, with the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

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INTRODUCTION

Nevertheless it is the tension between past and present, and a growing sense that history has invaded politics, that is the recurring issue here.30 The conversations often return to three traumatic turning points in 1938, ’48, and ’68: the 1938 Munich agreement between key European powers that opened for Hitler a path to the invasion of Czechoslovakia with his annexation of the Sudetenland; the Communist coup in 1948; and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies. Other points of reference are the dark period of “normalization,” with its radical reversal of the reformatory direction of the Prague Spring; the Helsinki accords of 1975; and the launching of Charter 77. These conversations are also populated by the voices of other writers, artists, and political figures. Michnik, a master at discovering historical analogies, and Havel, the philosopher poet with an eye for the illuminating detail, invite us to join them in deliberating about the future of the democratic order. Their worries about the disturbingly divisive political scene in their countries may ring a familiar bell for American readers today, at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Caring and bold, these conversations were infused with a spirit of gentle heresy. They include such radically plain truths as one that was articulated by Havel at an event in his honor in Warsaw, and which he suggested should be shared with the West: that a clean conscience pays off. On that occasion Havel added: “I dare say that the fundamental political lesson we have taken from life under communism is the understanding that the only meaningful politics are those that grow from the imperative and the need to live as all ought to live, and thus— even though it may sound somewhat grandiloquent—to bear responsibility for the future of the whole world.”

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Many of the written exchanges between Havel and Michnik after the revolution are simple birthday greetings, those for Havel often published in Gazeta Wyborcza. The very last is a brief note sent by Havel a month before his death, on the occasion of Michnik’s birthday. Thanking him for the essay Michnik had just written and published on the occasion of “Vašek’s” seventy-fifth birthday, Havel expressed his wistful hope for another reunion, signing off with a sketch of a heart: I am also very happy that—in spite of all your duties—you came for my birthday, and that you took part in Forum 2000. I hope there will be occasion for us to meet again soon. Yours, Vašek

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“Dear Adam, here’s that essay I promised . . .” Havel’s Instructions on Publishing “The Power of the Powerless,” 1978

Havel’s handwritten instruction at the top of his letter typewritten on November 18, 1978:

To the address: Adam Michnik . . . Warszawa Send Havel’s manuscript: “The Power of the Powerless” Dear Adam, I have finally finished writing that essay of mine which I promised to write as an introduction to our planned collection and so I am sending it to you with the request that you give it the person who will be taking care of this matter on your side. It is a bit longer, and I am sorry for that, but I am that kind of author who is at first too lazy to write, but when I do start writing, I am then too lazy to stop. But if the collection is a bit fatter, I hope nothing will happen (in the extreme case it can be divided into two volumes). Here is some information on how we imagine it on our side: 1) My piece is only an introduction to the problem, it outlines the theme, meant as a stimulus. Therefore contributions do not at all have to react to it or be concerned

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“ D E A R A D A M , H E R E ’ S T H A T E S S AY . . . ”

with it, it would be enough if they touch in one way or another on the general theme that we are concerned with. They do not have to be long, quite to the contrary. My piece is rather journalistic, I am not a political scientist, or a philosopher, or a historian; therefore it is even better if other contributions happen to be of a more scholarly kind. 2) We have disseminated my piece here to a variety of circles concerned with ideas and politics. It would be good if a wider spectrum of opinions and approaches were represented also on your side (maybe even somebody outside of the KOR milieu?). 3) I assume that the volume should bring together at least ten contributions from our side and ten from yours. When it comes to authors from other countries, we have established some contact with GDR, but otherwise we have no other contacts, so it would probably be up to you (Djilas? Mihajlov? Sakharov? Medvedev?). 4) On both the Polish and Czech side one author living in the West should be represented; Mlynárˇ has promised a contribution for us, and perhaps you could talk to Kołakowski. 5) Each author should attach to his or her contribution a short bio (basic biographic data, profession, political trajectory, etc.). 6) It is not necessary that all contributors know my piece, it is enough that they know the general theme of the volume. Particularly for authors from other countries, there would be technical difficulties to provide them with my piece ahead of time.

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“ D E A R A D A M , H E R E ’ S T H A T E S S AY . . . ”

7) I imagine the timetable more or less as follows: a) By the end of ’78 somebody from your side will translate my essay, you will give it to potential contributors from your side and you will collect their contributions by the end of February ’79. b) We will have a deadline on our side at the end of January ’79, then we will send it to you, you will begin to translate it into Polish, and when you have yours and other contributions, you will publish it in your samizdat (sometime in the spring?). c) Once you publish it, you send it to us immediately, we will translate it and send it back so that you could possibly publish it for us in Czech. d) If there is then—in the spring or in the summer—a possibility to meet again, we would meet and arrange a discussion about the published collection, which would be our own “political science seminar” that we have announced. If we cannot meet, there will be only the collection. At our meeting we would inform the public about the collection and then it could perhaps be published abroad. 7) [duplication of number sic] The title of the collection, the arrangement of the contributions, layout etc.—we would leave all of that up to you—we would publish the Czech edition in accordance with the final form that you give it on your side. 8) I would like you to consider whether the entire collection could be dedicated to Jirˇí Lederer, as a pioneer of authentic Czechoslovak-Polish relations; especially if he is still in prison at the time, it would be a nice

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“ D E A R A D A M , H E R E ’ S T H A T E S S AY . . . ”

present for him after his return. But this is just for your consideration; you make the decision. Concerning our collaboration in general: it seems as though the public response in both of our countries and in the world at large is great and unambiguously positive. This confirms that we started a good thing and that we should not stop. Our working group, which focuses on Polish matters, works intensively; a certain problem is that there are few “clean” contacts. But again, this task is rather for you; as everything is getting increasingly complicated for us because nowadays they are organizing some kind of a total attack on us and every little thing turns into a big problem for us. We could hardly find “clean” people, who could travel to you; we are so closely watched that anybody who comes into touch with us a couple of times becomes immediately polluted. I know that you also do not have it easy, but still we cannot help being envious of your situation. (And now on top of things you have the Pope—what a sensation! Everybody here was so happy, as if he were a Czech!) I remember fondly our meetings and I hope that we will be able to continue them (but we will have to do a better job of keeping them secret). After our meetings the interest in Poland grew quite a bit. Give my greetings to Jacek and all other friends! Please give especially gracious greetings to Anka Kowalska, whom I have not yet met in person, but whose book, which she sent me, I liked very much—I send warm greetings to you, Vašek Havel

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“ D E A R A D A M , H E R E ’ S T H A T E S S AY . . . ”

P.S. When you get this package, please call me and say for example that the apples are ripe or whatever else. I think that we could call each other sometimes. I will now be in Prague and my phone number is 3299592. P.P.S. Have you received the foreword to my play? Šabata had it on him, but they took it from him, but maybe another copy has already been sent you. I got a call to write something for “Zapis”;1 I could not do it yet, because I wanted to finish this essay, but I will eventually write something. 18.11.78

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“Welcome to freedom, Václav!” May 1989

This piece was published in the ninth issue of Gazeta Wyborcza, the first independent daily newspaper published officially in Poland and the region. The establishment of Gazeta Wyborcza (Electoral Gazette) had been negotiated between Solidarity and the Communist regime during the Roundtable Talks in April 1989, in preparation for the first partially free elections in Poland, to take place on June 4, 1989. The editor in chief of GW became Adam Michnik, and the staff was made up of people who had worked in the underground media since 1976.

I belong to that category of Poles who are marked by a deep complex regarding our southern neighbors. This complex involves a sense of guilt for our country’s twice contributing to the strangling of freedom in Czechoslovakia. The first time in 1938; the second time, thirty years later.1 And nothing pains me more than the opinion of Poles that the Czechs don’t like the smell of gunpowder. And nothing bothers me more than the absence of any Polish pangs of conscience over those two disgraceful dates. That’s why the contact with Charter 77, to which I owe my friendship with Havel, has always had a special meaning

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“ W E L C O M E T O F R E E D O M , V Á C L AV ! ”

for me.2 It was always something more than a political choice. That’s why the voice of Havel that reached me after the Gdan´sk trial3 through the prison’s bars, a voice of protest and friendship, felt to me like an assurance that we could talk about the future without the persistent memory of accounting for wrongs. I was reminded of his smiling face from a group photo, and I was reminded of his essay “The Power of the Powerless,” and about the message of this essay: don’t succumb to hatred; don’t give in to despair. So that we can protect spiritual freedom, and build— even in prison, as Václav did— some foundation for a community of “those who were not indifferent.” Welcome to freedom, Václav! Adam Michnik

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The Uncanny Era of Post-Communism Prague, November 1991

In this conversation, Václav Havel is joined by Saša (Alexandr) Vondra, Havel’s adviser on international affairs, and Michael Žantovský, Havel’s press secretary.

havel: Adam, apparently you want to interrogate me for three hours. michnik: That’s right, Vašek. havel: But I don’t have so much knowledge that it would last for three hours. michnik: On the other hand you have experience, because you’ve been interrogated so many times already. Three hours is just right for a criminal like you. Two years have passed since the Velvet Revolution, that famous year of 1989, when on the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, Communism in our countries collapsed. I remember my visit to Prague in 1989, when here in Hra´decˇek1 I told you that you would be president. Tell me, in your opinion, has Communism finally been defeated, or might it perhaps come back? Do you think that a Communist counterrevolution is possible, a Restoration of Communism?

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havel: I think that a global return of Communism, a U-turn of history to the times of Brezhnev or Stalin, is out of the question. This process is irreversible. Some local returns are possible. I can imagine that in some new variant Communist rule could return under a slightly repainted banner. Here or there, in one place or another, in one of the Soviet republics, for example, the nomenklatura could repaint its banner in more nationalistic colors, and supported by the former party hierarchy, could try to renew something that might resemble the prior system. Such local returns are imaginable, but the empire, or the bloc as a whole, in my opinion, has already bidden farewell to our epoch, because history cannot move backward. michnik: What in your opinion is happening and will happen . . . with everything that constitutes the ancien régime—both people and institutions? havel: I believe this is a major problem for the entire postCommunist world. The people who to a greater or lesser degree cocreated the regime, and those who silently tolerated it, but also all of us who unconsciously got accustomed to it, we are all in it together. We have to deal with huge centralized and monopolistic state enterprises, we have to deal with offices of the state administration full of bureaucrats from the prior era. This constitutes one of the sources of huge problems and troubles with which the post-Communist world has to struggle. It’s not the only problem, but one of the most serious. It’s not only about the struggle with specific people connected to the old regime, its representatives, or concrete institutions, but above all, about the struggle against the habits of normal average citizens. While they hated the totalitarian regime, they spent their whole lives in it, and willy-nilly, got accustomed to it. They got accustomed to

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the fact that the omnipotent state towers over them —that the state can do anything, that it takes care of everything, that it is responsible for everything. They got used to the paternalism of the state, and this habit cannot be shed from one day to the next. All those bad habits that this regime systematically ingrained in the people over many years cannot suddenly disappear. It is a powerful and troublesome legacy, one of the sources of the problems that the post-Communist world has to deal with. michnik: There are two symbolic names that capture two different ways of thinking about how to deal with the Communists or the people of the old regime. One of these ways is known in Poland as the policy of the “thick line.” Tadeusz Mazowiecki used this phrase in his first address as prime minister. What he had in mind was to draw a thick line between the past and the present and to say that the only criterion for judging bureaucrats would be their competence and their loyalty to the new order. He was accused that in using the thick line he wanted to protect Communists, criminals, and thieves, et cetera. The second way comes from Czechoslovakia, or more specifically from the Czech and Slovak Republics, and it’s called lustration. Lustration and the policy of the thick line represent two extreme ways of thinking about those matters. What do you think of the philosophy proposed by Mazowiecki and the one proposed by the supporters of lustration? havel: This is another very serious problem. One has to somehow swim between Scylla and Charybdis. I think both concepts in their extreme forms are misguided. We know from the history of our own country that we paid for it horribly whenever we assumed that what’s past is not important. That really meant that we didn’t cut out the abscess that was infecting the whole body.

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The abscess kept decaying and kept producing poisons. So it seems to me that the need for some kind of excision to achieve justice is fully understandable and natural. But at the same time in my opinion one should not open the door to unlawful revenge and hunting down people, because in fact that would simply be a different version of what we just got rid of. Such an approach also has its own tradition here. I remember various postwar avengings, and usually the most energetic were done by people whose hands were not clean to begin with. I think that to call for revealing the names of all those who one way or another had something to do with the police—no matter when and why—is very dangerous. It is a bomb that can explode at any minute and again poison the social climate, bring back into it some elements of fanaticism, unlawfulness, and injustice. It’s important to find the appropriate balance, and a kind of approach that would be civilized but would not avoid the past. We have to know how to face our own past, how to name it, how to draw conclusions from it, and do it justice. But we have to do it honestly, in a measured way, with tact, generosity, and imagination. And whenever we deal with admissions of guilt and penance, we have to find space for forgiveness. I am for a humanitarian approach, and not for new repressions and a climate of fear. It’s enough that people for forty years were afraid of the security police. It cannot be that for the next ten years they may be afraid whether somebody might dig up evidence against them. After all, many do not even know whether they might not have stepped into something. That’s why I reacted with reservations to our parliamentary law on lustration; that’s why I publicly proposed that it be amended.

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michnik: This begs for concrete examples. I was told yesterday in Prague that Karel Kosík, a well-known philosopher, might face a lustration trial. After the Prague Spring, Kosík was subjected to repression and silenced for many years. Right now he is about to be repressed again for things that happened more than twenty years ago before the Prague Spring—specifically, that in 1968 he was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. How would you judge that concrete instance? havel: First I have to make a certain factographic remark. Though the law is popularly known as the lustration law, it has a broader character and does not concern only lustration. The concept of lustration refers to the investigation into whether somebody was listed in the registry of the Ministry of Internal Affairs as a collaborator, whereas the law itself makes it impossible for those people to hold positions who were ever members of the People’s Militia during the past forty years, or the Communist verification commissions of 1948 and 1968, or were activists of the Party Committee at the county level. But there is an exception there—the law does not concern party functionaries from the period of January 1968 to May 1969. I believe that this very exception includes, among many others, Karel Kosík, even though he had been, as a twenty-year-old, a member of a verification committee that after 1948 threw people out of the universities. Generally I believe that this law is very severe and unfair. It was enough that one was for one day a member of the People’s Militia thirty years ago for him not to be able to hold certain functions today. That also applies to militiamen who in 1968 protected the Extraordinary Party Congress in Vysocˇany from the occupying Russian army.2

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I’m not saying that these were a majority. Most certainly they were a minority, but from a moral point of view, even if it were only one person who would innocently have suffered from this law, then I would still believe it’s a bad law. For that very reason nowhere else is the principle of collective guilt and collective responsibility applied, but what is judged are the individual deeds of each person. The project that I proposed to the federal assembly for amending the law provided that each person could make his case before an independent court that would have the right to judge him capable of holding a certain position because of the specific circumstances of his specific case. If, for example, the person has a long history of engagement in the struggle for human rights, the court would have the right to decide that his merits are greater than his guilt for having been a member of something for a while. This law would also concern persons who were forced to collaborate or those who were delegated to collaboration with the regime by underground organizations— one could imagine such cases in the 1950s. michnik: There is one more trouble here. I have heard that the vice ˇ arnogurský, accused chairman of the Slovak parliament, Ivan C the former prime minister of Slovakia of collaboration with the ˇ arnogurský of the same. security forces, and Mecˇiar accused C The arbiter in this confrontation could only be somebody who was competent, meaning the colonel of the security forces. It seems to me that we are approaching the absurd when we resort to having colonels of the security forces issuing certificates of morality. havel: Yes, that’s true. And I also pointed out in my letter to Parliament that the highest, absolute, and final indicator of usefulness in holding certain functions in the state was to be the internal

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data collected by the security forces. There’s something terribly wrong with that. michnik: There’s the widely publicized case of Jan Kavan, a former émigré who supported the Czechoslovak opposition and who, after his return to the country, was accused of supposedly collaborating with the security forces. They say that last week you demonstratively went with Kavan to a restaurant so that everyone could see. havel: Indeed, I guess last week I was with Kavan in a restaurant, but it wasn’t to demonstrate. I met him there because our mutual friend, Petr Uhl,3 had asked me to talk with him and listen to his side of the story. I saw no reason not to do it, especially since I had worked with Kavan back in dissident times. He helped the opposition at that time and indeed he did a lot for us. His case was very controversial, which is all the more reason for me to see him and talk with him. But it wasn’t a “demonstration.” michnik: You say that one has to swim between Scylla and Charybdis. Where in your opinion is the boundary where the need for justice ends and the need for revenge begins? havel: This boundary can be designated only by something intangible or something that does not lend itself to legal norms, such as feelings, taste, understanding, prudence, wisdom —that is, certain human characteristics. Would we be guided by them, then perhaps we would succeed in finding this boundary. This is a burning issue and such a boundary is difficult to find, as is demonstrated by our lustration law, which in my opinion is unsuccessful, even though it is the result of a two-year deliberation. It is an example of how difficult it is to place this boundary within legal norms; but at the same time it has to find itself within such a norm because even worse than a harsh law is

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lawlessness, where everybody can lustrate anybody and turn it into a public scandal. michnik: In one of your interviews you said that you sense how there arises in people a fear of the past. I just came back from Germany, where I spoke with our friends from dissident times, and they all talk about the Stasi. I had a sense that that’s an obsessive topic for them. They said that for them the achievement of the Stasi was somehow comparable to an Auschwitz of the soul. And they said that one should look at the entire problem from the point of view of the victims. If someone was wronged by the Stasi, then this person has the right to seek justice, in the sense of knowing who it was that had hurt him or her. That means one has the right to examine one’s files to see who the informant was. On the other hand, when I talked recently with the Spanish writer Jorge Semprun and asked him, “How did you deal with it in Spain?”—after all, they also had a dictatorship, police who tortured people, informants, et cetera—he answered, “If you want to lead a normal life, you have to try to forget, otherwise those snakes let out of the box will poison public life for years to come.” But the East German writer and dissident Jürgen Fuchs said: “Listen, Adam, I’m not bloodthirsty. I write poetry. But I couldn’t live with that. If we don’t deal with this problem to the very end it will come back to us again, like Nazism. We didn’t go through de-Nazification, and this has hung over us for many, many years.” What does a Czech writer who is also president think about this? havel: I want to say that in this matter my private opinion differs a bit from the one that I have and must have as president.

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As president, I have to take into account the situation of the society and its will. My personal view is best illustrated by one example. Shortly after I became president, I was given a list of all colleagues who had informed on me, but that same day I not only lost the piece of paper but on top of that I forgot who was on the list. That simply means that I personally am inclined rather to let it go. I keep my distance from it because I’m familiar with those meat grinders and I know how they can destroy people. I have written plays and essays about it and somehow worked out this problem for myself. That’s why I have no need to punish somebody who didn’t do the right thing. Nevertheless, as president I have to take into account that society needs this kind of accountability, because they have a sense that the revolution has not been completed. There are people whose whole lives and whose families’ lives were destroyed by the regime, and who spent their entire youth in prison camps and are not able to reconcile themselves with this so easily . . . even less so when those who persecuted them are much better off today than they themselves are. That’s an eyesore. In society there is a considerable need to face the past and to get rid of people who terrorized the population and in obvious ways abused human rights, and to remove them from their current positions. As I said, it seems there is a historical necessity to look at one’s past without any lenses and to name it precisely. This is why as president I cannot approach those matters with the same carelessness with which I misplaced the piece of paper listing “my own” informants. saša vondr a: Interesting that in these matters there is a certain distinction between Catholic and Protestant societies. On the one hand there is Spain, but also Hungary and Poland, and on the other, the Germans and Czechs.

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michael žantovsky´ : In Slovakia they are already approaching it in a more Catholic way . . . vondr a: Precisely. michnik: It seems to me that Sasha is injecting too much of a kind of philosophical structuralism, because in Poland, as it happens—I don’t know why—nobody speaks as loudly about settling accounts as Catholic politicians. Only such horrible, suspicious people as Kuron´4 or I say that perhaps we shouldn’t go crazy over it. But the politicians from parties having the word “Catholic” in their name are today rather more inclined to repeat that God is just than that He is merciful. havel: The fact is that in Catholicism there are two traditions, which produce a peculiar dialectical tension. One is the tradition of sin, about which Catholicism is more understanding than is Protestantism. Hence it is also a source of forgiveness and absolution. The second tradition is that of the Inquisition. žantovsky´ : But absolution is always connected with confession, that is, acknowledging your own sins, whereas the Inquisition is about tracking down the hidden sins, those that are considered the most dangerous. michnik: I think that each of us is doomed to such a peculiar dialectic. When I was still in prison, I vowed two things: in the first place, that I would never join any veterans’ organizations that give people medals for fighting against Communism. Second, that I would never be vindictive and seek revenge. But on the other hand, I repeat to myself a verse from a poem by Herbert, who wrote: And do not forgive in truth it is not in your power To forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn.5

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I think that we are doomed to such dialectic that we can absolve only those wrongs done to us, but to absolve the wrongs suffered by others is not in our power. We could try to persuade otherwise, but if people want justice, they have a right to it. havel: This is precisely the dilemma I was just talking about. In my position I can’t act in the way I would do in private. I have no need to persecute “my own” informers or secret policemen. I do not feel a need for revenge. On the other hand, as a state official I don’t have the right to proclaim for others a general act of mercy. michnik: You used a phrase a while ago that worries me . . . about an “unfinished revolution.” What does that really mean? When would you decide that the revolution is finally completed? havel: Hard to say. The revolution does not end on one day, and there is no such indicator on the basis of which one could say that it has just ended. It is a process that is unfolding by slowly ending and fading away. And only when new generations enter political life will it be possible to say that it’s behind us. But in some sense this revolution is indeed unfinished. Let us recognize that, for example, one of the elements of our revolutionary program included a market economy, but 95 percent of property is still owned by the state. The same with the legal system —95 percent of our laws are from the Communist era. The same with the political system. Only with time will new people emerge who will replace the current state bureaucrats, but for the time being everything is still in flux. But I agree with you that it is difficult to say: “Here we are. The revolution has ended.” Whenever it happens, it will merely be a symbolic moment—for example, when the biggest steel mill passes into private hands.

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žantovsky´ : Forgive me, but I think we’re touching a matter here that you have always tried to avoid. It’s true that because of the press the term “revolution” is being used, but what happened here was not strictly speaking a revolution. Revolution is always connected with the use of force. If it were a revolution, then, for example, the constitution would be suspended and revolutionary courts would be established. But we did not take that path, and I believe it’s too late to go back to it. havel: Yes, but in the beginning we did call it a revolution . . . žantovsky´ : Not we. havel: OK, so that’s how it was called, but such names mean what we want them to mean. For example, now there are controversies as to where federation ends and confederation begins. As writers, we know well that we are not just readers, but also the creators, of dictionaries. We know that any word can gradually acquire the meaning that is given to it. What happened here was called a revolution, and regardless of whether this was right or not, it has become a fact. žantovsky´ : Here I have to object. Your friend Tom Stoppard6 said that using language makes sense only when words mean specific things. Otherwise people cannot communicate with each other. Of course, journalists can write whatever they want. But from the definition of revolution it turns out that ours was no revolution. havel: You are talking as a scientist and not as a poet. žantovsky´ : I only quoted your friend, who is no scientist. michnik: It seems to me, Michael, that the revolution was a demonstration that forced the totalitarian power to give in. And later what journalists called a “velvet revolution” entered upon the path of a state of law. There exists a theory in our countries that

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what happened then was not good. That one should not enter the path of law, but that one should use revolutionary methods— that is, the path of lawlessness—to destroy Communism once and for all. Revolution always means discrimination, whether against political enemies or the people of the ancien régime, but the law means equality under the law. And this, Vašek, is not scientism, but life: either the law is equal for everybody, or there is no law. I’m afraid that there still exists the possibility that some categories of people will be denied their legal rights (for example, former Communists), just as in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution the kulaks and the bourgeoisie were denied their rights. So when I’m asking about an unfinished revolution, I know what I’m afraid of: that this process may also lead to its next phase. We know from history the cases of revolution that began with a struggle for freedom and ended with despotism, from Cromwell, through Napoleon, to Khomeini. Many years ago Semprun, whom I mentioned before, wrote a script for a film by Alain Resnais, called The War Has Ended. The Spanish Civil War had reached its end; so the methods of war were not needed anymore. And when you are saying the “unfinished revolution,” then I am wondering whether some people won’t appear who say, “Look, even Havel—humanist, writer, philosopher, good man—says this revolution ought to be continued.” So how is it: are we continuing the revolution, or are we saying, “The war is over”? There are Communists, but they have the same right to life as other people. If they committed a crime, and if there is court evidence about it, they will be punished, like all criminals. But if not, then they cannot be discriminated

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against for having been for however many years in the Communist Party. havel: I believe that the sense of these changes—if you don’t want to, we don’t have to call them revolutionary—was to introduce law instead of lawlessness, and not to introduce a new lawlessness. Except that this social pressure is caused by a lawlessness that has still endured. Imagine for example that one of my friends, Standa Milota, who for twenty years was persecuted and could not be employed, has today a retirement pension of only one thousand crowns, because he could not be promoted, and has a very low-income basis for calculating his pension. And the one who persecuted him and made it impossible for him to get a regular job gets a pension today of five thousand, a villa, and many other assets. So people observe such a situation, and yet in fact people at the top have been changed and censorship has been ended. And newspapers can write what they want. But those real material everyday wrongs and the results of lawlessness have remained. And that’s why people protest against it. Unlike a few political extremists, they are ruled not by a need for revenge but by a desire for justice, and moral and material satisfaction. This doesn’t have anything to do with some kind of Jacobinism or permanent revolution. It is about completing a work begun to remedy public matters. At least that is how I see it. On the other hand, when some signals reach me, I speak out sharply against them. michnik: We are observing today a certain bewildering phenomenon. Not long ago I was in Yugoslavia, if one can still use this name. Perhaps it’s better to say that I was in Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia. I had the impression that the press, radio, and television in those countries speak in the language of fifty years ago . . .

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that the conflicts that seemed buried forever are back. In Serbia, for example, you would hear about the Croatian Ustasha,7 in Croatia you’d hear about Serbian Chetniks.8 Also in other countries one can observe the return of language, symbols, or ideologies that haven’t been used for fifty years. In Poland there is a return of the Endecja,9 in Ukraine there are new monuments to Bandera,10 in Slovakia Father Tiso11 is being rehabilitated. In Romania there is a newspaper published in a million copies, Romania Mare, which glorifies Antonescu;12 in Hungary Horthy13 is being celebrated. What does it mean, this return of the old demons? havel: I too am surprised by this revival of the old demons. It testifies to what I once wrote—that Communism in some way stopped history, that it postponed its natural development and movement. Metaphorically speaking, one could say it was a kind of general anesthesia, and now society is waking up to those times before it was administered. All those problems that society lived through before the anesthesia are now suddenly resuscitated. I’m also surprised— especially when it comes to the younger people who did not learn about it in school and so in fact could not know anything about it—how very much alive among them are not only the bad traditions that you talked about, but also the good ones. Here in Czechoslovakia, in every little town or county, one can see that people are reaching back for traditions that were destroyed over forty years ago, and now they are coming back; regional identities are revived, a sense of bonds between regions, et cetera. Not only bad demons are reawakening but also good spirits. michnik: What demons of the Czech tradition are you most afraid of ?

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havel: If I were to judge those phenomena that are beginning to emerge, then I would consider the most serious ones antiSemitism and ethnic intolerance, xenophobia, which can be observed in Slovakia, but also—in a somewhat different form —in the Czech lands. There is a journal called Politika, with a wide readership, which is full of anti-Semitic articles, grossly vulgar. This is such a gutter that the last time we had it was in 1938 during the so-called Second Republic,14 between Munich and the German occupation, when fascist organizations emerged, like Vlajka, which orˇ apek.15 This is such a peculiar ganized campaigns against Karel C mix of complexes, chauvinism, Fascism, intolerance, and hatred of those who are “other.” Today it manifests itself in the form of hatred for the Vietnamese, Cubans, Romanians, or gypsies. There is a kind of cult of “racial purity” in all this. There is a kind of return to the phenomenon of Czech fascism that was different from the German only in that it was Czech. In Slovakia, on the other hand, there is a tradition of what the Communists called clerico-fascism: indeed, the memories of the Slovak state of 1939 – 45 are being revived, and there appear some signs of anti-Semitism. These are very dangerous matters. There are also other dangerous demons that find nourishment in unstable environments. For obvious reasons democratic rule, when compared with the prior totalitarian rule, inevitably appears indecisive, uncertain, insufficiently strong or energetic. That’s natural. People who for their whole lives were exposed to totalitarian power inevitably have that kind of feeling. And that feeling constitutes fertile ground for those who yearn for rule with an iron hand. There is a desire for the so-called strong personality, somebody who can come in and put things in order. It’s already less important whether such a person’s banner is 46

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right-wing or left-wing. I think that kind of danger exists in all post-Communist countries. michnik: Don’t you have the impression that our thinking during Communist times was dominated by the question, “How did Communism come about?” How did it happen that from the leftist tradition, from the language, rhetoric, and a leftist system of values, there suddenly appeared a system of inhuman dictatorship? And in those times we somehow forgot that this leftist face of dictatorship was only one of its faces, that it was possible to have a totalitarian system, a dictatorship, with right-wing rhetoric and ideology. We are observing throughout Europe a turn to right-wing values. Aren’t you afraid that this danger is more poorly recognized in our part of Europe? Today nobody will buy the slogans of left-wing totalitarianism: anything that smells of the left is associated with Communism. Don’t you think, on the other hand, that the anti-Communism, which promotes itself through right-wing rhetoric and by appealing to the national values that were undermined by Communism, might be a new threat that neither our societies nor we are ready for? havel: I have to admit that I myself do not feel threatened by that. I am not afraid of being beguiled by right-wing rhetoric issued by some new heralds of authoritarianism. Of course I can express myself only on my own behalf, and I myself feel resistant to all kinds of microbes no matter what faces they wear. Perhaps it’s precisely because of that that some suspect me of leftism. Such signs of the possibility of authoritarian and right-wing rule are naturally appearing in our society. I make note of them, but in what I do I’m not subject to them. michnik: It’s obvious to me that you are not susceptible to the ideology of a dictatorship or right-wing totalitarianism because you come from a “different ape.” The ape that you are descended 47

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from does not fit into any dictatorship. You said yourself many times that you situate yourself neither within the left nor within the right. I define myself the same way. Moreover, you said— and this is also very close to me—that as a matter of fact these categories do not explain the world to you. But how come this theme returns in both the Czech and Slovak lands, as well as in Poland? That people all the time appear and say I am from the right, or I am from the left. And what do they actually mean to say when they say that? havel: I’m also often amused when I read in the papers that some right-wing party has been established or that somebody is creating an alliance of right-wing parties, et cetera, et cetera. But it certainly has to do with the desire of the society to create some pluralist political spectrum. People know that in traditional democracies the political forces are pluralized from left to right. So they try to somehow define themselves by placing themselves within this spectrum, and today it’s fashionable to define oneself as an adherent of the right, which in many respects seems to be understandable. What else can you expect after the collapse of Communism, which has spelled out on its banner Leftism? This is simply a normal counterreaction. But I think that if nothing intervenes in this normal development, then in time the political spectrum will stabilize, and such a hypertrophy of self-definition will to a considerable extent die off, because concrete political work will begin, the implementation of programs, and it will become obvious who belongs where, and so it would not have to be so declaratively proclaimed. All of this is characteristic of our uncanny era of post-Communism. Because this is something the world has never experienced yet. A new phase in which different unexpected and dramatic mo-

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ments take place. I myself will admit that every day something comes up that bewilders me. This is a time full of many different dangers, and to move within the politics of this time you could break your neck. Any politically thoughtful person would prefer to wait five years for the process of fermentation to end, and only then get engaged in politics. Yet this is a phase we have to plod through despite all its paradoxes and absurdities. michnik: I’d now like to ask about something that surprises me and that I don’t understand. How do you explain the renaissance of the authority of Father Tiso in Slovakia? Perhaps this question comes from ignorance, but according to my image of the history of the Slovak nation, this is not a tradition that ought to be rehabilitated. havel: Indeed. I fully agree with you and I regard it as a very sad and dangerous phenomenon. Yet I have to say that it is not an opinion shared by the majority of Slovak citizens. The rehabilitation of Tiso is demanded in fact by a small group of people. But you are asking what the reasons for it are. They are particular and in fact irrational. From the eighth century the Slovak nation was under foreign rule. The Czechoslovak Republic was not for them an adequate fulfillment of their desire for their own statehood. It’s true that it owes to this Republic that it wasn’t left under Hungarian rule and freed itself from the pressure of magyarization, but that never tasted like the freedom of one’s own state. The only period of the existence of an independent state was that of the Slovak Republic during the Second World War. This state was a vassal of Hitler, established thanks to him, and in all possible ways it tried to please him. The legislature of this state was subordinated to German legislation but took it even further.

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Nevertheless, unlike other countries that collaborated with Hitler, in Slovakia there was relative peace— of course, if we don’t take into account the deportation of Jews or the outright selling of them to the Germans. The turmoil of war surrounded the state, but inside it wasn’t so visible. The horror of war such as Poland went through, Slovakia did not experience. In some older people, perhaps, this memory is connected with the fact that it was the only period in which Slovaks governed themselves, even though in reality they were only vassals. In addition, Slovaks don’t like it when Czechs remind them of this Slovak state. They think that this is their own problem that they have to solve themselves and that the Czechs have no right to meddle. Those are some of the nuances of a certain historical consciousness that exists in some circles here, though—I repeat— this is not a general phenomenon. It is a fact that the execution of Tiso after the war was quite a controversial matter. In Slovakia there is a conviction that one cannot kill a priest, though, contrary to my position, Catholics are not decisively against the death penalty. In this matter time has not erased the memories. Furthermore that trial was very carefully engineered, and the best day on which to have the hanging was carefully calculated, and so on. Despite these nuances, I repeatedly distanced myself publicly from reminiscences of the Slovak state, saying that the democratic authorities of Czechoslovakia cannot have anything to do with it. michnik: You have just spoken very interestingly about the Slovak complex. And now I would like to ask you about the Czech complex. I will remember all my life the conversation from November 1989 just after the Wrocław Festival of Polish-Czech Solidarity, when I met in Warsaw with Pavel Tigrid, Karl Schwarzenberg,

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Jirˇí Pelikán, and Vilém Precˇan.16 I maintained that Communism is already “kaput,” and Tigrid responded, “You do not know the Czechs. The entire Czech spirituality exists between Švejk17 and Kafka. Czechs are not going to shed the Communist dictatorship, because they have a complex, they have a complex that they did not defend themselves, neither in 1938, nor in 1948, nor even in 1968.” I don’t have to tell you how happy I was when it turned out that I’m a better expert on the Czech soul than our friend Tigrid and all others who agreed with him. havel: This confirms for me what I sensed a long time ago. In the 1970s and ’80s various foreign journalists came to me and they all repeated all the time that these dissidents are a handful locked up in a tight ghetto; that the people will never join them; that they won’t wake up, because they are satisfied with what they have or at least that they have already reconciled themselves to that, and that we are madmen who are beating our heads against a wall, et cetera. And I said to them, “What can you know? In the soul of this society there are various dormant possibilities.” I have lived through so many startling events that I believe anything is possible. I lived, for example, through the euphoria of 1968 that culminated in this all-nation, generally peaceful resistance to the Soviet invasion. I was completely surprised by this because before that there had been apathy for many years, and so I wondered where in such a society this had come from. But not even one year later the very same society plunged again into apathy and I wondered again. How is it possible that the same people who not long ago had gone with their bare hands against tanks, are now saying: “All of this doesn’t make sense, it’s better to tend to one’s garden.”

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I understood then that we are both Švejk and the land surveyor K [from Kafka’s The Castle] but also Hussites, and that all those features reside in all of us at the same time. michnik: Communism was an ideology that in an extraordinarily simple way, with simple words, was capable of explaining to any idiot the complexities of the world. It was enough to know a few formulas to be wiser than Plato, Heidegger, or Descartes. And here Communism collapsed, and along with it this simple way of explaining the world. There remained a vacuum. And don’t you have the impression that into that gap is now entering a coarse and primitive nationalism? That those people who explained the world to themselves by using Communist categories are now doing it by using nationalist categories? havel: We know from physics that nature cannot stand a vacuum, cannot stand the negative pressure created by a vacuum, and tries to eliminate it. In this case the same thing is happening. One of the major ones among those simple primitive ideologies that are pushing themselves into this vacuum is nationalism. But it’s not the only one, because there are other simple ways of explaining the world that are also forcing themselves in. In spite of this, I think the world now faces a huge opportunity that is offered by this vacuum. It has an opportunity to understand that the era of ideology is ending. In a small book that I recently wrote I say that at least in some regions of the world there are good odds that the era of ideology is over and that an era of ideas will begin. That means an era of open society, an era of awareness of global relationships and global responsibilities. At the same time it would be an era of nondoctrinal ways of thinking in which, in my opinion, not everything would have to fit together.

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In the entire modern epoch, there has been a characteristic tendency that one thing should not contradict another thing, that one has to have a closed, full image of the world. The concept of a worldview became dominant. For me this is extremely controversial, and in fact I don’t know what it means. Is the world so simple that one can have only one view of it? I have thousands of views, which are parallel and relate to different matters, I have thousands of different opinions. I think that after the modern epoch with its rational constructs, created since the time of Descartes, a new epoch is opening up now—Václav Beˇlohradský calls it the postmodernist epoch—an epoch of nondoctrinal pluralistic thinking. In general I think that human nature is more favorably disposed to the possibility of considering every matter in a different way than to using just one way of thinking. At the same time such pluralistic thinking is the best possible way to prevent conflict. Regardless of the kind of conflict— whether related to ideology, class, or ethics—there always has to be underlying this that integrated view of the world. Of course, the other side has a different view of the world, and this becomes a cause of conflict. But returning to that vacuum, it is not only a disaster but at the same time an opportunity and a challenge. michnik: Is the era of ideology really ending? Isn’t that just wishful thinking, the yearning of humanists and intellectuals? After all, we can see in all post-Communist countries a return to nationalism, a return to the utopia of an ethnically pure nation-state, the return to a pure nation without aliens or strangers. The phenomenon that fascinates me is the phenomenon of the doctrine of the nation and state but also of the xenophobic mentality, the aversion to Gypsies and Jews, et cetera.

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In Germany this is articulated in an even more radical way. Let me illustrate this with a joke I heard there. Two Germans meet, one from the East, Ossie, and one from the West, Wessie. Ossie says, “Hello! We are one nation!” And Wessie replies: “So are we.” Tell me, how would you define nationalism —as ideology, as a way of perceiving the world? havel: That’s a complicated question. But when we read the history of the closing millennium, we notice that it’s defined by a continuous series of tribal or ethnic conflicts in which the matter of somebody’s otherness plays the major role. That means that the question of national belonging runs deep, much more deeply than class belonging. The majority of wars in modern history were national wars. To appeal to national matters will always reverberate because this is the simplest criterion of self-identification—after just one word one can recognize whether you are Czech, Polish, or Hungarian. People are always searching for something they can identify with, some common badge. The simplest is national belonging: to be Czech you don’t need anything, you don’t need to be wise or good; it’s enough to be born here. This is perhaps the main reason why despite all those experiences these national appeals always find a response. If they referred to Marxists, phenomenologists, or existentialists, it would not have an impact, because the majority of people wouldn’t know how to identify themselves, but everybody knows his nationality. This is the simplest, and therefore very dangerous. Communism had a strong tendency to homogenize, to make everything the same, from Vladivostok to Berlin: the structure of state administration, décor in the shops, the look of the apartment complexes, et cetera. This meant that it tried, often in a very cruel way, to erase all

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differences between societies and nationalities. So how could one expect that after such pressures the vacuum which was created would not immediately be filled precisely by nationalism? I think a lot of time must pass before civil society will respect all the dimensions of our “self,” will appreciate the matter of national belonging but not encourage a sense of superiority, and will not turn it into an ideology or the organizing principle of the state. michnik: And xenophobia? Where does that come from? Why today in Czechoslovakia, where there is no “Jewish problem,” in the journal Politika, suddenly appears anti-Semitism, why suddenly a hostility toward Gypsies? After all, this is not a specificity of Czechoslovakia, because this is taking place in every post-Communist country. In Germany it’s carried to the absurd in that Nazi symbols are turning up that we haven’t seen till now. havel: I think that this xenophobia in post-Communist countries has at least two causes. One of them is that for forty years we didn’t live in an open society. When one walks in London, Paris, or New York, one meets people of different races, speaking different languages, and everybody’s used to it. Even there you sometimes get conflicts, for example with the Turks in Germany or Arabs in France, but generally people got used to the fact that the world has become quite cosmopolitan, that one can move within it and change one’s residence. We, on the other hand, lived in a kind of isolated ghetto, and for our society it is a surprise when one suddenly meets a group of people who in some respects are different, who, for example, speak a different language. The second cause, connected with the first, is that people want to find out who’s guilty. There is a state of shock caused by freedom, they

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have lost all guarantees and have lost a hierarchy of values. This is a state I have often compared to the release from prison. When you are there you are looking forward to the moment when they let you out, but when it happens, you suddenly become helpless. You don’t know what to do, and even have an urge to go back, because you know what awaits you there, but you don’t know what awaits you in freedom. It’s the same with a society that is frustrated because it can’t deal with its own freedom, and that’s why it looks for an enemy whom one can blame for everything. Of course the one most readily turned into an enemy is the one who speaks a different language or has a different skin color. That’s why they say that everything is the fault of the Vietnamese or the Gypsies or some other “they.” For there is in people a need to attribute all the misfortunes of the world and their own frustrations to something outside of themselves, to some kind of enemy, and in this way to somehow escape the hell that is within themselves. It’s easier after all to point to somebody else and say this is the devil than to acknowledge one’s own weaknesses. žantovsky´ : Despite what Mr. President has just said, I believe that Czech society in comparison with others is not so clearly xenophobic. After the revolution there was no wave of anti-Sovietism. Despite discussions on the history of our relations with the Germans and issues related to the German/Czechoslovak treaties, there hasn’t been any anti-German wave. The attacks on Gypsies are limited to small groups of young people who describe themselves as skinheads and do not have a wider social base. International surveys of public opinion that include all the postCommunist countries indicate that Czech society is to a great degree open. Admittedly, that doesn’t mean there is no intolerance or xenophobia among us, but in comparison with other

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countries these phenomena are not on a mass scale. Of course we denounce any such occurrence because regardless of its scale it is very dangerous. michnik: I’m glad to see that just as in Poland, here too the president’s own collaborators argue with him! At least in this domain we are in analogous situations. I have to say, though, that the president’s way of thinking is closer to my own. Because the problem is not in the quantity but in the dynamics of the existing threats. Xenophobia usually refers to the relationship with foreigners, but it turns out—just as in the German joke I just cited—that it doesn’t have to be only that. After all, the Germans are one people, but as it turns out, they are not. Looking from that point of view I cannot but look at two matters. The first one is the issue of de-Communization in Czechoslovakia, which in my opinion also performs this function: the attitude toward the Communists is also an articulation of the attitude to “the other,” to people with a different biography and different experience. The second example is the Republican Party in Czechoslovakia. It is no accident that the leader of this party, Mr. Sládek, and the leader of the National Party of Poland, Mr. Giertych, follow the model of Jean-Marie Le Pen.18 I want to say that in any germ there is something that might appear inessential, ridiculous, and marginal, but we are people of our century; we have to remember that Hitler, in the beginning, was a completely grotesque story. It meant even less than your Sládek. What could such a Hitler amount to in conservative Germany—some Austrian citizen and a failed painter? havel: It may well be the case that the abolition of barriers that limited us up to now, that the collapse of the previous hierarchy of values, provokes people like Sládek to propose their own

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simplified values. At the same time this is a proposal of negative self-identification. This Sládek doesn’t propose any positive program. He only wants to sweep into the Vltava River the current government, parliament, and president. Such negative self-identification resonates with certain social groups because it is simple and understandable. All their lives people got used to cursing the Communists, and now they are disoriented because they don’t have anybody to curse. But Sládek says curse those who govern now. He proposes an easy way of life. The current situation creates fertile ground for various kinds of hostility and xenophobia. It’s not limited to national intolerance. In what Sládek says there are of course themes like defending “the purity of the Czech nation,” but there could equally be other cheap models. I am fully aware of their danger. The example of Hitler came to my mind a few times, and once I even stated it publicly, for which Sládek immediately took me to court. Such a situation can be especially dangerous in some parts of the Soviet Union where in many respects it is worse than here. I believe that our social organism will know how to manage this virus. We have some historical traditions along these lines. In the interwar period there were several attempts to overthrow Masaryk—from the left and from the right, but none of them succeeded and now they are just marginal, grotesque episodes. I believe that now, too, this would not spread, but it is dangerous especially because our young, inexperienced democracy hasn’t learned how to deal with it. The police are disoriented and don’t know whether to intervene. They are afraid that they would be seen as a continuation of the Communist police. So they prefer to hold back or remain inactive.

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michnik: You have repeatedly written that in this world the political culture is so shattered that it is essential to return to spiritual values. What is your opinion on the role of religion in the era of post-Communism? Under the Communist dictatorship it was for all of us a source of strength, whether we were religious or not. It was our only recourse to a natural law that we all had to answer to. And how does that look today? havel: I think that religiosity in the post-Communist world— or perhaps I should limit myself to Czechoslovakia—has two dimensions. On the one hand it’s something very important that puts things into perspective, as it directs human attention upward, reminding us of the metaphysical anchoring of our conscience and our responsibility, because it emphasizes brotherly love and unselfishness. To remind and to revive those Christian values is a matter of extraordinary importance. It’s something this demoralized society badly needs. But there is a second dimension that might be stronger in Poland than here—the entry of religion or the church into political life. From faith—something deeply eternal, spiritual, and personal—in this secularized world, a world of profanum, there again arises a doctrine or an ideology. But as I already said, it seems to me that there is an opportunity for the world to turn its back on ideology. How very dangerous is the entry of religion into the world of politics we see—more clearly in Muslim countries than in Christian countries—in the form of fundamentalism. There the state is based seemingly on religious principles, but in fact these are ideological and doctrinal principles. A state that is based on such principles is in its very essence intolerant, because it reduces

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the human being to one dimension of his life, constrains him and manipulates him. I think that a state that is based on religious principles, just as on ideological or nationalistic principles, is always dangerous. michnik: Permit me to ask a question directed to the president of the state. How does the church behave in Czechoslovakia? Doesn’t it, for example, exert pressure for the penalization of abortion? Does it demand that a formula be written into the constitution that the state be based on Christian values? Does it demand that a law be written that would guarantee those values in the educational system? In talks with the president of the republic do the bishops say that since Czechs and Slovaks are Christian nations, then the republic ought to be a Christian state? havel: I haven’t run into anything like that, especially in the Czech lands. In Slovakia, where Catholicism is stronger and the leading political grouping is the Christian Democratic movement— though the church does not demand that the state be based on religious principles or be guaranteed its role in the constitution— one can notice there some evidence of its engagement in political life. The Czech primate, Miloslav Vlk, is for me the embodiment of a dimension of religiosity that we very much need. Spiritual and moral renewal is his program, and I consider it extraordinarily important and beneficial. There are absolutely no efforts in the Czech church to define our country as a Christian or Catholic state. The church desires separation from the state. And wants a guarantee that there will be no meddling in their normal work and also demands the return of some of the properties of the monastic orders from which the monks were expelled in 1948. But neither in the Czech lands nor in Slovakia are there

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any efforts to put the church under state control or to replace the previous leading role of the Communist Party with the leading role of the Church. michnik: And now I ask you as a writer, intellectual, and citizen, how would you respond to a demand that a woman or a doctor be sent to jail for doing an abortion? havel: This is an unusually complicated issue, on which I don’t have a ready-made opinion. Instinctively, inwardly, I consider abortion to be something wrong, probably as most people do. However, how to solve this problem at a time of population explosion, this I’m not in a position to say. Our legislature here is very liberal, and some members of Parliament of a Catholic orientation would like to restrain it. They turned to me on this matter, looking for support, but I was not in a position to give it to them unequivocally. It is such a complicated issue, with so much expert literature and analysis on it, that I am not capable of saying how it ought to be. We do not have the problem of a legislature being too severe vis-à-vis society: it is rather the other way around. michnik: And how would you react—as a citizen, not as president—if priests from the pulpit would say for which party good Christians should vote. havel: From what I have said it is clear that I wouldn’t think this is good. For now, we have only had isolated cases like this in Slovakia. I think that this is not the job of the priests. I can understand that at a time when the system was collapsing, the priests supported the cause of freedom, whether Solidarity in Poland or our own Civic Forum.19 At that time, Miroslav Vlk celebrated in the Cathedral of Saint Wit a mass in support of civic efforts. That was all right, because it was about a general public matter.

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But if today the priests would say which party one ought to vote for, I would consider it a bad thing, and I would consider such a priest a bad priest. vondr a: And I can’t possibly imagine a priest saying which party we should not vote for! michnik: But there are some very interesting borderline cases. Not so long ago in a Slovak journal, Kulturny Život, there was published a religiously provocative short story by a writer named Martin Kasarda. After it was published, our common friend, the ˇ arnogurský, stopped the subsidies Slovak prime minister, Ján C for the journal, and the deputy prime minister of the federal government asked that the prosecutor launch an investigation. I can’t resist seeing certain analogies here. In Poland the bishops issued a pastoral letter about the mass media in which they said which content should be there, and which should not. And in another case—the writer Salman Rushdie was accused of violating a religious sacrum, and as a result a fatwa, a death sentence, was issued against him. Thank God it’s a long way from withdrawing a subsidy to issuing a death penalty. Nevertheless, a somewhat similar logic is being put in motion here. If I’m not mistaken, you spoke about it on the radio. Could you comment on it? havel: I said that on principle literature cannot be taken to court. Literature is always provoking somebody, sometimes more, sometimes less. I realize that literature can offend somebody or offend his religious feelings. I can imagine that some story could irritate or anger or offend me, but I cannot imagine that I would take its authors to court. michnik: When twelve years ago there was a revolution in Iran, it seemed to me then that there was something weird here, some-

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thing incomprehensible: suddenly at the end of the twentieth century a religious state! That’s absurd! But when I look at what is going on today, when I see the growing importance of religious parties in Israel, of Jewish fundamentalism, when I see the growing importance of Muslim fundamentalism in all Muslim countries, and when I see the strengthening of fundamentalist tendencies within Protestantism, for example in America, or Catholicism in the post-Communist countries, then I wonder whether the Iranian revolution was not the first sign of a new phenomenon, and whether André Glucksmann, our mutual friend, is not right. He writes that for today the most crucial thing is the challenge of new fundamentalisms that can take on a nationalist, ideological, or religious character. He says that we are facing a new phenomenon and that from that point of view we are already viewing Communism differently: that Communism is not some epiphenomenon but one of the faces of fundamentalism. What do you think of that? havel: Before I answer that, I have to underscore that the most powerful fundamentalism we are witnessing in the world—Islamic fundamentalism — can be explained by a certain historical delay. Islam was established several years after Christianity and has somehow ended up in the same place today where Christianity was several hundred years ago. In some sense it recalls the Christian Middle Ages. But of course this is not yet an answer to your question. Indeed I believe that the perhaps most serious threat today is that after the collapse of Communism religious or nationalist fundamentalism may come to the fore. But at the same time I think there is a force that acts against them, a force that I hope will succeed. It is the power of the survival instinct of this planet.

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Our planet has begun to be threatened by various factors: through the economic and social abyss between rich and poor countries, through population growth, through ecological threats, et cetera, all of which together creates a state of global threat. But I believe that at least a part of humanity is beginning to be aware that under the pressure of this threat the human spirit will be able to pull itself together, which means, among other things, accepting this individual human point of view and liberating oneself from the captivity of doctrine, ideologies, and fundamentalism. Otherwise this path will turn into a suicidal one. But I believe that the survival instinct will work. Keep in mind that when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, a united international community—along with Arab countries and with the blessings of the United Nations—protested for the first time. This is a new factor, which could be interpreted as a sign of those survival mechanisms. Kuwait itself is a small state with few oil wells. The point is that the invasion could have been a precedent for the spread of this mad fundamentalism, for threatening other countries, and for the genocide of various ethnic groups, starting with the Kurds. It’s probably the case that humanity had already begun to be aware of the scale of those threats, because otherwise Bush and Baker could have been a hundred times more cunning and still not have accomplished anything. I don’t want to see our entering a world of fundamentalism in such dark colors, but would rather regard this fundamentalism as a phenomenon that, though dangerous, is facing forces that are capable of withstanding it. michnik: What in fact are all the quarrels these days between Slovaks and Czechs? What are the lines that divide them?

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havel: This quarrel has two levels. The first is completely understandable and justified. The Slovak nation, after a thousand years of existence, has a different tradition, different experiences; they are simply different from the Czech nation. And because they never had the possibility of self-realization, they are less structured. Something which we have already experienced they haven’t yet. Only now are they going through successive stages of their rebirth. As a smaller and lesser-known nation within Czechoslovakia, they were always in the shadow of the Czech nation. And in spite of this the Czech nation helped the Slovaks get on their feet. This help was understandably regarded as yet another offensive demonstration of Czech predominance, which from a psychological point of view was a perfectly understandable mechanism. Slovak society senses its own integrity and community, they want to be on their own feet, and want to have an equal position to that of their bigger brother who is constantly instructing and stealing the show. All of that is absolutely understandable and justified. On the other hand, it is not so strong or widespread that one could call it a universal phenomenon. It is indeed understandable that there is a certain vigilance and suspicion vis-à-vis the Czechs—whether they aren’t by any chance preparing some trick again to keep the Slovaks in line. The second level is the political, and here it’s a bit worse. Various politicians exploit what I’ve just been describing, and play the national card, because this is easy and it’s easier to mobilize crowds in the squares with it. And it’s just those politicians—some of them in a civilized way, some in a demagogic way—who play the national card on the assumption that an appropriate moment has just presented itself: nations are liberating themselves, new states are being established, so this is the right

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moment for the Slovak nation to mature into its own statehood and to stand on its own feet. This is precisely the cause of the tension that is currently reaching a culmination, and indeed the question arises whether our state, Czechoslovakia, will survive as an integral whole. I still believe that this will happen, yet we will go through more than one dramatic moment. One must nevertheless distinguish from each other those two levels: the game of the politicians, which is reflected in the negotiations conducted by the parliaments of both republics, and the second level, the aspirations of society. Those aspirations are often connected to a certain complex, but above all they are caused by different experiences or different perspectives on the world. I’ll give you a somewhat absurd example, which nevertheless illuminates the situation a bit. Just imagine that there exists a federation of one hundred and twenty million people, of whom forty million are Poles and eighty million are Germans. The Germans are economically and in many other respects in a much better situation, and above all there are twice as many of them. In such a situation most certainly in Poland a mood would be awakened very much like that in today’s Slovakia. In a sense this is the relationship of a smaller brother to a bigger one who constantly leads him by the hand. And nobody would like that, even if being led in the right direction. michnik: And what are the internal divisions? What are the Czechs arguing with Czechs about, and the Slovaks with Slovaks? Poles are arguing today about how to go to a market economy: with Balcerowicz20 or against him; they quarrel about the place of the church in the state; about the system —presidential or parliamentary? About policies vis-à-vis the countryside: should they be “hard,” or, on the contrary, based on subsidies,

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credits, price guarantees, protective tariffs, et cetera; about deCommunization; whether Poland should follow the European political model or whether it ought to take its own specifically Polish path, because Europe also means pornography, abortion, consumerism, drugs, degeneracy, et cetera. What is the main point of contention between the Czechs and Slovaks? havel: There are several. In the spring there will be elections. Only a while ago the political parties were formed, but they are already thinking about the elections, and in a sense in all matters they are thinking about their own interests. The crystallization of the political spectrum overlaps in time with the search for a model of the state and the creation of new constitutions. The subject of the arguments between Czechs and Czechs is, for example, the relationship to the problem of Slovakia. Some politicians would like the state to be as strong as possible, and they don’t want to give in to Slovak pressures, which has its own subtext, because they want to ingratiate themselves with an electorate that likes that. Because in the Czech lands there is more and more talk that Slovaks keep complicating the situation; so it would be better if they left. And some politicians turn up the heat of those sentiments in order to bake their own cake. A similar quarrel is conducted in Slovakia because there are federalists there, confederalists, and advocates of independence. So it’s not as though when it comes to Slovak matters there are only two monolithic blocs facing each other, Czech and Slovak. The second argument concerns economic policy. Currently quite a loud and strong right-wing voice is forming that wants the quickest and most radical reforms—speaking in an oversimplified way: “sharp capitalism.” On the other hand there is some kind of a left that has many factions. All those

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wings are attacking each other: the right calls all liberals cryptoCommunists, and the left is also radicalizing itself and criticizes the reformers altogether. Other subjects of controversy are the problem of eventual autonomy for Moravia and Silesia, and the lustration law that we’ve already mentioned. Finally, there is a certain hidden, rather psychological conflict between what we call dissidents who were in opposition and resisted the Communist regime, and those new, fresh, and younger people who were unknown before and had collaborated neither with the Communists nor with the opposition. Rather in the way O’Neill put it, “We fought so long against small things that we became small ourselves,”21 those younger people believe that the opposition fought the Communists for so long that they got dirty themselves and today their role is finished. Moreover, they criticize dissidents for having been in some cases members of the Communist Party in the fifties or sixties, and they say that all Communists are the same whether from the sixties or the eighties. On the other hand, public opinion identifies rather with those nondissident politicians, for the simple reason that the majority of people were neither dissidents nor part of the Communist nomenklatura. Such politicians are personifications for them of their own situation. Beyond that there are other patchy quarrels but they all have this Party subtext. michnik: The problem of the marginalization of dissidents appears in all our countries. It’s very interesting, and you’ve often written and spoken about it in interviews, that dissidents are sort of like pangs of conscience for people who were conformists and who today cultivate the rhetoric of de-Communization.

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I would like to ask you about something else now. All these more or less velvet revolutions of ours gave birth to charismatic leaders, and you were also such a leader. It is no accident that in Georgia a democratically elected president wanted very much to be called the Georgian Havel. This charismatic Georgian leader, also a former dissident, soon began to put his opponents in prison. In other words, we should assume that each of us faces the authoritarian temptation to tighten power, because democracy interferes, because it’s ineffective, because everything goes too slowly, when things have to be decisive and quick. In Georgia it ends up with barricades, and in fact with a kind of civil war that has not ended yet. What do you think about this authoritarian threat in the period of post-Communism, when democracy is young and has weak structures? And how did you feel when you heard that Mr. Zviad Konstantinovitch Gamsakhurdia was called the Georgian Havel? vondr a: Adam, I don’t think you know the following story. When Václav in February 1990 was in the Soviet Union, already as president, and gave a dinner party in our embassy, he invited [Russian] dissidents, because at that time those people were still dissidents. Gamsakhurdia also got an invitation, even though he was then under house arrest, but they let him out for this reception. It was a kind of Saint George’s Day gift from Václav that he got him out of prison. And in fact it was from that time that Gamsakhurdia began his presidential campaign. havel: I don’t think I’m in such danger that I would cling to power so strongly as to incarcerate my friends. Quite to the contrary—I am constantly being criticized by people I meet in pubs or on the street or wherever that I’m too soft. They tell me: “You have to

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be tough on them.” Saying “them,” they have in mind everybody: Communists, de-Communizers, Slovaks, Czechs, politicians, Parliament. So I have rather the opposite problem, that I am not authoritarian enough. Nevertheless I think, in general, that in emerging, fragile democracies, it is precisely in order to preclude the threat of the kind of authoritarian force that could appear in a populist program of rule by an iron hand—that one must quickly strengthen democratic institutions, mechanisms, and the rules of the game. Democracy has to earn its authority quickly. If it does not earn it quickly, it will be earned by an authoritarian leader like Sládek. Authority must be achieved not by Havel as Havel but by the president, the government, and the Parliament. There has to be built up a mechanism for their mutual connections. There has to be a system of constitutional safeguards that protects us from constant political crisis. In our case all of that is related to the making of a new constitutional system and new constitutions. I must say that I am an advocate of strengthening the authority of the president. I’m not talking about a presidential system in which the president is elected directly and heads the executive power, but I declare myself in favor of bringing back some of the powers that the president of democratic Czechoslovakia had in the past. I have in mind, for example, the right to send back parliamentary bills to the Federal Assembly or—in case the government is not given a vote of confidence—the right to dissolve Parliament and to call for early elections. So I am for strengthening the competency of the president, though not because I want to strengthen my own power, but in order to strengthen the authority of the head of state, because this is the most effective weapon against those who come in with the idea of rule by an iron hand.

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michnik: You have often said that as president you realized what an important role is played by the personal characteristics of politicians. Could you expand upon this thought? What characteristics did you have in mind? And from that point of view what has made the biggest impression on you? havel: It’s probably not appropriate for me to talk about specific heads of state, but rather about my own observations. I have realized that when some politician is to my liking or I am to his, and when we find that we maintain a common tone, we’re on the same page, in the same key, or on the same wavelength on which we can communicate, then this is soon reflected in good relations with the country this politician represents. I think that Saša [Vondra], who is present at all my international conversations, could confirm that. Indeed, I was very surprised when I realized how hugely significant is the personal rapport between leading politicians, and how very much this is reflected in political life. It’s almost a bit scary, and one begins to feel afraid of the responsibility. Because one can easily imagine the following situation— of course this is only a metaphor—that at 7 o’clock, let’s say, the foreign minister of Iceland is coming, and I am tired, sleepy, or don’t feel well. Of course the conversation will not gel. And then we are obliged to perform at a press conference and answer questions, but of course we will not have much to say. The journalists then begin to write that the meeting took place in a cool atmosphere, that the visit brought disappointment, and in the end this can evolve into some kind of political fact that the relationship between Czechoslovakia and Iceland has cooled down. Of course this is an invented example, but you understand through it what I’m saying.

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michnik: Our own democracy is having a very difficult birth, more difficult than we had expected. Almost everywhere we have a Balkanized political scene. We have ethnic conflicts. On top of that we have something I would call a childhood disease—faith in utopian capitalism. A belief that the market will take care of everything. Just as we once believed that the planned economy will take care of everything, today there is a popular belief that it’s enough to get the market in motion and that it alone will take care of everything. In your opinion how does this look in Czechoslovakia? havel: I personally do not belong to those who think that the market mechanism is a magical key that will solve everything, nor do I think that the free market is a worldview or the meaning of life. I differ in this respect from some right-wing commentators and politicians, and I argue with them about it. The fact that everything should be privately owned and that there is a law of supply and demand is for me obvious. But I don’t treat it as ideology, as the meaning of life, or as a utopia, but rather as something that has been tested for centuries, resonates with human nature, and functions in a natural way. A human being doesn’t have to be a scientist to know that if he calls a private electrician he will do his job better than an anonymous employee of a state enterprise. This is evident because the former is personally interested in the effect of his work, since this is reflected in the payment he receives for his service. From this point of view, I am an adherent of the speediest possible renewal of natural property relations, pluralism, and competition between enterprises. I treat market mechanisms as something obvious; they are tested economic principle, but nothing else. This is not a religion.

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michnik: In our public life great success is enjoyed by populist language. The language of empty promises. A situation has developed in which political struggle is based more and more on the populist promise of mountains of gold. “If you vote for me I will arrange everything for you.” To what extent is this strong in Czechoslovakia today and where does it come from? havel: It most probably comes from the immaturity and adolescence of our political culture. Obviously, when one has to defend oneself and one’s own program in the course of fifteen years of repeated elections, one cannot limit oneself to demagogic platitudes. There has to be some accomplishment behind it. He has to prove that he knows something. Therefore in countries that have a continuously growing democratic tradition, demagoguery alone is not enough. While in the situation of an emerging democracy, there is an open field for various populists who take advantage of the chaos and propose shoddy programs. On the other hand, I have to mention something that troubles me a lot. As a writer, I think of myself as a creative person. That means that I don’t like to repeat myself or simplify things. However, my role forces me to repeat what I have already said millions of times. It forces me to use simplified appeals. For when I am to give a speech, I realize that I cannot use kilometerlong sentences, with complicated syntax, but must use simple sentences and to end with some understandable appeal. I often catch myself on this, that I will think up some original sentence, and then when I’m paraphrasing it after myself for the third time I become aware of its banality. I who have been sensitive to this my entire life, and criticize a life made up of platitudes, and I who have worked with language, I now sense willy-nilly the professional temptation of platitudes. My collaborators can testify to

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how I try to defend myself from public speeches. I don’t want to write them anymore because I know that I would repeat in some variant what I have already said before, thus coming even closer to platitudes. But at the same time I can’t stand reading what they write for me, because I have my own style. Although they are also capable of writing well, theirs is already a different style. Hence when they write something for me, I am so embarrassed I blush. In effect I am trying to write it myself, but on the other hand, I feel repelled by it. You have no idea what revulsion I felt yesterday when writing today’s speech. Perhaps when I speak without a text I am sometimes able to smuggle in something more or less original. But when I’m trying to put pen to paper, I actually feel a physiological pain. žantovsky´ : I understand you well, because yesterday I wanted to propose that I write it myself, but when I realized that I would write it at night in pain and that you will then be reading it in pain, I decided that one pain is better than two. michnik: Czechoslovakia is the only country to which émigrés are coming back and being put to use. Karl Schwarzenberg is the head of your chancellery. . . . Pavel Tigrid, the Czech Giedroyc´,22 is your adviser. Jirˇí Gruša, your ambassador in Bonn. How do you explain it? It’s widely known that the diaspora played a very important role in the recent history of our countries. Without the diaspora, it would be hard to imagine a democratic opposition. Why in every other country are political émigrés giving a lot of good advice but not returning? žantovsky´ : And Tymin´ski?23 michnik: Why must you use pornographic language!24 havel: Certainly the return of émigrés is not a massive phenomenon in Czechoslovakia; the majority of them stay where they

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are because they have arranged their lives there for twenty or forty years. They have children there, and their return would mean another uprooting. When I walk through the courtyard of the palace to the Vikárka Restaurant, always on my way someone catches me—at least one hundred such older ladies who say they’ve come from Australia or Canada and they thank me that they can come here. Only now does one see how many people had not been able till now to come here. And those are, after all, most loyal citizens, and it’s too bad they don’t live here. There are not so many who have returned, though of course there are more of them than just Schwarzenberg and Tigrid. They are mainly intellectuals who are treating the return as a challenge, who enjoy witnessing the birth of this democracy. Some come back who were terribly sad there, and those who want to pursue private entrepreneurship. michnik: Tell me, what’s happened with us dissidents during these two years? Everything has changed in our lives. You went from being a criminal to being president. And I could go on and on extending this list. How do you see yourself ? What in you has changed? As president and as a writer, surely you often face the choice: whether to be loyal to your sense of responsibility for the welfare of the state and the national interest, or whether to be loyal to the truth. How do you deal with this conflict? havel: That is not an easy question; it demands some introspection. Above all, I ought to say that no serious man, and I consider myself one, is capable of explaining himself in terms of some simple formula. Every one of us is marked by completely contradictory traits and features. For example, I am a man who has a strong sense of the absurd. I have a tendency to be amazed by everything. And sometimes

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I have moments when I don’t believe that I am president, even though I’ve been so for almost two years. In the morning I’ll be standing in the bathroom, still sleepy, brushing my teeth, and in a rush, and I wonder, why am I actually rushing? I answer myself that I have to go to the president’s chancellery to receive some prime minister, and suddenly I don’t believe it. It seems to me absurd and unreal. On the other hand, though—and here is the paradox—life has taught me not to be too surprised by anything. It taught me to swim even through the most absurd and unexpected situations which I didn’t just think up and yet they happened to me and I am attracting them although I don’t know why. This often happens to writers, that in some way their own world develops around them. Bohumil Hrabal25 is the creator of Hrabal’s world that we know from his books. But he is literally the creator of this world. He is capable of creating a Hrabalist world not only in the pub U Kocoura but also in New York’s Kennedy Airport. The world in his presence somehow structures itself and bends, adjusting to Hrabal’s outlines. Similarly, as a man who loves peace, comfort, and harmony, and would like most of all to live his life in the same way, I bend the space around me in a way, I don’t know how, provoking again and again new and unexpected situations. The fact that I was in prison several times is just as absurd as my now being president. And I don’t know yet what absurdity awaits me in the future when they remove me from this position. Or when, for example, they call upon me again or lock me up again. Everything is possible. But it’s not that I chose such a lot, or that I’m an adventurer, because I’m absolutely not that—I’m rather a quiet petit bourgeois. So those are two contradictory things. On the one hand everything amazes me. On the other hand, I know that anything is possible 76

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in my life. The lot of every man is a collection of such contradictions in terms, and we are constantly amazed by ourselves. Suddenly, for example, in old age we realize that we are jealous and cannot comprehend that and it’s difficult for us to comprehend it. žantovsky´ : For us, too! Vašek jealous?! havel: That was only a literary example. That was about me. And now, the second, much more serious matter that you touched upon—the conflict between loyalty and truth. Indeed, there is sometimes a problem with that. But again, as a writer, as a creative being, I have some predisposition—and my collaborators help me with this—toward finding some formula in order not to be unfaithful to myself, not to betray some truth of which I’m convinced, but at the same time, not to cause—if possible— unnecessary political complications, not to destabilize the political scene, and remain loyal with respect to democratic rule. To some extent it’s a matter of taste, intuition, form, fantasy—much more than any education in political science. michnik: But has it happened to you that as president you sign some kind of law knowing that you shouldn’t be doing it but at the same time not being able not to do it? havel: I just went through something just like that and I even wrote it up immediately. I gave a talk on it at a university in New York when I received an honorary degree.26 Our constitutional system obliges me to sign laws. I simply have to sign them, and would I not, it would still go into effect, except that I would cause tension between the president and Parliament and I would complicate the situation. I went through an experience involving precisely the lustration law, and got out of it by signing the law but at the same time proposing an amendment. 77

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Parliament is obliged to work on my initiative—that is, to consider the amendment—but in order for that to happen, the law must first go into effect. On this matter my friends were divided into two camps: those who said I should not have signed, which would have been a demonstrative gesture but without practical meaning, and the others, that I should have signed, and then proposed an amendment, which would be more constructive. In the end I chose the second path. Time will show whether I chose the right one. Of course such situations occur and I try immediately to reflect upon them. I simply do what I’ve done all my life: when I found myself in some kind of jam, the easiest way for me to get out of it was to immediately write about it. It’s a kind of literary way of solving life’s problems. michnik: You are not only president, but indeed also a writer, playwright, essayist, and author of the only book till now that tries to offer an intellectual synthesis of what’s happened over the last two years. But I would like to ask you, as a reader, “What text in the last two years made the biggest impression on you?” žantovsky´ : Do you think he has time to read? This is an absurd question. michnik: Well after all, he writes about the absurd! havel: Indeed, 95 percent of what I read are official documents and newspapers, only rarely do I manage to read some interesting essay, and as for novels, I have no time at all. The last book I read was a remembrance of Jan Masaryk, our minister of foreign affairs who died after the war under mysterious circumstances— written by his friend Marcia Davenport. This is not an especially essayistic or belletristic work, but when I read the book I realized suddenly how well off I am. I worry from morning till evening, get furious, fall into depres-

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sion, and want to quit the whole thing, because there is still so much chaos around me, the state is falling apart, and so on. And here suddenly I read about this horrific moral dilemma faced by Jan Masaryk when Communism came to power. Masaryk was bound by the vow given to his father that he will never leave Beneš—successor after Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk—and here in the meantime Communism was cunningly creeping in from all sides.27 It was clear that it would win and would destroy all opponents. Beneš—an old, ill, sclerotic man—had clearly given up and signed everything the Communists asked him to. And Jan Masaryk felt on the one hand a deep physiological fear, on the other a responsibility to the vow he had made to his father, and at the same time complete hopelessness about the situation. On top of that there was constant humiliation coming from Stalin, Molotov, Zorin,28 and people of the Gottwald29 variety. When he arrived in Washington on an official visit with Secretary of State Marshall, it turned out that nobody had time for him. Neither Marshall nor Truman received him, even though Masaryk was known in the Anglo-Saxon world: his mother was American, he had lived there for ten years. And he knew not only English perfectly but also many dialects. And here those friends now had no time for him. And all of that is taking place one month before the February putsch by the Communists, when key decisions about the future of Europe were being made.30 What’s more, it was happening to a politician of Anglo-American orientation, very popular in that world. What this man, who wasn’t the most courageous, went through, at the very beginning of the Cold War, made a huge impression on me. Suddenly playing a political role myself, I understood that for a person in such a terrible predicament the only

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exit is to jump from a window. And then I thought to myself that compared with Jan Masaryk, I’m not yet so badly off. michnik: Yesterday Jirˇí Dienstbier showed me the window from which Masaryk jumped. I think the coincidence of your telling me that story and my having seen that window just yesterday is evidence that the metaphysical exists. We’ve known each other for thirteen years, and today, after all those years, when people ask me what kind of political orientation I represent, I answer, “Havlovski.” Havelian. And for that I would like to thank you. I have talked today with a friend and a president. Let me finish this conversation by saying Thank you, Vašek! Thank you, Mr. President.

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A Completed Revolution and Belated Avengers Prague, October 1995

In this conversation, Adam Michnik was joined by Andrzej Jagodzin´ski, a correspondent for Gazeta Wyborcza in Prague.

michnik: When I visited you six years ago in Hra´decˇek, already having a diplomatic passport as a member of the Polish parliament, your small house was surrounded by a thick circle of agents of the secret police, who were taking our pictures. I told you then that Communism in Czechoslovakia is over, because Prague is a city which doesn’t fit in with Communism —and that you will soon be president. You laughed and treated it as a joke. Today, six years later, in both of our countries, one hears the same thing: “The Revolution has not been completed.” Tell me, Vašek, why didn’t you finish the revolution? havel: I wouldn’t dare to say that this accusation is correct. But I do know it’s a very widespread view. So we have to try to find out what the reasons for it are. In my opinion, with the collapse of Communism the structure of habits, values, and ways of life also collapsed. Entire generations had become accustomed to Communism and knew how to move within it. They knew it, and though they hated

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it, they also had some sense of security at the same time—just as in prison, which nobody likes, but once one is free, one loses one’s sense of orientation. Something similar surely happened after the collapse of Communism, when people had to organize their lives anew. The majority of people unconsciously counted on it that after the revolution suddenly everything would become beautiful, people would be nice, they would stop stealing and cheating. . . . But of course the world did not become more beautiful overnight, and people have lost their previous sense of confidence. They remember the hopes they had during the time of revolution, and they compare it with the circumstances they see around them now. This juxtaposition convinces many that the revolution has not been completed. If my reasoning is correct, then this constitutes an argument that the revolution was in fact completed. Because this new kind of security can be provided only by some new authoritarian leader, which after all was hardly the goal of our revolution. michnik: But don’t you think that a completed revolution is in essence a betrayed revolution? Because a completed revolution turns into its opposite. After all, we fought not for power but for freedom, and for Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks to be able to choose their own authorities. And in this sense the revolution is completed because people can choose their own authorities. Those who wanted President Havel got President Havel. Those who wanted Prime Minister Mecˇiar got Mecˇiar.1 Those who wanted President Wałe˛sa got Wałe˛sa. Those who wanted Prime Minister Oleksy got Oleksy . . .2 We cannot complete the revolution, because then we stop being people of freedom and become Jacobins or Bolsheviks. In that case, we take freedom away, and we say: “This power

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is good.” We are not saying: “You must choose. If you choose badly you’ll have a bad government, but the choice is yours.” Don’t you think that the call to finish the revolution is in essence antidemocratic? havel: Indeed I do think that’s how it is. Because when people say that those in power are bad, and accuse them of different things, they forget that they elected them themselves. And that’s further evidence that in our societies there is a lack of a deeply rooted awareness of what democracy is. We believe that once a bad government is overthrown, the next one will automatically be good. But those who come to power will only be of a kind that the society is capable of generating. Once the continuity of democratic culture is interrupted, it may take quite a bit of time before new, real political personalities of merit are developed. michnik: Looking at history, I would say that the only revolutions we can identify with are the unfinished revolutions, for example, the American Revolution. Because a finished revolution means revolutionary terror. havel: That’s true. What’s fascinating about the American Revolution is not that some people won over others but rather that principles won. andrzej jagodzin´ ski: In many countries of our region the postCommunist parties are winning in democratic elections. In Lithuania, Poland, in Hungary, Bulgaria. Why is this happening?3 havel: There are probably several reasons. First of all, the Communists were the only ones who had had any practice in governing, and had a bureaucratic apparatus, structures, discipline, and so on. Naturally, all of that is very useful even under the conditions of democracy. Furthermore, their victory may be the sign of a natural pendulum movement that we observe in the Western

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democracies, where sometimes more right-wing politicians are in power, and at other times more left-wing. And finally, something I’ve already mentioned: a sense of tiredness and the lack of skills in maneuvering under new conditions, which breeds frustration. All in all I wouldn’t overrate this phenomenon and I would not talk about a return of Communism, because what’s happened is irreversible. Rather, I’m inclined to treat it as a certain expression of stabilization, which can help in crystallizing the political scene. Because when people realize that there is no miracle medicine and that beautiful promises cannot be fulfilled, the results of the next elections may be very different. michnik: And why is it any different in the Czech Republic? havel: To a great degree we owe it to Brezhnev, because after the military invasion in 1968, all people of the Horn or Kwas´niewski variety were thrown out.4 Those who were left in the government were only the most limited, conservative, and compromised people, who would never be able to transform the Communist Party into some kind of social democratic party. Whereas those who had tried to implement some kind of reforms before 1968 ended up later in boiler rooms or as street cleaners, and lost any influence on politics. But had our [Communist] Party not been castrated in that way, it’s not precluded that after a while—just as in Poland or Hungary—it could have become an important player on the political stage. michnik: In Poland there is a controversy over how to interpret the over-two-year-long rule of the current coalition.5 According to one hypothesis, this is re-Communization: a Polish People’s Republic encore. And the second hypothesis, which I support, says that it is a Velvet Restoration. That doesn’t mean that this

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is a return to the old regime but rather the return of the people of that regime, which in a new way continues the mechanism put in motion by the revolution. In England after Cromwell, a restoration came, but the old order from before Cromwell did not return. Similarly in France after Napoleon. What in your opinion are the consequences of such a Velvet Restoration? havel: What you call a Velvet Restoration does not appear in the Czech Republic in the political sphere, but some of its symptoms can be seen in the economic sphere. The old managerial apparatchiks of various state enterprises are today the biggest private entrepreneurs and capitalists, who have cleverly changed their colors. But I think that after such a huge change in property relations, this is perhaps a necessary phase. One could compare it with the time when convicts were shipped [from England] to Australia, where they built an economy. They were still criminals, but not their descendants. A market economy cannot be established overnight, because it’s not just a matter of legislation. It’s not enough to distribute the factories to private owners. In our countries the traditional bourgeoisie was eradicated. Not long ago I had a meeting with the biggest private entrepreneurs in our country, who asked me: “Are we bourgeois?” I answered that I didn’t know. As you know, Adam, I am from a bourgeois family, and I know that “bourgeois” doesn’t just mean that someone is rich. It also means a certain ethos, style, a way of behavior, some kind of creative approach to the world, a participation in public matters. Finally there is the pride in being a man of honor and having clean hands. Communism broke down structures that had existed before, and after its collapse new ones are only now being born. There are no entrepreneurs with traditions yet who would

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continue the work of their forbears; there are only people who have managed to gain some wealth. They often did it thanks to their talents, but equally often thanks to their dishonest tricks. People of the old Communist economic apparatus over the years accumulated so many contacts that it was much easier for them to enter into privatization in comparison with those who had had no prior experience. They had know-how, they knew the markets, they also had money; no wonder they were winning out. So that was some kind of Velvet Restoration. In addition one can notice signs of a fusion of those people with people from the circles of the right-wing government. Some radicals harshly criticize Klaus’s cabinet for this.6 But it seems to me that this phenomenon would have had to emerge one way or another. michnik: Today in many countries, including the Czech Republic but also in Poland and Russia, the most radical attacks come from so-called Communist reformers who in the past were often repressed and marginalized for their criticism of the Communist Party. In Prague—I’m talking about the people of 1968 —that year was a very complicated phenomenon and was created by various people. Among them were apparatchiks, but also people like Jan Patocˇka and you.7 Why is this entire formation so brutally attacked today? havel: I think that in some sense this is a generational issue. The generation of those in their thirties, forties, and to some extent also fifties grew up in the time of so-called normalization. They had to learn to live under those conditions. At the same time they had a bit of an ingrained aversion to people who had tried in some way to reform Communism. Very often the loudest accusers of the reformers of 1968 are those who were in the Communist Party during that period of “normalization.”8 Today,

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of course, they are in different parties. On the other hand the people of 1968 are often more sharply attacked than those who came after them . . . michnik: Indra, Bil’ak, Švestka, Kolder, and Jakeš . . .9 havel: Exactly. Surely there is a bit of fear in it of a return to Communism and of those reformers trying to bring it in again through the back door. Because they had been repressed, they gained for themselves a certain credibility. And perhaps part of society is afraid they may use it in the new political situation. Nobody treats seriously Šteˇpán or any other former Communist leader,10 but they do treat the reformers seriously. I must say that those concerns are not completely groundless, because some 1968 people were not able to shed certain patterns of thinking and indeed give the impression of having never learned anything. All in all these attacks are symptoms, often grotesque, of the immaturity of our political life. michnik: In The Cowards, by Josef Škvorecký,11 there is a precise description of how people with a dirty conscience, when nothing threatens them anymore, become the most uncompromising revolutionaries. That applies to all the post-Communist countries . . . havel: It seems to me that this is stronger here than in Poland, if only because Poles repeatedly fought for their freedom, whereas in our modern history often appear the belated avengers who are overcompensating for their own humiliation and collaboration. And during the war they meekly bowed their heads and were mostly afraid of getting in touch by chance with some member of the resistance movement, on whom they would then have to inform. After the war it was precisely they and not the partisans who were hanging the Germans on lampposts. One can observe

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something similar today when among political writers there appear a group of avengers who constantly want to de-Communize and lustrate. But nothing is known as to whether they did anything against Communism during its reign. michnik: I remember your essay about František Kriegel.12 I read it at least three times and believe it is one of your most beautiful pieces. Tell me, how would you feel if Kriegel were still alive and someone wanted to lustrate or de-Communize him? What would you say then? havel: Kriegel is indeed no longer with us, but the problem you’re talking about does exist. The Czech parliament passed a bill about one-time restitution compensation for former members of the resistance movement that I didn’t sign and sent back for further review. The condition for receiving the money was to submit to lustration and to write by hand a statement that the combatant had been faithful to democracy all his life. Then this statement was to be evaluated by a clerk in the Ministry of Labor who had the right to decide whether this was true or not. That means that the right to judge an entire human life was put into the hands of the executive branch. And I know, for example, a general, a famous pilot in the Second World War, who in the 1950s was imprisoned, and when in 1960 they let him free because of an amnesty, he signed a form as the majority of people did who didn’t want to die in prison. Of course afterward he was never an agent, but according to this bill he could not receive compensation, and it is for me simply absurd that some eighty-year-old veteran would have to run from office to office to get a certificate of lustration and with shaking hand write that all his life he’d been faithful to

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democracy. So though Kriegel is not alive, the problem still exists. It is absurd that the real criminals are escaping punishment and still doing wrong, while those people who suffered all their life are finding themselves caught up in a net because of some utter nonsense . . . because fifty years ago they were in the Party or even had some kind of function there. And at the same time these laws are thought up by people who were in the same Party only six years ago. Unfortunately, I am convinced that if Kriegel were alive, part of the press would subject him to very sharp and brutal critiques. They would say, for example: “It’s OK that he was in 1968 imprisoned in Moscow along with the state leadership, that he refused to sign the protocols which in fact legalized Soviet intervention, but what did he do in February of 1948? After all, he was a chief of the People’s Militia!” So maybe it’s just as well that he isn’t still alive. michnik: But don’t you think this is a way of attacking the whole liberal-democratic spectrum? And that this Communism is only a pretext, which it’s not about who those people were before, but who they are today? It’s more convenient to attack someone who once had a Party card than to attack Václav Havel. havel: I think they are something like a lightning rod or scapegoat, while one can see it more clearly in the example of distaste for dissidents that exists here. michnik: But not toward those who went in the direction of political extremism. havel: The dissident milieu was very differentiated. There were people there of different professions and different orientations. But the dislike that I’m talking about concerns the “dissident spirit.”

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And that’s logical, because society sees them as pangs of conscience. After all, 99 percent of the people obediently voted for the Communists. People don’t like it when somebody even indirectly reminds them of that. It was the same in Germany or Austria after the war. Initially the situation brought to the top those who’d been in concentration camps or in exile, but those were quickly washed away by a wave because society could not take it and preferred to associate themselves with people whose life trajectories were like their own. It took another five or six years to return again to politics. At some point Brandt13 was accused that during the war he was an émigré and didn’t share the life of the German nation. michnik: According to what principles did those former dissidents divide themselves? havel: Some returned to their normal professions, because they believed their part in the protest movement had been only a temporary substitute. So when appropriate conditions arose, they stepped aside for those who had political ambitions. Others in different ways take part in politics and try to bring to today’s pragmatic situation something from that spirit of freedom and tolerance that was characteristic of the dissident community. They do not enjoy great popularity for the reasons I just explained. There are also some who joined one of the larger parties because they wanted to do something in their field, and that would only be possible in the party that wins the elections. And there are others who under the influence of freedom went mad; those in whom various morbid ambitions were awakened; in others still, something got radicalized that had earlier been dormant, because the dissident required solidarity. Some are bitter, they live in the past, and expect greater recognition.

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michnik: Our revolution was a revolution without a utopia. We didn’t have such a project that the new world would be perfect and free of conflict. On the contrary, we knew that it would be normal, saturated with conflicts. I remember our conversations on the border both in 1978 and in 1988.14 Even then we had no illusions like those of the Jacobins or Bolsheviks. But we were convinced that in this normal world we would find a reasonably simple road toward the democratic structures of Europe. Now it turns out that this road is not simple at all. We are aspiring to the European Union and NATO, but we are having trouble with it. Why? havel: The West was not prepared at all for the collapse of Communism. It fought with it for decades and got so used to it that it didn’t occur to it that this Communism might collapse. For forty years there evolved in the West huge bureaucratic structures with a tendency toward stereotypical thinking and cautious practices. Today there are no politicians as courageous and magnanimous as Adenauer, de Gaulle, and Gasperi after the war.15 The world itself has also changed. Contemporary politicians are much more constrained. Clinton has to take into account the media to an amazing degree, while Truman did not have that problem because there was no television yet and he didn’t have to smile all the time. In short, Western politicians are not prepared to make quick decisions. They are walking in place, treading water, which brings harm to themselves but also to the European and world order. It’s not that they don’t want us in Europe because in postCommunist countries there are unstable conditions, nationalists, populists, and so on. Quite to the contrary: the longer the west postpones a decision, the more it helps to produce those

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nationalists, populists, and extremists—because those always fill the vacuum. They may then say: “You see, this evil West doesn’t want you anyway.” They can then propose their own miracle medicine and win the elections. That’s why on various occasions I try to appeal to the West that a victory in some battle is at the same time an obligation. That it’s not as many Americans think: since we defeated the Empire of Evil, we do not have to worry about anybody today, only about ourselves. And yet, since the old order is in ruins, we have to build a new one together. However, the West still cultivates such thinking as was required in the bipolar world. When they admitted Portugal to NATO, nobody worried that there was Salazar and a dictatorship. Simply in that bipolar world this was a strategically important country and that was what mattered. But now they worry whether Poland or the Czech Republic is democratic enough. michnik: As you know, I’m the editor of a newspaper that got very engaged in Central European collaboration. But I sometimes think that making a joint supplement with three dailies from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary is against common sense, because nobody really wants this collaboration except the presidents. havel: I belong to those who believe that we should not be like exotic countries for each other, because historically and spiritually speaking, this is a shared space. In addition, in the past there were significant tensions and conflicts here. Today we have a historic opportunity to create a space for cooperation and to use our shared experiences. Including the experience of Communism. But I would like to defend our own government a bit. Since 1989 the situation has somewhat changed. Immediately after the

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revolution we had to dissolve the Warsaw Pact and remove the Soviet Army from our countries. We also had to show the West that it’s not just a gang of accidental adventurers who rule here, but people who are well aware of the importance of good neighborly collaboration. Hence there were many reasons to emphasize our bonds and even to some extent institutionalize them.16 Now the situation is a bit different, because the basic tasks have been fulfilled. That doesn’t mean that our collaboration is now redundant, only that it should take different forms. Let’s take a look, for example, at the way Russian politics have changed in the last three years. Three years ago Yeltsin publically said in Prague and Warsaw that for Russia it makes no difference if we are in NATO. Today he is saying something completely different. To a considerable degree this is a result of the fact that in Central Europe there is some kind of vacuum and our integration with European structures is still postponed. The hesitation of the West encourages Russia and causes it to want to regain lost terrain. In this situation it is important to emphasize our collaboration in this space. We know to which of these worlds we want to belong. And if we say it together in a synchronized way, it will naturally carry more weight. michnik: A big shock in recent years is the Balkan problem. The war between Serbs and Croats is a war in which there will be no victors, only losers. This is a war that gives a signal to Europe that the multicultural state is losing while the ethnic is winning—a war that reveals the powerlessness of Europe, which hasn’t been able to do anything. Today, as a matter of fact, I don’t know on which side I am in this war. More and more often I come to the conclusion that this is a war between “ethnic cleansers,” because

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both sides are going in this direction. How are we—who fought for freedom, democracy, tolerance, and multiculturalism —to look at this war? havel: This is a topic that I also very frequently return to, as I am really convinced that in the former Yugoslavia it’s all about Europe, its basic, fundamental values. One of them is the principle of civil coexistence of peoples of various nations and religions. So when the international community agrees with the fact of ethnic division, that means that it spits on the principles upon which it rests. First, it recognizes Bosnia and Herzegovina as a state within its current borders. Soon after that they begin to draw on maps how to divide it. One cannot divide it, because the borderline would go through every family, every household, every village. The worst is that there are three sides fighting one another and a fourth that doesn’t want any war. Those are the people who want to lead normal lives. This fourth side is the biggest, but nobody talks with it. Everybody talks with the three sides that have weapons. So they sacrifice civic principle in the name of ethnic principle, and everybody seems to agree with it. It’s horrible that the Karadžic´17 army is called one of the fighting sides, and that it’s put on the same level as the army of the internationally recognized sovereign state of Bosnia. The negotiators are certainly of goodwill, but I consider their work terribly dangerous. It’s also absurd that Russia, which during the time of Josip Broz Tito18 could not create a good position for itself in the Balkans, now, at the insistence of the Western powers, is present there, and moreover as a major power. The Balkans are a spark from which a huge fire could begin that could overtake Macedonia, Kosovo, Bulgaria, and the

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Islamic world. . . .19 It’s not that we have to take sides with one of the “ethnic cleansers.” On the contrary, we should take sides with those who do not want to have ethnically pure states. This is a huge challenge, and a serious test for Europe. If Europe doesn’t pass this test, and paints the borders according to what those wild armies were able to seize and cleanse, it would be Europe’s defeat, which may bring fatal consequences in very unexpected places: in Corsica, in Catalonia, or in the Basque country. Because if in the Balkans Europe accepts the rationale of the Le Pens, the Haiders, the Sládeks, and the Zhirinovskys,20 then it accepts it in general and therefore undermines the very principles upon which Europe itself rests. michnik: What can be done to help this fourth, nonbelligerent, side? havel: I have asked this question of our soldiers from the peacekeeping forces and generals from NATO. The conclusion from all those conversations is that if this conflict is not to take another twenty years, it can only be stopped by outside force. It won’t be done by UNPROFOR,21 which is capable merely of performing policing and humanitarian functions. The war ought to be finished with force, and this is technically possible. But there is no adequate political will. michnik: We exited from Communism, and for the past six years we are going somewhere. Tell me in which directions we can go, what are the options? havel: The worst variant is that the entire post-Communist space will become in the next dozen years a space of chaos and destabilization, unrest, and local conflicts. Communist discipline will be replaced by a non-Communist mess. This will feed even more extremists and populists who immediately will propose

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their own rules. Because if the new European order is not created by democrats, nationalists will take care of it, and then one day we could be unpleasantly surprised. The better variant is that we’ll gradually become normal democratic states, like some poorer Holland, Belgium, or Portugal. There is in my opinion an even better option—I’m very criticized in my milieu for such views and am called a naïve dreamer or seeker of third ways. At its core is that we will draw conclusions from our experiences and will try in this global civilization to think a bit more globally. That means that we would take upon ourselves a bigger responsibility and in some sense we will become a source of inspiration for the wealthy West. This could happen if we were able well ahead of time to notice the dangers lurking in the contemporary world and to articulate them in the right way thanks to the specific experience of Communism and our entire history. I dream that we will not just become some Portugal “encore” but will try to think on our own, differently, in a broader context. Thanks to that we could make a particular contribution to world politics. I consider this the best option, though I admit the least probable. michnik: Your polemic with Milan Kundera in 1968 launched in my opinion one of the most important disputes in Czech culture. Try to explain what that controversy was really about. havel: At that point we had known each other for a long time, and we were not enemies in the least. On the contrary, Kundera even helped me when I tried to get into the film school when he was a professor there. One could say that we were friends, though some of his views bothered me a bit. At the end of the 1960s we conducted several private discussions. By the end of 1968, a few

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months after the invasion of Czechoslovakia,22 Kundera wrote an article in which he said that in fact we didn’t lose so badly, and that all in all it ended well, that the situation would improve again, and that in the end our lot was always to adapt to the conditions dictated by the greater powers. For me this was an intellectual, philosophical, and elegant justification of the Czech inclination to capitulate, its passivity, or the downright collaborationist thinking that reminded me of the climate in that period between Munich and the German occupation. At the end of ’68 and the beginning of ’69 there was again a similar climate here. And then it appeared yet again immediately after the division of Czechoslovakia in 1992. It seems that whenever the state is getting smaller, this same mood returns. In an emotional state I wrote in the course of one night a polemic that was perhaps a bit too harsh. Literární Noviny refused to publish it and it appeared in the journal Tvárˇ.23 From today’s perspective our dispute seems indeed rather crucial. It dealt with the question of whether we are the creators of our own destiny or whether we are passive objects. I believed that our historical lot was often treated as a cover for immoral conduct. I deeply disagreed with that. Kundera then responded to my text in a horrible way. His article, published in the monthly Host do Domu, had the character of a personal file. The author informed that I come from a bourgeois family. He also believed that my disagreement had an egoistic basis and resulted from exaggerated self-love. Some time later I received a private letter from Kundera in which he acknowledged his mistake, said I was right, and indicated that our polemic was still a huge problem for him. Our relations improved, and a few years ago when I was in Paris, we

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spent a very pleasant evening together. But then Kundera apparently wrote somewhere that he hadn’t changed his position; so I don’t know how it really is. In any case, our polemic then concerned a very essential matter. In addition, it was quite a particular historical moment when—to put it simply—the nation was making a decision whether to adapt to the situation or disagree with it. And I still think that I was right. michnik: We have entered freedom with the luggage of unsettled accounts about our history. On the one hand this is of course about Communism, but on the other hand, when it comes to the Czech lands, for example—it’s about the period after 1938, when by the decision of the Czech government, the books of Karel Cˇ apek were confiscated.24 Tell me, Vašek, how are we to deal with this first history and with the second? With the history of our own depravity and with the history of our peaceful coexistence with Communism? havel: I think there is no identity without continuity. Neither an individual person nor society can be itself without an awareness of who one was before and what one did. In this sense I understand the task of accounting for the past, and I consider that task justified. Because we can’t cross out everything and say let’s start from zero. We can never start this way because we are dragging behind us the baggage of the past, and today we are also responsible for what was yesterday and before yesterday. The thing is, we are not capable of making such an accounting. As far as I know, no post-Communist country has found a sensible and dignified way to account for its past. All those lustration laws, which we so dislike, are a failed attempt to do something like that.

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But there are examples which can inspire us. I spoke many times with my friend the Spanish king, Juan Carlos, about what such a reckoning looked like in Spain after the death of General Franco. In many respects the situation there was much more dramatic than it was here, because there had been a civil war in Spain, and now the people from both camps had to work together. The king then played a huge role as a courageous intermediary, and finally managed to bring reconciliation, though they did not forget about the past at all. They opened up a space for reflecting on history, but this did not preclude or make impossible the coexistence of citizens. Of course our experiences are slightly different and one cannot directly apply their experience, but it turns out that the most important thing is a substantive analysis of the past. It’s more important than all the provisional political games that are conducted with history. But perhaps we are able to analyze the past only then when all the participants of the events are dead, as doing it earlier creates huge problems for us. It’s that we can read interesting analyses in exclusive journals, but this is a margin that doesn’t influence the character of society-wide reflection on social and political matters. michnik: You have repeatedly encouraged intellectuals to stop despising politics, but your appeals do not enjoy a wide response. I have the impression that the Czech intellectual elite is not intensively participating in the most essential debates. Why? havel: Under the conditions of democracy the intellectual elites cannot play such an essential role as they can under totalitarian rule, where generally they were the only independent voice. But I think that in the period of post-Communist transformation,

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its voice ought to be heard. In times when there is so much particularism, pragmatism, and egoistic interests running the show; in times of seeking new values and extraordinary transformation of property relations; and in times of a “wild west”—the intelligentsia ought to speak up in public life. It is difficult for me to accept that the voice of some minor party activist has a much bigger audience than the words of a distinguished thinker. I think it’s not just that the situation is at fault, but also the intellectuals themselves. I often have the impression that they are more interested in traveling to various conferences and promoting their books abroad than in taking positions on crucial matters. Naturally I don’t want to generalize, and I want to emphasize that I don’t have any conflict with this community. michnik: All of us involved in KOR25 and Charter 7726 had a somewhat Manichean sense of good and evil. We were the good and “they” were evil. Today we know that the world is not black and white. Tell me in which areas your adversaries are right? Because I know where you are right. havel: I often encounter—in dissident times, but also today—the accusation that putting the benchmark so high or emphasizing principles or ideas is a symptom of exhibitionism . . . and that in that way I want to exalt myself and make myself more beautiful than others. I admit that this has always provoked me to reflection. I have wondered whether they aren’t by any chance right. But I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re not. Indeed, for a few months after the Velvet Revolution I did various crazy things that I’m a bit ashamed of today. One day I spoke in five towns and by the end I was saying nonsense, because I’m not the type to speak at rallies. There was something of a kind of postprison psychosis, and when a person is let out

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he constantly talks and thinks he has so much to say because everybody is listening to him. When I think about it today I feel embarrassed, but at that time it was tolerated. I have drawn conclusions and I’m much more cautious. I understood that politics has its principles that ought to be respected, regardless of the fact that one wants to bring to it one’s own style. Perhaps indeed in those first months of revolution one could notice in me some elements of megalomania or a tendency toward bombast. But I’m the only person who knows this and nobody till now pays attention to that period. Whereas my critics accuse me of megalomania in completely different and unjustified cases. For example, that I invited the Dalai Lama, or that I met with Salman Rushdie. michnik: Every nation has its skeleton in the closet, and mine too. What would you as president say about that? What are Czechs embarrassed about in their history? What do they prefer not to talk about? havel: I believe that they don’t like to talk about their behavior in difficult periods, and in the moments immediately afterward when those difficult times are ending. For example, it is very unpopular to talk about the behavior of some Czechs during the German occupation or immediately after the war during the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans. Also about earlier times, the dark period between the Munich treaty and the German occupation. Naturally it is also unpleasant to talk about behavior during the Communist time. Those were times when the society wanted to survive, and people chose the path of adapting themselves to circumstances. Today they don’t like recalling that. And this is why they don’t like dissidents who are the living pangs of conscience. Maybe

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there’ll be a time when some of today’s avengers will prefer not to remember what they are writing today. michnik: A former adviser to Prime Minister Václav Klaus said that the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans opened up for Gottwald27 a road to power, because it broke Czech morale. havel: Precisely, or even worse. The postwar expulsion—which everybody at that time agreed with: democrats, Communists, the great powers—was in fact a period of huge ethnic cleansing. We accepted something that today we consider the biggest danger in Europe. After all the horrors of war, people thought it was obvious that the Germans who betrayed us ought to leave. But I think that if somebody betrays one’s country, he ought to be tried there on the basis of individual guilt, while expulsion from the country of one-fifth of its citizens was a solution about which today we should at least admit that it was controversial. If we don’t do it, we create a climate in which something like that could repeat itself—if the elections are won by some extremists or nationalists who have the desire to expel from the country, for example, Gypsies, Slovaks, foreigners, or former members of the Communist Party. In other words, we agree with the principle of collective responsibility that leads straight to racism and discrimination. During the war Nazi racism to a considerable degree infected even those who sensed it on their very own skin. Once Eugene O’Neill wrote, “I fought with small people so long that I also became small.”28 We too were susceptible to this illness of judging ethnic groups or nations collectively. I think it is a prerequisite of national hygiene to acknowledge this straightforwardly, quietly, and plainly—without accusing those who do so of betraying the national interest.

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Masaryk repeatedly spoke out against public opinion and despite this he was incredibly popular and even became the object of a cult. So it turns out that to say things that are unpopular may pay off. The day comes when society having been angry about hearing something a thousand times, suddenly begins to understand. Naturally I don’t believe that what happened can in some way be undone, that the Sudeten Germans are to return and have to get back their property. This cannot have any legal consequences for us, as history cannot be reversed. However, one can tell the truth about it.

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Everything Is Still in Motion Prague, November 1998

In this conversation with Václav Havel, Adam Michnik was joined by three journalists from Gazeta Wyborcza, Andrzej Jagodzin´ski, Aleksander Kaczorowski, and Tomasz Mac´kowiak.

michnik: Vašek, I keep thinking about your essay “The Power of the Powerless.” In it you articulated the idea of a civil society which, at the center of the new posttotalitarian order, would create something like a polis, a community. But after 1989 it was the market that became the center. That is, competition. The market may have the last word in the economy but certainly not in politics and social relations. That means that the cult of the market will be ending. One will have to look for something new. That’s why I think that your essay about “The Power of the Powerless” will gain currency again, but in a different context: how to deal with a ruthless market, how to turn it into a market with a human face. havel: I don’t know whether you remember that I wrote this text because you commissioned it after our meeting at Mount Sneˇžka, in 1978. We agreed then that for our next meeting at the border each of us would write something.1

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michnik: And you remember that? havel: Of course. Otherwise the text would not have come about. I feel the same way about what you just said. Most likely I didn’t appreciate—and perhaps there were more of us who also didn’t—what social processes would be put in motion by the transition to a market economy. We didn’t foresee that privatization would become not only a matter of ideology but also quite a cult object. That was our mistake. But still I think that our societies had to go through this phase. The greengrocer that I wrote about is enchanted that today he himself can decide about the prices in his shop, that this shop belongs to him, that he can enter into contracts, and so on. People get a kick out of that. Even for me it was a very nice surprise that almost any Czech could be a good entrepreneur, know economics, know how to be a shareholder, and so on. I may be the only one who doesn’t know that stuff. michnik: What else was a pleasant surprise for you? havel: The new generation, young people who were about ten years old when Communism collapsed, and today they are about twenty. Travel and foreign study seem obvious to them. They are aware of their citizens’ rights just like young Belgians, the French, or Germans. They already live in “the West,” and they even protest against the consumer society just like their peers in the West. Can you imagine a forty-something protesting against the consumer society and McDonaldization? aleksander kaczorowski: But those protests go hand in hand with a dislike for politics in general. havel: It doesn’t seem to me that people have to be excessively interested in politics. Quite to the contrary, the drop in interest in politics might be a good signal indicating the development of

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civil society, that is, local communities in which people ought to be active above all. Unfortunately, one can get the impression that here it’s different: the drop in the interest in politics is not accompanied by a bigger engagement in local self-government, nonprofit organizations, trade unions, et cetera. I saw a TV program about a community in which there will be no elections for self-government because no one there wants to be a candidate. That means that the previous Council will fade away, and its head, who’s been in charge for eight years and already many times wanted to step down, would have to stay on against his own will. It’s not important which party he’s with. The point is that this community has given up the right to take care of its own affairs independently. And this is an alarming phenomenon. Those people are still entrusting all their affairs to those “at the top.” But I still hope that this is an isolated case. TV has a peculiar capacity to find exceptions and present them as though they are the rule. michnik: What are the most serious threats to democracy in our countries? What in the last ten years went wrong, and why? havel: I think the basic direction in which our countries are moving—the post-Communist states in Eastern Europe—is good. We are holding on to our principles and ideals for which we fought during the Communist times. However, everything is infinitely more complex than we naïvely imagined when we were in prison. Problems are being revealed which under the dictatorship were pushed into the corner—local nationalisms, ethnic conflicts—it’s enough to take a look at the Balkans and the postSoviet republics. What was also revealed was a full-scale social demoralization over the prior decades. Organized crime emerged, also in the

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economy, because the unprecedented change in property relations created huge temptations. We do have entrepreneurs for whom entrepreneurships mean creative activity, creating something beneficial for all. But there are also people whose main goal is to steal as much cash as possible and to escape with it as far away as possible. But generally we’re moving in the right direction. Each of our countries commits its own mistakes. But I’m not worried about Poland or about the Czech Republic or Hungary, and it is quite possible that I will soon stop worrying about Slovakia. michnik: And what about Russia? havel: I’m not worried about Russia either. After all, Russia is going down the same path that we are, it’s just that it will take them much longer. I try to explain this to Americans on whatever occasion I can. michnik: Indeed, Vašek, you recently came back from America. What do you think about what’s happened around President Clinton? Is this a crisis of the democratic order? Some kind of warning? Wasn’t some taboo broken here that for us Europeans obviously shouldn’t be broken?2 havel: At a press conference with President Clinton I said that America has thousands of faces, most of which I love. In this specific instance it showed a face that I simply don’t understand. michnik: But where are the limits of democracy? We fought for democracy, whose foundation is respect for the human being, for privacy, for intimacy; we rejected Communism because it was forced into our heads and hearts, and now in America we see how a “Lavrentiy Pavlovich Starr”3 can act within the framework of the democratic order. After all, this is an example of how in

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a democratic state the secret service can function using wiretaps and provocation. havel: You’ve hit the nail on the head. Does the path to freedom have to lead over the corpses of respected leaders, or are there some limits, and if so, what are they and who gets to designate them? Many times I have heard from politicians and intellectuals in Singapore and Taiwan and in other Asian countries that democracy is a great thing but it has to stop somewhere, because democracy without limitations leads to a crisis of authority and sooner or later brings about chaos. I don’t think they are right, but in what they are saying I see a fundamental issue for the future of our civilization. I believe that if our civilization does not somehow deepen spiritually, if it doesn’t realize anew its own spiritual roots, if it doesn’t start to respect moral principles, we are threatened with a disintegration of our human bonds, the loss of a sense of responsibility, and totally unbridled selfinterest. This problem concerns our whole civilization, not just the post-Communist states. And going back to Prosecutor Starr. I think what that was all about was simply calculations regarding the upcoming congressional elections.4 michnik: From what you write, one senses a distrust of political parties. Just what are they today in our countries and in the West? havel: Political parties are a necessary and tested instrument of political life. But they cannot be an end in themselves. Life cannot be subordinated to party interests. In fact, in the long run it is disadvantageous for the parties themselves, because political life is all the more colorful, diversified, and interesting the

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richer the life of civil society is, with its variety of associations and organizations. I believe that political parties ought to be a space for creating political personalities, and ought to ensure the organizational side of their activities, such as election campaigns. But for such personalities to appear and to grow, a party must also be a place for debate. Most certainly it should not be some parallel power structure that duplicates the state. In our countries, unfortunately, too many issues are settled only through the parties. Without being a sympathizer or even a member of one or another party, one cannot do much. Parties play too big a role in the life of the country. michnik: And what differentiates those political parties today, besides, of course, personal differences? havel: For my part I hardly ever use the notions of left and right, because I believe that using them may cause more harm than good. Perhaps you or I, if we have a view on some matter, might consider whether it’s a conservative one, or liberal, or social democratic, or whether by any chance it isn’t Communist. But the majority of people don’t think about it: they simply know what they know. All the more because we have politicians here who say of themselves that they are left, but in reality they are only a bit to the left of those who say that they are right. There is also a party here which wants very much to be seen as right wing, but which at the same time has a lot of . . . not exactly left, but . . . downright Communist habits. michnik: And in your opinion, do the notions of left and right in the West accurately describe the reality? havel: The more left-wing parties do not entrust public matters to private initiatives as much as the more right-wing parties are

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inclined to do. But there is not such a very big difference. People in their own choices are guided by something that has little to do with social democracy or conservatism. They see on television somebody who’s regarded as the Father of the Nation, and if their lives are going well they will vote for him . . . until they find that their lives are getting worse. Then in turn they vote for the person who says on television: Our lives are bad but I will change that. And this is the great thing about democracy: that people can judge for themselves whether this person is trustworthy and whether it is really about the common good or only about power. The problem is that in making those choices they are sentenced to television. Condemned to television. If I had to judge only on the basis of the programming of our most popular commercial station, I would have to come to the conclusion that the Czech Republic is a country of catastrophes where blood is constantly being shed and politicians are gossiping about each other in public toilets. It doesn’t seem to me that this is how it is. But this is the message received by the majority of people. michnik: If the classic division into left and right is not the most important, then where is the dividing line that divides Czech society? havel: In my opinion the most important division is between people who care only for their garden and those who are interested in what’s beyond their fence. During my last visit to the United States, I met with members of Congress. The first question they asked me was: What do you think about the prospects for our civilization? I cannot imagine that such a question would ever be posed by a Czech deputy. Not as the first question but as the

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150th question! Instead, a certain major Czech politician told me at the conference Forum 2000, which we organized in Prague, that this was an idiotic project to do because at the moment there was nothing in this meeting for Czechs.5 michnik: During a discussion in Warsaw about integration with the European Union—a very important one because this was when Bishop Pieronek said that the Catholic Church supports integration— our Endecja asked: But would the EU give us apartments?6 havel: I don’t know how it is in Poland, but with us the dividing line is between those who know that their belt-tightening makes sense and those who believe it does not make sense and who recall the good old Communist times. Ten percent voted for the Communist Party, and a small percentage voted for our Republicans, but luckily these didn’t get to Parliament. The Social Democrats most probably have similar voters.7 Those people think that all those necessary changes that accompany the transition from a centrally controlled to a market economy are too costly, that they got cheated, and that the government is a bunch of masked Jews, and that the Gypsies are responsible for everything. But one has to wonder why they think like that. Is somebody getting into their heads by tapping latent prejudices? michnik: Isn’t this connected with the relationship to the Germans? havel: Of course. Of those who experienced horrors during the German occupation there are not many left. But for whole decades people were made to believe that the Germans are our eternal enemy, that they had always oppressed us, and so on. Several years are not enough to undo this. But I wouldn’t want to accuse

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anybody of xenophobia who says that every German is a criminal. Many people simply repeat what they’ve heard all their lives from radio and television. michnik: Our three countries are ruled today by exotic coalitions. In Poland the AWS,8 which entered the election campaign under the banner, “Down with Balcerowicz and Geremek,” is now cocreating a government in which Geremek is the minister of foreign affairs and Balcerowicz is the deputy prime minister and minister of finance. In the Czech Republic the minority government of Social Democrats endures thanks to an agreement between Prime Minister Miloš Zeman and his archenemy, Václav Klaus. Finally in Hungary, the liberals of FIDESZ9 created a government with the extreme peasant populists of Torgyán.10 havel: The fact that such exotic coalitions, as you call them, are possible, testifies to the fact that our democracies are still maturing. In Germany there were three possibilities: government by Christian Democrats and the Liberals, Social Democrats and the Greens, or a grand coalition. But in our countries everything is still in motion. Some parties are emerging, others are disappearing. But it seems to me that after a few electoral cycles, the political scene in each of our countries will stabilize and it will be easier to foresee what will happen after elections. michnik: And how do you imagine the New Europe? Will some new European nation emerge? I think this is impossible—that just as a Czechoslovak nation or a Belgian nation did not emerge, similarly no European nation will emerge on the American pattern. havel: But there is no such need. Nobody sees that as a goal. A shared Europe is to be a union of states, in which nobody will take away anyone else’s national, regional, or religious identity.

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There is a Protestant Europe and a Catholic Europe. And a Jewish community exists wherever it wasn’t completely exterminated. And this diversity of identities will be protected in an integrated Europe so that everyone will remain who one is. The Frenchman remains French and a Pole remains a Pole. michnik: This model of Europe, in which no one is trying to dominate anybody, I called at the conference Forum 2000, “Globalization on the Prague Model.” In Prague before the war lived Czechs, Germans, Austrians, Jews, and Russians. The name of František Kriegel . . . a great Czech patriot, was the only one among the members of the Communist Party leadership taken to Moscow after the August 1968 intervention in Czechoslovakia who did not sign the so-called Moscow Protocol. Before the war this Czech patriot had been a Soviet Communist in Spain, and even earlier a Polish Jew from Stanisławów. You wrote a great essay about him. havel: Unfortunately this multicultural Prague you are talking about doesn’t exist anymore. We Czechs, without noticing it, cleansed ourselves, or were ethnically cleansed. In the feeling of some Czechs, the last time this happened was when we divided ourselves from the Slovaks. michnik: Precisely. When they ask you today a question about the Central European community, are you going to answer it differently now that Mecˇiar has lost the election in Slovakia?11 havel: In my opinion what happened in Slovakia is one of the most important things since the collapse of Communism in Central Europe. The matter is not yet definitively decided yet, but a great hope has arisen that Slovakia will begin to look more like any European democracy, that this weird half-authoritarian regime will end; a regime with an ambiguous orientation in foreign policy,

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and a regime reminiscent of Peronism. . . . I don’t know what to compare it with. Mecˇiar to a significant degree subordinated to himself the judiciary, both executive and legislative power, business circles, and the media. In his election campaign he adorned himself with famous people like Gérard Depardieu . . . michnik: Depardieu had lost his mind. havel: No. He may not even know where this Slovakia is located. He only knows that for this one day he earned what he normally earns in a week. The fact that, despite all the instruments of power that Mecˇiar had at his disposal, the elections were won decisively by the opposition, testifies to the great maturity of Slovak society. Thanks to that the prospects for Slovakia went up, as well as the hope for collaboration among Central European countries. Had Slovakia continued to isolate itself it would have had huge consequences for the neighboring countries. Most probably, not only would Slovakia not get into the European Union, but the Czech Republic would have done so only with great difficulty. Had Slovakia become a kind of bridgehead of the East, the Austrians would most probably have had to reconsider the question of their neutrality. tomasz mac´ kowiak: Sir, do you believe that Slovakia still has a chance to catch up with its neighbors? havel: Slovakia will not be in the first wave of NATO expansion. But if the next wave will be in two or three years, Slovakia has a real chance to be a part of it, just like Slovenia and the Baltic countries. The same with joining the European Union. If Slovakia wants that and mobilizes itself appropriately, it could be admitted to the E.U. at the same time we are. I see no reason why Slovakia couldn’t make up for this late start.12

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michnik: Mr. President, we are now sitting in the beautiful library of Prague’s Hrad. In this library sixty years ago President Edvard Beneš decided to capitulate to the diktat of the powers in Munich.13 Is Beneš a positive or negative figure in Czech history? havel: When I myself was not performing any political function I judged harshly the capitulation of Beneš in 1938 and in February 1948, the first time under pressure from the Allies, the second time under pressure from the Communists. But when I found myself in his position, I began to have more understanding of the dilemmas he faced. Not that I basically changed my view—I believe that neither in the first nor the second case should one have capitulated, or at least one shouldn’t have capitulated so easily and quickly. But I gained some understanding for this man who bore a responsibility for several million human beings and was not clairvoyant. He could not know what would happen next, that the Second World War would erupt and that the Allies would win it. Benesˇ had to take into account that the Germans would crush us, bomb Prague, and that we would become a part of the Third Reich for one or two hundred years. He felt a terrible responsibility on his shoulders. I spoke about those dilemmas in Barcelona.14 At my lecture was General Jaruzelski. He came to me to say what a great impression my talk had made on him. Because he also thinks of himself as a person who faced this horrible dilemma: to save human lives at the cost of coercion, or to risk invasion from outside. Whether this is really how it was, I don’t know, but this is how he sees it. I saw that he was very moved. michnik: I learned about this lecture from Jaruzelski. We published it and called it “The Czech Complex.” Were we right?

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havel: From our conversation it seems to be a dramatic topic not only for Czechs. Also for Poles. michnik: And for the English. This was Chamberlain’s dilemma: to fight or not to fight. havel: That’s true. And last but not least, the Americans. Do our boys have to die in Kosovo? michnik: It was clear from the very beginning that the Czechs, deserted by the French and the English, would not be able to defend themselves from Hitler. So it was only a question of whether to take the path of Jan Hus15 and go up in flames, or to capitulate in order to survive. This dilemma is known by all small nations. Yesterday, walking through Prague with Leszek Kołakowski, I told him: “Look. What a beautiful city.” And his reply: “Because the Czechs were not idiots and didn’t make so many uprisings.” havel: I think that our tragedy began in Munich. For sixty years we have felt its effects. And no doubt we will continue to feel it. michnik: Milan Kundera said that in the future, people will talk about the time of Communism in Central Europe as an epoch in which Bohumil Hrabal lived and worked. How is it that the more Hrabal becomes a world author, the less he is read in the Czech Republic? havel: I consider Hrabal a great writer. I got to know him when he could not be published, and then I followed the development of his writing. In the beginning it was a bit esoteric. Later when his books began to be published, he quickly won great popularity and almost became a consumer product. This is when they shot all those films based on his novels and awarded Oscars. This was no longer the authentic Hrabal. However, he became a part of the popular consciousness.

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It’s great that he is now conquering a foreign audience, but I wouldn’t say that this is accompanied by any loss of interest in his home country. Hrabal is not a prophet unrecognized in his own country. He was recognized all too much, and it didn’t have a good influence on him. kaczorowski: The initial impulse to establish Charter 77 was a petition in defense of musicians from the rock group Plastic People of the Universe. A few days ago we went with Adam Michnik to their concert. I realized there how difficult it must have been then to convince all those serious people, oppositional professors and politicians, to sign a petition in defense of some long-haired musicians. Is anything left of that community? havel: I can speak best about how difficult it was because it all landed on my shoulders. It worked out, because the conviction won out that freedom is indivisible, that one has to defend everybody, even those youngsters with their long hair and their music and their lyrics. The trial took place in the courthouse in Smíchov. They hadn’t yet closed the court buildings to the public; so one could actually enter the corridor. And there in a friendly chat were all the members of the Politburo—Mlynárˇ, Kriegel, Slavik, the philosopher Jan Patocˇka, the art critic Jindrˇich Chalupecký, various artists and young long-haired people—an unusual scene. Solidarity was forced on us by our common enemy, the dictatorship. Now everybody lives their own life. It would be as difficult today for some phenomenologist to go to a rock concert as for the members of this rock group to go to his lecture. But they could, if they only wanted to, because we managed to win this freedom. mac´ kowiak: The philosopher Václav Beˇlohradský, in an essay about the heritage of the 1960s, says how big the difference is between

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his old professors, like Patocˇka, and himself, a fifty-year-year-old lecturer at Charles University, who goes to class in sneakers. You, Mr. President, are a fan of the Rolling Stones, a friend of Mick Jagger. Is this an outcome of your involvement in the defense of Czech rock musicians in the seventies? havel: No, this matter has deeper roots. I’m older than Beˇlohradský, but the atmosphere of the 1960s also had a huge influence on me, this decade of cultural, spiritual, and social rebellion against all establishments. This rebellion was accompanied by completely new cultural phenomena. It wasn’t the rule in my generation but those years marked me. Yes, to some degree I’m a product of the sixties. andrzej jagodzin´ ski: Has your participation in practical politics and having power—something that rarely happens to intellectuals—has that changed you? Has it enriched you or is it rather a troubling experience? havel: This has been a very interesting experience, except that in my case it’s been lasting a bit too long. I would be happy if a sense of responsibility would free me one day from this function. I would like very much to write plays again. That doesn’t mean that those would be plays about politics, or that I would use experiences that I had as a politician. Even if I did, then not directly. Before I became president, I didn’t know any person in power, except for Mitterrand, who in the eighties invited me for breakfast. This is why I tremendously mythologized the world of big politics. It seemed to me that even behind banal events, there was certainly something going on. I told myself they are only pretending that nothing is happening. Later I myself found myself in the world of big politics and understood that this world is absolutely no different from this ordinary world in which people

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curse at each other, don’t like each other, one person gets on a second person’s nerves, while a third is licking a fourth person’s ass, and so on. And this is what from a distance appeared to be “friendship” between two countries or a “cool relationship” between two countries. I can’t say that I wouldn’t like to be an independent intellectual again, but I’m not that, and—since I decided to run again for the presidency and I was again elected—I committed myself to not being that for another four years. Fortunately the Czech president cannot be president three times in a row. That means that if I live long enough there is hope that I will be able then to express myself more freely. Not that I have had to lie now— God forbid!—I say what I think. But if Adam considers some politician a fool, he can write about it in Gazeta Wyborcza. And I—what can I do? It would be beautiful, if instead of our newspapers, I could read Gazeta every morning. But wouldn’t I begin to imagine that I’m king of Poland? michnik: Vašek, that wouldn’t be so bad at all.

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An Account of Our Victories, an Accounting of Our Freedom Olomouc, October 2003

Havel and Michnik are interviewed here together on the occasion of receiving the Medal of Saint George, an award given by the Polish weekly Tygodnik Powszechny. The conversation /interview took place in the restaurant Viktoria and was moderated by Krzysztof Burnetko, a journalist for Tygodnik Powszechny, and Václav Burian, a Czech writer and a translator of Polish literature.

krzysztof burnetko: In accordance with journalistic custom, let’s begin with fundamental questions . . . va´ clav burian: Mr. President, our Polish friends thought it obvious that the best place for our meeting would be a place where one drinks beer. Your Audience1 is certainly in some respects autobiographical. If that play is any indication, you’re not a beer lover . . . havel: To this absolutely fundamental question, I can answer directly: I drink beer in the morning as a medicine, and I drink it before I go to sleep as part of a treatment that helps me get to sleep. During the day, however, especially with meals, I prefer wine. But in any case in my plays I draw upon the material I know best: from situations that concern me, and from the behavior of my

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friends and the attitudes that they represent. However, I select elements from it that are most suitable for writing a play about somebody completely different. We are not part of this play; those are not documents recounting specific experiences of ours. But in general my ambition is to work on universal themes, and that I might be understood as well by people in Iceland or Africa as I am by people here. Is my answer sufficiently exhaustive? burnetko: So now we will ask about things less fundamental, that is about politics. The two of you met twenty-five years ago in 1978, on the Polish-Czech border in the Karkonosze Mountains, managing to lose the security agents of both our countries who were following you. The outcome of this meeting on Sˇniez˙ka Mountain of members of the democratic opposition from both countries, the Committee for the Defense of Workers (KOR) and Charter 77, was not only personal friendships and shared initiatives but also a certain text, which became a kind of bible for all those in both countries who could not agree with the system in which they had to live. Václav Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless,” besides its deep analysis of how Communism functioned, included a program of resistance which was to be based on a seemingly natural refusal to participate in the prevailing lie, and on the creation— even under totalitarian conditions— of embryonic civic communities, that is, a civil society. The plan turned out to be effective, both in Czechoslovakia and in Poland. And now you two are sitting with us, despite everything, having a beer in a pub called—nomen omen—the Viktoria. And indeed you were victorious! The System collapsed. We no longer have to fear plainclothesmen, or print samizdat, or buy meat

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with ration cards. We have democracy, a free market, membership in Western structures. And for your having had a hand in that Great Change, Tygodnik Powszechny has conferred upon each of you the Medal of Saint George.2 But the skeptic says: that’s right, this beer mug is half-full, but then it’s also half-empty. Let’s talk about our respective— Czech and Polish—troubles in completing the revolution and building freedom. Could you come up with a list of the plagues that threaten us? And then give us a little soul-searching, because according to Scripture, nobody is without guilt. michnik: To make such a list is always troublesome. If for no other reason than that which Churchill cited: “When I am abroad I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my country. I make up for lost time when I am at home.”3 Let me start from the beer mug. That’s always a trouble: to judge whether it’s half-empty or perhaps actually half-full. If somebody would have said fifteen years ago, in 1988, to Václav Havel, or me, or even Pope John Paul II, that in the next two years the Communist system would break down, that the Soviet Army would exit from Czechoslovakia and Poland, that the Soviet Union would fall apart, that dictatorship and censorship would be abolished, that the borders would open up, that democratic elections would be possible, that all civil rights would be respected, that in place of a command economy we would have a market economy, that we would soon be in the North Atlantic pact and the European Union, while COMECON4 and the Warsaw Pact5 are ending—then we would all say that it is some possessed village idiot who doesn’t know what he’s saying and doesn’t know the realities of the world. So—after all that—

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when somebody tells me that this glass is half-empty, then I reply that he has probably never had a beer in his life. On the other hand, indeed, it is a sociological fact that in both our countries there exists a sort of disappointment, frustration, and even a rejection of everything that was brought along by freedom, sovereignty, and the market economy. But that’s true of any big change. Every big change promises manna from heaven: that everybody will be healthy, handsome, and rich enough to live as they like. I’ve always joked that Poles have one dream: we want to earn money as they do in the States, have social security as in Sweden, and work as they did in the People’s Republic of Poland under Gierek.6 Except that it’s difficult to make that happen. Such dreams don’t come true. The result is frustration, and frustration is a fact. In all the postCommunist countries, including those in which the transformation is judged positively, such as the Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovenia, Poland, or Hungary, we hear all the time this horrible lament, as though it was never so bad in Poland as it is now. Here and there we can plainly read that even under Hitler’s occupation, farmers were better off. But we also complain about other fundamental features of the world we live in. The first one is the huge axiological vacuum. Suddenly all great value systems are collapsing. The axiological vacuum is a typical phenomenon of periods of restoration as described by Stendhal in The Red and the Black: this is a time of cynicism, intrigues, careerism. The outcome of such an axiological vacuum is also that all republican slogans transform themselves into cynicism and corruption and all conservative slogans are transformed into . . . the same thing, actually. The only difference is that the republicans want to burn at the stake

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Catholic priests, while the others want to burn those raised on Voltaire. Today’s situation is different, but something from that climate remains. Ideological disputes, as a matter of fact, are often a kind of masked ball. What’s happening in our countries is a fragment of what’s happening currently in the European democracies and in democracies in general. When in California democratic elections are won by Schwarzenegger, about whose political talents nothing is known, then we are dealing here not with a democratic process but with a quasi-theatrical spectacle. Schwarzenegger as a politician wins because of his well-known face. And if in Western Europe we are dealing with the phenomenon of Berlusconi, that means that democracy is in crisis. On the one hand it’s threatened by its theatricalization, and on the other, by corruption. In this sense we can do some soul-searching because I don’t think Vašek’s opinion on this would be different from mine. But are Havel and Michnik really primarily responsible for the world going in that direction? I would reply sharply: it is exactly people like Vašek, like the editors of Tygodnik Powszechny, like the editors of Gazeta Wyborcza—we do everything to oppose this logic, to be in the minority that says no to those processes. Even if we lose today, we are conscious of the fact that we ˇ apek was right when he wrote A Place are right. Just as Karel C 7 for Jonathan, or Cardinal Wyszyn´ski was right when he said non possumus8 to the Communists, despite the fact that such an atˇ apek in 1938, just titude looked anachronistic. Because when C before the Anschluss, wrote A Place for Jonathan, it looked as though all of Europe would end up in the hands of the Nazis and that they could not be opposed. Similarly, when Cardinal

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Wyszyn´ski said non possumus, for which he was imprisoned, it seemed as though Communism would win. I don’t know about you, Vašek, but I went through a thorough Marxist training, and one thing I learned was that there are no historical necessities. History will be what we make of it with our own hands. burian: Do you, too, believe that no historical necessity exists? havel: I agree that none of us exists only in the orbit of some anonymous historical regularity, which somebody discovers and describes, or doesn’t discover. I believe that all people are agents of historical events, except that there are many people, and they are different, and so history depends on lots of factors. And I would also emphasize one thing: that civilization has chosen a direction which, according to my conviction—based on my life experience—is exceptionally ambiguous. To be sure, it brings with it a huge variety of benefits that make daily life easier. At the same time it terrorizes us more and more and in a peculiar way destroys our life, the environment, and coexistence on this planet. This is a direction which a lot of wise people have described in a huge number of wise books, and yet we are still moving in this direction. None of those books has managed to change this. It is unusually interesting that the phase of civilization in which we find ourselves is probably the first time in history that humanity has been able to perceive itself in such a critical way, and yet at the same time is absolutely incapable of changing itself. As a result it is still moving in a dangerous direction. It’s possible that one more thing happened. That those unexpected changes connected with the collapse of Communism created an illusion around us that the whole world had changed.

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The bipolar division of the world had ended, Soviet domination had ended, it seemed as though suddenly everybody would be free, happy, that human dignity would be respected, wars would end, and so on. In the course of these unexpected turnarounds, and the explosion of euphoria that accompanied them, perhaps they expected more than could possibly happen. Neither Adam nor I could have changed the direction in which the world was going, but we could influence it through ways of living and acting. And in this sense we all are subjects of history and not in any case its passive objects. But this is also the source of that ambivalent view of the last fourteen years. I often think about it myself, and perhaps I will still write something about it. Not so long ago, and even publically, I posed a question to myself (for a retiree such questions are natural): Did I win life or did I blow it? For sometimes it seems to me that everything I ever yearned for, or competed for, or considered constructive, I was able to incorporate into my life. While at other times I have the feeling that life stuck its tongue out at me and thereby made it clear that I am an utter clown. But in the end I matured to the view that neither the one nor the other is true. Because this battle with the dragon, as fought by Saint George, can’t ever be completely won, but at the same time it can’t ever be completely lost. It is a constant battle, because one always ought to try for something better. It is a great illusion to think that that “better” suddenly comes and that we find ourselves in a paradise on earth. A human being remains a creature full of contradictions, as he always was. In fact, the entire civilization will be full of contradictions. But that doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t—again and again— concentrate on certain ideals, take care of certain values that are

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important for our vision of a better order, even if they seem unglamorous and mundane. Hence the question “Did I win my life or blow it?” is essentially a faulty one. I tried some things and some worked out and some didn’t. As always, as with everything. michnik: A few years ago Václav Havel and I took part in a conference in Vienna on the transformations in Central Europe, along with the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, and the chancellor of Austria, Viktor Klima. I was reflecting there on the essence and the effects of so-called normalization. I said that the achievement of Vašek is that as president he did not allow himself to be normalized. Susan Sontag said once about the Bolsheviks that they were Jacobins who succeeded. You are a Jan Hus who succeeded. burnetko: Since Adam Michnik introduced to the discussion Marxist categories, let’s use them again: isn’t the alienation of citizens from public life the biggest threat to contemporary democracy? One could see it in both Poland and in the Czech Republic. michnik: The alienation of our times is linked to the theatricalization of politics and its commercialization. And it is an outcome of the breakdown of the great value systems, and a result of the corruption, broadly understood, of public life. burnetko: Then what to do to make people like politics? michnik: Good question . . . Is politics to be liked? burnetko: Furthermore, is politics necessarily to be liked? havel: An aversion to politics indeed exists, but that is not the biggest reason for worry. In the end it’s natural that people delegate someone to be responsible for creating laws, the principles of

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public life, and so on. And they say, this belongs to you. This is your job. And we will be able to take care of our own day-today matters. But what’s even worse—and Adam was also talking about this—is that we delegate to politics with the help of technology ever larger battalions of ill-suited people, and this, of course, further deepens the sense of alienation. And we delegate them on the basis of erroneous information: today, in fact, we are not electing the politicians themselves but their public relations agents. If someone is the most popular, that means he’s the best. That is, everything depends on the media presentation. And that’s not good: I, Citizen Václav Havel, would like to deal with the power of some concrete politician and not with the power of the p.r. experts hidden behind him. That leads to the many consequences that bring about a crisis of democracy. In fact, this is something deeper than a crisis of democracy. I think we are dealing with a crisis of civilization. It’s related to the fact that on one hand, we are the first civilization with global reach. All earlier civilizations embraced fragments of the world, and not, like today, the whole planet. On the other hand, we are the first atheist civilization, in which to be sure there may exist any number of Christian or Social Christian parties, but their character or foundations remain atheist. Are these perhaps the reasons why it is so ambiguous? The crisis of democracy is then only one of the consequences of the crisis of civilization. And here again I would emphasize the completely misguided—and absurd— expectation that onceoppressed dissidents who suddenly became presidents will change the entire world from one day to the next. The trouble is that we didn’t completely fulfill—and one must admit it— our mission. After all, it was we who were obliged

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to explain to democratic societies in democratic states—I am thinking here above all about the West—to present our experience of the totalitarian system. We had a duty to pass on to them that experience, and especially to warn them about the politics of appeasement, and in this we failed. We are observing today the same pacifism that was one of the factors behind the Second World War and the Holocaust. And we share in the guilt. michnik: Two remarks. The first one: when it comes to the character of our civilization you are on the same wavelength as John Paul II, that this is an atheist civilization. I don’t agree with that. I believe it’s a secularized civilization, but not atheist. This is a civilization that needs metaphysics. Moreover it seeks metaphysics. Often erroneously, in the wrong places, but even the variety of religious fundamentalisms demonstrates that atheism is not a sufficient way to find an answer to the question How to live? This civilization is not atheist even though it is going through a crisis of the traditional forms of religiosity. In general, I don’t believe in the existence of an atheist civilization. Because as long as civilization exists, the need for metaphysics will endure. Atheists may exist, but there cannot be an atheist civilization. My second remark: if we didn’t succeed in convincing the larger part of Western public opinion that unreflective passivism is senseless, it is not our defeat. It’s a defeat for the Western powers. We would have been defeated if we had accepted their point of view and suddenly begun to speak with the language of the French, German, or Italian pacifists. Meanwhile, I am proud because in a well-known German newspaper a well-known commentator in his article attacked as militarist and bellicose three people: Václav Havel, György Konra´d, and Adam Michnik.9 That means that we hadn’t lost what was the core of our think-

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ing. But is John Paul II a pacifist? No, he’s not! The pope desires peace, but to be a pacifist means to say it’s better to be red, or brown, or green than dead. The pope would never say anything like that. And in this sense, the pope is not a pacifist. To be sure, he believes that one has to use all possible means to peacefully solve conflicts, and it’s hard to argue with that. Neither Václav Havel nor Andrei Sakharov nor Jacek Kuron´ was ever a pacifist.10 They were partisans of struggle without violence and that’s the kind of fight they fought. But that’s not pacifism! The fight without violence means that you agree that you will be subject to suffering, but that you don’t want to subject anyone else to suffering. Nobody reasonable would accept as a principle that you cannot react to violence with violence. And nobody reasonable will accept the thesis that it’s a matter of moral indifference that there is a regime in Iraq which chops people’s hands off, plucks their eyes out, cuts off their ears, and the world is to look at that quietly in the name of the holy rule of sovereignty. That kind of pacifism we rejected and we paid a certain price for it. havel: There is probably one more thing connected to this, and this is what I had in mind when I called contemporary civilization an atheist one: the formalistic, scientistic, technocratic character of power in a majority of democratic states is a typical expression of a formalistic understanding of law. Meanwhile the state is the work of people, while the person is a work of God. There is some hierarchy here. To tolerate a crime, to walk past indifferently, while referring to formally existing laws, is simply inappropriate. Of course, it’s hard to recognize the moment when one should stop observing the laws—which, after all, are the rules

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we have agreed to—and turn to ordinary human norms. There exists no single model that’s universally usable. But one has to be aware that legal rules are there to serve some sort of moral rules. It’s not as though no moral system exists and that the only thing that counts is the legal system and formally obligatory regulations. Or in another realm, the concern with the exclusively quantitative growth of all indicators, without any consideration as to whether that growth makes any sense, or not. For example, driving a car recently, I heard the news on the radio that a big corporation, XYZ, was planning an investment in our country, valued at fifteen billion, that it’s the biggest investment in our history, that the firm is hugely prestigious, that the firm will employ thousands of people, and so on. For several minutes they said very good things about the firm, but they never said a word about what this firm does! All they communicated were power and growth indicators. Such features turn out to be more important than what a person actually does with his life, what the quality of life is, what merit the product has, what the sense of the whole thing is. This is also part of this technocratic knowledge, and this is what I had in mind when I spoke of the atheism of today’s civilization. And when it comes to pacifism, I myself am a child of the sixties. I was in America at the height of the hippie movement. I witnessed gigantic demonstrations by millions against the Vietnam War. And this ethos of various independent movements, the idea of contestation, the beauty of young people who want a different, better world, who are opposing the establishment, who are not indifferent to what’s going on around them —that all was and remains close to me. . . . At the same time what I consider a very dangerous pacifism is in essence an indifference masked by activity: someone who’s 132

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doing quite well takes an afternoon off to take part in some big demonstration, but in fact this is at best a trendy gesture. My late friend Jan Lopatka, a Czech literary critic, fell down one day in Prague in Malá Strana Square, most probably because of a heart problem. He was lying there for an hour and a half and nobody helped him. And it was noon, when it is most crowded. Passersby probably explained to themselves that it’s a drunk or homeless person who might want something from them. . . . I wouldn’t like us to behave like those who are so indifferent. And that’s what bothers me about current pacifism: the indifference to the suffering of people in other countries. This politics of appeasement is what to a certain degree strengthened the power of Hitler and in effect made it possible for him to unleash a world war. This mentality: so what that in Czechoslovakia they have those problems with the Sudetenland?11 Why get mixed up in it? We ourselves more recently should have been able to recognize the danger of this current indifference vis-à-vis evil, as we had experienced it under a developed totalitarian system. And we should have been able to convey more of that experience to the world. . . . michnik: Today perhaps instead of writing “The Power of the Powerless” one ought to write an essay called “The Power of the Uncorrupted.” . . . Because maybe the time has come for one to look differently at corruption, as a kind of cancer which is hollowing us out and killing us from the inside. In this sense, if we regard corruption not just as financial corruption but also as moral, axiological—then we are in Munich 1938. Because axiological corruption took place there, too. When the French minister of foreign affairs, Édouard Daladier, flew from Munich to Paris, he was terrified how he would be greeted—but at the airport he was awaited by cheering crowds. 133

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The biggest pacifist antiwar demonstration took place in Paris in 1943, soon after the Allies bombed it for the first time. So now whenever I hear pacifist voices in French, I am cautious. Because I prefer the attitude of Albert Camus, who didn’t fret over it but instead wrote The Plague. I don’t like the word “dissident” because dissidents were those who left the church, and in my opinion those who left the church in Czechoslovakia or Poland were Communists and not us. We were faithful to the church. But even if you accept this label, then the essence of dissidence was the conviction that if the crowd in the square yells “Crucify him! Give us Barabbas!” you are not obligated to shout with them. You can be a decent person outside of that crowd. For us, people of the democratic opposition in Poland, that was an important lesson: we had a feeling of loneliness, we thought that we were in the minority, but at the same time we had a sense that we were on the side of the most important values and traditions of our civilization. To apply this to current times: today there is no censorship, but there is cacophony. We have a huge din that smothers the word of the poet, the word of the philosopher. And here is the question. On whose side do we want to be: on the side of the din or the side of the poet and philosopher? My greatest admiration for Václav Havel comes from the fact that being president of the state, a politician conducting real politics, he always in his public mission saved room for the voice of a poet or the voice of a philosopher. And I’d like to thank you for this, Vašek. And that is the meaning of the award from Tygodnik Powszechny. Tygodnik Powszechny was never part of that crowd that screamed “Crucify!” whoever it might be.

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burnetko: Mr. President, why don’t the Czechs have their own Adam Michnik? michnik: And what do they need Michnik for?! burian: Why don’t we have an Adam Michnik and why don’t the Poles have a Václav Havel? havel: Obviously, I feel good when I’m assessed so warmly, but at the same time that provokes an avalanche of doubts about myself, a psychological mechanism well known by the experts. I used to say that to some degree I am a mistake of history, a peculiar kind of Kundera-esque joke of history. I woke up playing a role which I may not have deserved, and which resulted from many overlapping circumstances and coincidences. That’s just a little remark about myself. That we in the Czech Republic don’t have Michnik and Gazeta Wyborcza is terrible. We have several quite good weeklies, but they are published in small numbers, they deteriorate, and fall victim to various pressures. As far as politics are concerned, I have the impression that the time of great revolutionary changes, thanks to which the important functions were assumed by intellectuals, dissidents, people who’d been in prison—that this time is over. A more stable and quiet time is coming, when it is difficult to draft as president someone with a revolutionary background. After all, where could one be found, since there’s been no revolution for some time? But seriously speaking, this is not what’s most important. I have the impression that the office could be conducted reasonably and expertly, despite the fact that the person holding office is not a philosopher, essayist, or poet, and that his biography doesn’t include prison time. What’s dangerous lies elsewhere: that the

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change from, let’s say, a revolutionary generation of politicians to a generation of politician/bureaucrats may be conducted with the help of a certain dangerous ideology, that is, the ideology of so-called normality. Such a scenario unfortunately threatens my country. And that means an opening up of space for this dragon with which Saint George fought. Because this is an ideology that tells us: behave according to standards, like anybody else; submit to mediocrity. Since nobody noticed Lopatka on Malá Strana Square, why would you have to notice him? Since so many people are not voting, why would you have to vote? Since the majority supports the death penalty, why would you, who wants to be in Parliament and represent this majority, and would have to be loved in order to be elected by them —why would you have to speak out against the death penalty? And so on . . . And here begins a vicious circle. Because the cult of mediocrity opens up a space—and constitutes a de facto acquiescence—for a politics that is reduced to public relations. I cannot mention by name the addressee of this criticism, because of my former position as president and because of my good upbringing. michnik: I will try to answer the second part of that question, why we don’t have in Poland our own Havel. The first one, why the Czechs don’t have a Michnik, seems to me less interesting. In Czechoslovakia, the democratic opposition up to the very end—up to the Velvet Revolution—was the movement of an elite. In Poland, from August 1980, it was a huge, nationwide social movement. At the head of the Czechoslovak opposition—an elite group of intelligentsia, students, and youth— could be a writer, philosopher, intellectual. At the head of our mass, multi-

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million movement there had to be someone with whom this movement could identify. That was Lech Wałe˛sa. I was a big supporter of Lech Wałe˛sa as the leader of this movement, but I was against his candidacy for president. I warned him: “Lech, as president, you will be like Robin Hood on Downing Street.” That is, a magnificent popular leader of a people’s revolt who is completely unsuitable for the office of president of the state. And then he asked: “And Havel?” I answered: “Havel was preceded by Masaryk, and you are preceded by Piłsudski, and those bring very different associations.” And this is the first answer, but it has a second face. After Wałe˛sa we elected Kwas´niewski, after Havel you elected Klaus.12 Which of our countries came out better?

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The Times Are Favoring What’s Mean Prague and Warsaw, October 2007

In October 2007 Václav Havel was invited to be guest editor for one day of the Slovak daily Hospodárskie Noviny. He sent to Michnik several questions to be answered and published in the paper. Among other featured interviewees were Madeleine Albright and Christiane Amanpour.

michnik: Václav Havel has sent me a few questions to answer for publication by him in Hospoda´rskie Noviny. va´ clav asks: In a recent essay, “Prayer for Rain,”1 you write about the situation in today’s Poland, and you call it a “creeping coup d’état.” Does that mean that not only the government has changed but also the system? Has the Fourth Republic of the Brothers Kaczyn´ski already been established? And if so, then how is it essentially different from the Third Republic, “that is, from the period after 1989”? Here is my answer. A coalition made up of three parties—Law and Justice (PIS), Self-Defense (Samoobrona), and the League of Polish Families (LPR)—has been changing the system for two years in a stealthy, creeping way. Poland is becoming a different country from what it was after 1989. It has become a different state from the one the

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democratic opposition had fought for in the course of twentyfive years. In 1981 I defined for myself an ideal Poland of “solidarity”: “A self-governing Poland, tolerant, multicolored, based on Christian values, socially just, and a Poland friendly with its neighbors, a Poland capable of compromise and moderation, capable of realism and real partnership, but incapable of slavery, incapable of spiritual servitude, impossible to subjugate spiritually. A Poland full of the tensions normal for modern societies, but imbued with the principle of solidarity. A Poland where intellectuals defend repressed workers, and where workers go on strike to demand freedom for culture. A Poland that talks about itself with both pathos and sarcasm; that was so often crushed but never overcome, so many times conquered but never vanquished. A Poland that today has regained its identity, its language, its face . . .”2 That’s the kind of Third Republic3 I was dreaming about in 1981, and that’s the kind of Poland I stood up for after 1989. There were many things that I didn’t foresee then, including mass privatization and the hard logic of the market economy. But privatization and the market do not mean having to reject a “shared Poland, a Poland free of the deadly logic of revenge and permanent cold civil war.” I cannot accept a situation in which the archives of the security apparatus are treated as a basic source of knowledge about all of us. The Third Republic is a country of shared concern for the freedom of Poland and the dignity of every person in Poland; it is a state ruled by the presumption of innocence. The Fourth Republic—and this is how I see the project of Jarosław Kaczyn´ski and his permanent “moral revolution”—is one in which the security services and the office of the prosecutor organize provoca-

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tions vis-à-vis inconvenient persons; in which wiretapping and denunciations by informers are our daily bread. The Fourth Republic is a state project based on suspicion and fear, in which we all feel suspect every day. The Fourth Republic is a state in which I expect every day to be summoned by the prosecutor’s office. We used to say, to describe the customs of the Communist epoch, “Give me a person, and there will always be a paragraph in the penal code that could apply to him.” I have the feeling that every day someone is searching for such a paragraph that would apply to me. va´ clav havel asks me: In connection with an observation by Winston Churchill, you’ve written that if in today’s Poland, somewhere at 6 o’clock in the morning, the doorbell rings, then nobody can be sure that it’s just the milkman. Is there any evidence supporting this observation other than the dramatic detention of the former minister of internal affairs, Janusz Kaczmarek?4 Dear Vašek, unfortunately in Poland somebody is arrested all the time in the lights of the TV cameras: physicians, entrepreneurs, politicians of the opposition. For example, Emil Wa˛sacz, former minister of the treasury, was detained, filmed, driven in a police car through half of Poland, and freed soon thereafter because the court decided that his detention had been illegal. The former minister of housing construction, Barbara Blida, was awakened at 6 o’clock: it was filmed by police cameras. In the course of the search she committed suicide—shot herself in the bathroom. The cameras didn’t film that, but public opinion till today still cannot know the full truth about this tragedy. Wellknown physicians are being detained in the light of TV cameras in order to be accused of corruption, or even, in one case, of murder.5

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Visits at 6 o’clock in the morning—as explained at a press conference by the minister of justice—are the norm in Poland, as they are throughout the entire civilized world. I have to admit that I have a different image of the civilized norms of a democratic state. va´ clav havel asks me: Do you think that the Polish system of justice is still independent from the executive? Kaczmarek was freed the next day, and the Constitutional Tribunal practically swept away the lustration law of the Kaczyn´ski government, thereby acknowledging that Bronisław Geremek and others who had called for civil disobedience were right. I answer: I think that the courts are still autonomous, which is clearly a cause for regret for Jarosław Kaczyn´ski and the minister of justice Zbigniew Ziobro.6 This is why they are renewing their efforts to limit this autonomy by abolishing the independence of judicial self-governance, intervening in the filling of posts, trying to limit the immunity of the justices, and also through brutal attacks on the Constitutional Tribunal and public blackmailing of judges of the Tribunal with materials from the archives of the Communist security service. I look at it with disgust because I remember all too well the submissiveness of the courts in the period of dictatorship when all sentences were given according to the will of the ruling Communists. Today, fortunately, it’s not yet that bad, although the prosecutors’ offices have become almost completely subject to political pressure. After the nomination of Anna Fotyga to the position of minister of foreign affairs—her qualifications are so peculiar that I will leave them without comment—Jarosław Kaczyn´ski declared: “We have won back the Foreign Ministry.” For myself I will add that they also won back the prosecutors’ offices. But

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they still didn’t win back the courts, which means that there still exist in Poland judges who have the courage to defend the spirit and the letter of the law in spite of attacks and insinuations from the executive branch. Both the prime minister and the president of the state took the liberty of unleashing such attacks. They are both lawyers, which adds a little spice to that practice. Probably neither of them is aware that they are slowly turning into caricatures of Communist Party Secretaries, for whom breaking the independence of the courts was a mandate of the proletarian revolution. The “moral revolution” according to the Kaczyn´ski brothers is a caricature of those habits; as of now it is more toothless, but it’s equally disgusting and ignoble. The lustration law was abolished by the Constitutional Tribunal. Glory to the judges of the Tribunal. It’s enough to study the content of that law to recognize the intention of the then– governmental coalition that forced this law—anticonstitutional and despicable—through the Parliament; and to recognize the vision of a state to which the Jarosław Kaczyn´ski party strives. This is the vision of an authoritarian state, in which—I repeat— each citizen is to feel suspected and threatened. The judges of the Constitutional Tribunal endured insults from the prime minister; these were accompanied by his forewarnings of a limitation on the powers of the Tribunal. That, too, does not augur well for the future. Then Havel asks me how I explain the wide support for the Law and Justice Party and whether I think this party could win the elections.7 I answer: Yes, the party of the Kaczyn´ski brothers may win the elections, and enjoys significant support on the part of society according to all opinion polls. Why is that?

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In your latest book, Vašek, To the Castle and Back, you recall your speech from February 1990 and “shouts of protest from a crowd otherwise favorably disposed to me when I announced that we were going to abolish the death penalty; for some reason, people are very fond of the death penalty.”8 And here is the key to my answer to Václav Havel’s question. Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyn´ski mastered to perfection the art of tapping into fear and what is most primitive and despicable in the human soul. His politics of permanent war and baiting aimed at “pseudoelites and eggheads”9 turned out to be amazingly effective; he was able to persuade many people that Poland is ruled by a secret pact that ought to be tracked down and destroyed. A large part of our society—I say it with anxiety, sadness, and shame—believed in this conspiratorial vision of the world, believed that repressions and the death penalty, eavesdroppings and police provocations, could be a prescription for the diseases of Polish democracy. That, too, doesn’t augur well for the future. va´ clav asks me further: Do I consider the current situation in Poland exceptional for Central and Eastern Europe, or could it be placed in a broader regional context? Do I notice similar tendencies in other countries? My answer: Poland is not an exception, though it’s perhaps in the avant-garde of some ominous tendencies. Because similar dangers are present in all of post-Communist Europe, including the Czech Republic. I will again quote from the latest book by Václav Havel: “Shortly after the revolution and the arrival of freedom, a very special kind of anticommunist obsession established itself in

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public life. It was as though some people—people who had been silent for years, who had voted obediently in communist elections, who had thought only of themselves and had been careful not to get into trouble—now felt the sudden need to compensate in some aggressive way for their earlier humiliation, or for the feeling or suspicion that they might have been found wanting. And so they took aim at the people who least held it against them, that is, the dissidents. They still felt, unconsciously, that the dissidents were the voice of their bad conscience, living proof that you didn’t have to completely knuckle under if you didn’t want to. “It’s interesting that, at a time when dissidents appeared to be a tiny group of crazy Don Quixotes, the aversion to them was not as intense as it was later, when history, as it were, had proven them right. . . . Ultimately, many a new anticommunist vented more anger against the dissidents than against the representatives of the old regime.”10 When Jarosław says he represents ordinary people, and not the elites, he appeals to a similar stereotype. And yet he’s not telling the truth: we are all ordinary people, but Kaczyn´ski taps into what in each of us ordinary people is petty and envious. And we both know, Václav Havel better than I, that there are times when the winds favor what’s mean in us rather than what’s noble. I repeat: Poland is not an exception. I could give multiple examples from other countries. A Slovak coalition (Fico, Mecˇiar, Slota), the Euroskeptic rhetoric of Václav Klaus, the anti-Communist radicalism of Viktor Orbán, or the post-Communist radicalism of Viktor Yanukovych.11 But the real model is the consistent and effective authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin. We should look at

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the practices of Putin to understand the nature of the threats to democracy in the countries of post-Communist Europe. va´ clav havel asks me: What is the most pleasantly surprising and what is the worst news from Poland in recent weeks? I think that the best news from Poland is the growing criticism of the governance of Jarosław Kaczyn´ski, and the worst is the fact that despite this criticism, Kaczyn´ski governance still endures and each day causes damage to polish democracy. could you, asks va´ clav, list three names of Polish politicians who should be kept in mind? I answer: the names worth keeping in mind are Zbigniew Ziobro, Roman Giertych, and Father Tadeusz Rydzyk. Each of those names is a symbol of evolving tendencies and represents the worst face of Polish tradition and Polish politics. Authoritarianism, mendacity, ethnic exclusionism, and the fanaticism of religious chauvinism. I think of this as the Polish version of the Spanish nacionalcatolicismo à la General Franco. And that’s it for my answers to Václav Havel’s questions. I augment it only with a typically Polish reflection: Poland is a country where no nastiness ever wins out in the end. In Poland everything is possible: even change for the better. Warm greetings from Warsaw, Vašek.

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The President and the Playwright Warsaw, November 2008

On Existential Revolution Warsaw, November 15, 2008

This conversation took place at Gazeta Wyborcza the day before the Warsaw premiere of Havel’s play Leaving. It happened almost exactly thirty years after the first meetings of Havel and Michnik on the Polish Czechoslovak border, twenty years after the beginning of the Velvet Revolution, and five years after Havel concluded his final term as president of the Czech Republic.

michnik: I would like to start from what happened forty years ago with the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. In your opinion, would it have been possible for Czechoslovakia to avoid the invasion had its politics been different? havel: Even then I thought, and still think today, there was a way to avert this threat, but the leaders of the country at that time did not see it. Of course, I’m not talking about military resistance, but about something like a “moral mobilization.” We had already been through something like that before the Munich Agreement, when the Czechoslovak state clearly indicated that it was ready to defend itself.1 In 1968 the proposal to intervene was

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supposedly passed by the Soviet Politburo with a small majority of votes. Perhaps the outcome would have been different if in the Kremlin they had been aware that our country was not always a submissive partner, but that it sometimes knows how to put its foot down. But those are only speculations, and above all, such an option was beyond the mental horizon of our leaders at the time. Those were people with a Communist past, and events had simply been getting ahead of them and they could hardly keep up. Perhaps if they had tried to give events a different tone, the threat of invasion might have been lessened, but it seems to me that it would not have ended well anyway. Perhaps some Czech Jaruzelski could have appeared, who would say we’ll make order ourselves. That’s one possibility, though I don’t know any Czech general who would have taken it upon himself to make such a decision.2 michnik: And what were people thinking then? Did you yourself expect an invasion? havel: That whole summer before the invasion I lived with particularly heavy stress. On the one hand, one could speak freely, form associations, political prisoners were being freed. . . . So there emerged thousands of previously unimagined possibilities and reasons to be euphoric. But on the other hand, the majority of us felt it was not certain that we would get away with it. Yet we took comfort in the thought that it was unlikely that tanks would roll in at a time of détente, in the middle of Europe, in an era of nuclear weapons. And when the tanks indeed rolled in, our amazement was accompanied by a nationwide resistance, not of a military kind, but one characterized by a peculiar urban folklore. The cities were full of protest banners, people helped each other, even thieves in prison issued a statement that they would

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no longer steal. I spent the first days of the occupation in Liberec, and I saw how the local hippies—the scourge of the town— came to the Town Hall and offered their services to the head of the Town Council. They were given the task of taking off the street signs, as it would not have been appropriate for the police to do that. In the course of the night the task was accomplished, and by morning all the street signs were piled in the corridors of the Town Hall, and the leader of the group asked for their next task. So it was a fabulous time. But I was aware that it wouldn’t last long. And indeed, general apathy and demoralization set in even more quickly than I had expected. michnik: What can you tell us about the differences of opinion in the Kremlin concerning the invasion? havel: I have learned that in the Politburo there was indeed discussion about it and that the decision to invade was passed by just one vote. I even heard that Khrushchev, who had no political function then, ran to the Kremlin and tried to get inside to advise the comrades against it. He believed that it would damage the Communist movement throughout the world, which is indeed what happened. So if there is any lasting positive side to the invasion, it’s that it opened the eyes of the Western left. The aggression against Czechoslovakia took away their illusions. michnik: We all know what the so-called normalization3 was about. But what was its moral and social impact on society? havel: Society quickly understood what was expected of it. The deal was: if you support the occupation, or at least remain silent about it, and not protest it, then we will let you get on with your lives. We will allow you to build your dachas and grow your vegetables. But the condition is that you will not protest, that you will decorate the facades of your buildings with slogans glorifying

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the Party, that you will regularly send telegrams with greetings to the congresses of the Communist Party, or that you will declare on such occasions a rise in industrial quotas. In short, if you give the regime a break, the regime will give you a break in return. This was a time of breaking spines that was worrisome and painful and which furthermore had arrived remarkably quickly. Only in this context could one understand the self-immolation of Jan Palach.4 It was an extreme expression of the tension in a society in which cleansings and amazing turnabouts by many people had started—when one who’d been known as a person of the Prague Spring yesterday became a dedicated “normalizer” today who fired people from their jobs. One could see how the leaders of the state were taking steps back and sanctioning successive concessions. But for several months it was still possible to discuss these things and write about them in public, because freedom of the press was being limited gradually. michnik: When we met in 1978 in the mountains along the PolishCzechoslovak border, we didn’t have any clear vision of an end to Communism. You wrote your essay “The Power of the Powerless,” which was an answer to the question how to build freedom and dignity under the conditions of Communist oppression. This essay became a manifesto of the democratic opposition in all the countries of the Communist Bloc. And when in 1989 we came to Prague and then to visit you at Hra´decˇek,5 you were still skeptical. You poked fun at me because of the fact that on the basis of crossing the Charles Bridge and seeing four foreigners playing guitars, I had forecast the end of Communism in Czechoslovakia. Everybody thought like you then, and nobody believed that it was already cracking and in a short while would turn into rubble. So how was it that so soon after our meeting came the Velvet Revolution? 150

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havel: For some time already during this “normalization,” I had been saying something different. After the establishment of Charter 77, Western journalists said repeatedly: you are a small group of bickering intellectuals. You don’t have the workers behind you. You don’t have the support of millions of people, and you are just beating your heads against a wall. And I told them that under totalitarian conditions we never know what sleeps under the surface, because one cannot check that out. We had neither opinion polls nor free media, but there was something going on in the subconscious of society. I increasingly felt that sooner or later something would crack; that it couldn’t go on like that forever, because one could notice an ever bigger pressure on this shell. And it was clear that an accidental event could provoke huge changes. And then it would be like the rolling snowball that grows and provokes an avalanche. I was also saying that under totalitarianism sometimes one voice—like the voice of Solzhenitsyn—might carry more weight than millions of voters. But then we don’t know when that snowball will turn into an avalanche. I also didn’t know that, and was surprised when it happened in November. But of course it was related to the general crisis of the system — economic, social—but also its cowardice. After all, they had in their hands all possible instruments of power to lead to confrontation and to defeat us. Except that they didn’t have the energy for it any more. michnik: You mention Solzhenitsyn. He went through a peculiar evolution. In his later years he became famous for his tribute to the czarist regime, his demand for a reinstatement of the death penalty, and his support of Putin. What had happened to Solzhenitsyn? havel: He’s not the only one. In Russia you can meet many members of the former democratic opposition, our friends with 151

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whom we had complete understanding, and who today have also gone through a certain evolution. You will recognize this in the moment when the conversation turns to Chechnya or Georgia. In Russian society there lurks a peculiar complex, an anxiety as to whether it will be taken seriously in the West. This, the biggest country in the world, appears to itself to be small, and that is why it glances at neighboring states as though it doesn’t know exactly where Russia begins and where it ends. So when suddenly somebody plucks that national string, he’s treating it like a medicine— of course, a false medicine—for those complexes. If I were an egoist, I would say, thank God that it is as it is, because otherwise we would not have had Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. After all, that is what they were writing about, and also about where, in all of this, there is a place for God— or is not. Nevertheless, this situation is worrisome, and I’m afraid that the European Union knows very little about it, as it puts economic interests above a respect for human rights. Sometimes it borders on the politics of appeasement. We have just had three important books come out in the Czech Republic—by Alexander Litvinenko, Anna Politkovskaya, and Alexander Yakovlev.6 Once you read them, your hair will stand on end in horror. This system of Putin’s doesn’t even have a name yet. michnik: What do you mean? It’s called Putinism. But its inventor is not Putin, it’s Lukashenko,7 and Putin is just a plagiarizer. havel: At the last meeting of Forum 2000, one of the representatives of the Russian democratic opposition said that Putin can’t stand Lukashenko because he sees in him a caricature of himself. michnik: We are dealing with a certain paradox. On the one hand, when you’re walking on the streets of Prague, Olomouc, Brno, Warsaw, or Kraków, you see a positive change: handsome build-

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ings, better streets, fantastic stores, full bookshops. On the other hand, in all our countries one can observe the progressive degradation—not to say, degeneration— of the political class. And when you look at the world at large, you won’t see politicians whom you can admire or who could be leaders of Europe or the world. So how to explain the contradiction that when it comes to civilization we are changing for the better and after dictatorship we have democracy, but at the same time we see a progressive process of deterioration of the political class, followed by the deterioration of democratic institutions. In Russia pluralism has been annihilated, but in Poland or the Czech Republic we have a choice. But sometimes, I think, it’s a choice between Putinism and Berlusconi-ism.8 What does the political, ideological, and spiritual map of the post-Soviet countries look like today? havel: On the one hand, everything’s getting better and better: every week there’s a new generation of cell phones. But in order to use one, you need very detailed instructions. And so you read those instructions instead of books, and in your free time you watch TV, where a good-looking, tanned young man in a commercial shouts how happy he is that he has swimming trunks from Company X. So along with the development of this consumerist global civilization grows a mass of people who do not create any values. They are only intermediaries—public relations agents. Supposedly you have a huge choice of goods in the supermarket, but in reality it’s a false variety. Centers of social self-control, small shops, little bistros—all of that goes hand in hand with the destruction of the natural environment. All of that seems very dangerous, and I don’t know whether civilization on its own will come to its senses without huge quakes or tsunamis. In any case I feel the need for some existential revolution. Something

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has to change in the mentality of people. This cannot be fixed by any technocratic trick. In today’s world, political personality loses its meaning. What counts above all is the short-term perspective. On both the left and the right the ideology of growth and the cult of novelty rule. It’s just like laundry detergent: it reads “new,” but the next day you see a newer one, and you don’t know what the difference is. Politicians, wanting to achieve success, cannot challenge this cult of novelty, change, progress, and growth. After all, they are just reflections of their societies. I also do not see in our world any great authorities—moral or spiritual. But in order not to be completely skeptical, I do believe that what does make sense are various civic organizations: unions, associations, initiatives. In the Czech Republic there are several thousand NGOs—so-called foundations—which are not well known, but are important in their microcommunities. A diverse civil society is one of the defenses against the precarious effects of civilization. michnik: On the one hand, in Europe we have both a process of integration—symbolized by the euro and the Schengen zone9— and on the other, processes of disintegration as in the Basque country, Corsica, or Belgium. When Czechoslovakia was falling apart, I was full of bad premonitions. But today everybody tells me that the relations between Czechs and Slovaks have never been as good as they are today. How do you account for that? havel: Nationalism emerged in part as a means of defending against the homogenizing pressure of global civilization. When you disembark at the airport in Tokyo or Moscow, you can’t really tell where you are. With a given number of prisoners, the smaller the cell, the more they will fight with each other. But the CzechoSlovak case shows something different. It often happens that a

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national community has to experience a period of sovereignty in order to understand why integration makes sense. The integration of clearly self-defined groups is much less difficult if they have had a taste of sovereignty. In any case, this is how I explain to myself the Czecho-Slovak case. michnik: In America, Obama said, “Choose between hope and cynicism.” Of course, this is an electoral slogan. But the more I think about it, the more I think that politics in post-Communist countries are so polluted with cynicism that the slogan may make sense for us, and that we are not condemned to cynicism, and that we could try to choose hope. What do you think of that? havel: For the past twenty years we witnessed different efforts to introduce change, to introduce some moral order. These efforts were not successful. Society simply has to be mature enough for that. In our case, things come in twenty-year cycles—1918, 1938, 1968, 1989 (with a one-year lag). The need for change cannot just be a dream of the intellectuals; it has to be desired by the society as a whole. When a new generation grows, no longer polluted by Communism and “normalization,” then those cynics will become less and less relevant, and they will be forced out of public life. And I hope that the ideal of change will then have a chance to be realized. michnik: I won’t ask you about lustration, which we’ve already discussed many times, but I can’t not ask you about the case of Milan Kundera. I read your statement, and I’m completely with you on that. In all the post-Communist countries we have warehouses full of narcotics, that is, the archives of the secret police. And we have addicts who are supposed to guard that stuff but who are constantly inhaling it and stepping forward to tell us who was an informer. What is the mechanism behind the fact

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that someone could find a piece of paper not even signed by Kundera and suddenly the Czech newspapers announce: “Kundera is no longer God!” He never was God, just a writer. What does that mean? havel: The whole problem was poorly handled in all the postCommunist countries. Some did it better, some worse, but none did it well. This is clearly a matter that needs to be addressed. We cannot ignore it and say it doesn’t interest us, because it’s a part of our life, after all. After the revolution I proposed that a group of five be created, people who fully deserved the public’s trust, intelligent people from dissident circles, who would have a year to consider how to deal with it. But instead of that, hasty decisions were made: the lustration law, its amendments, and so on. So now there are all sorts of absurdities, like announcing on television a list of names, with millions of people watching, and then admitting that they in fact don’t know whether those files were about those informed on, or about the informers. If one is interested one can go and find these answers for oneself. But who out of those millions would bother to check? This is completely irresponsible behavior: destroying people’s lives by putting them all into the same basket. michnik: But this is also some sort of indication that there exists a certain need on the part of society. havel: This problem is also connected with the direction our civilization is taking. The media are interested in profit. And as the old saying goes, when a roofer falls from the roof, it’s news, but when he doesn’t, it isn’t. So if they can say that Y is an informer, or got divorced, or raped somebody, they will do it because they

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profit from it. And for some media, profit is more important than content or truth. michnik: If someone who is twenty today would read your essay “The Power of the Powerless,” what kind of lessons would he take from it in these times? What advice would you give to a young man today if he asked you how to live? havel: The elementary imperative, “to live in truth”—which has its tradition in Czech philosophy, but in fact has biblical roots— doesn’t mean only to have or to transmit information, because information, like viruses, circulates in the air, and one person catches more of it and the other less. But truth is something else, because one guarantees it with one’s whole self. Truth is built upon responsibility. And this is an imperative that can be applied at any time. Of course, today it takes different forms. Today, fortunately, one does not have to put up in the window of every shop a portrait of Havel, Klaus, or Kaczyn´ski, and of course, there are no totalitarian pressures any more, but that doesn’t mean we have won. What I call “existential revolution” is still a responsibility of ours, although it looks a little different in different places. But in the end, it’s about standing up for your principles, and vouching for your own truth. Just as Anna Politkovskaya guaranteed hers with her own life. That example refers to the fairly specific context of Putinism, but the same obligation obtains in America as well. And speaking of “The Power of the Powerless,” I’d like to remind you that you bear some of the guilt there, because in 1978, when we met on the Polish-Czech border, we decided to work on a joint Polish-Czech volume of essays. And it was you who asked me to write the opening text for it, and that was in fact “The Power of the Powerless.”

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michnik: So now after thirty years I should sit down and write you a response. Thank you, Vašek! It Could Be Me, But We Don’t Know That It Is. Warsaw, November 17, 2008

Two days later, on the day that Havel’s play Leaving opened in the Ateneum Theater in Warsaw, he again visited Gazeta Wyborcza for a meeting open to a larger audience. Michnik, who hosted the meeting, introduced Havel.

adam michnik: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. First of all I want to welcome our guest Václav Havel, who is not only president, playwright, essayist, and a magnificent European democrat, but above all a long-standing collaborator of Gazeta Wyborcza. I want to welcome the beautiful Daša Havlová. I welcome Mr. Ambassador of the Czech Republic. To put it briefly, Vašek, you are among friends, and I don’t know whether at any newspaper in Prague you would find so many enthusiasts, but I take comfort in the fact that no one is a prophet in his own country. The main moderator today will be Remek Grzela, and the translator—a star among Polish translators and a collaborator of Gazeta Wyborcza—will be Andrzej Jagodzin´ski. remigiusz grzela: Mr. President, Leaving was written after your twenty-year silence as a playwright. How could you stand such a long period without writing? havel: As an author I went silent, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t write. Never in my life have I written so much as I did during my tenure as president. I would never be able to deliver a speech written by someone else. So every weekend I wrote speeches, or

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drafts of statements, memoranda, instructions. . . . I know it’s uncharacteristic for a playwright to drop out for thirteen years to become a president, and then to return to writing. Today I also know it’s not easy. grzela: Mr. President, after reading your autobiographical book To the Castle and Back,10 I have the impression that you didn’t have a love relationship with your presidential literature. havel: Some time ago, my friend the late Kurt Vonnegut said that a writer is someone who hates to write. Very often I force myself to write. I sit down and I don’t know how to start. But once I get started, it even begins to amuse me. While I was president, the worst thing about writing was that I couldn’t put it off, reschedule it. I couldn’t wait for a better mood or for the creative spirit. grzela: In To the Castle and Back you quote from the orders you gave to your staffers. At times they read like literature. havel: It’s possible that I treated those memos, initially not for publication, as a substitute genre. I wrote them weekly, and accumulated several thousand pages. Only a small part ended up in my book. Normally it’s the president who worries about what his staffers will write about him when he leaves office. In this case, it was just the opposite. They were afraid of what I might write about them. grzela: You constantly reprimand them for being inattentive. And ˇ echtacˇek didn’t refill your cigarette you’re annoyed that Mr. R lighter, that Mrs. Ouškova wants more for laundering your shirts, and on the weekend, when you are trying to write an important speech, nobody wants to come and fix the printer. Were those orders a kind of game with your staffers? havel: On the one hand those were instructions, but on the other hand, they were in effect my diary. I simply had to write about

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my worries. When something bothered me, I wrote it down and it stopped bothering me. grzela: You told Karel Hvížd’ala, whose conversation with you is a part of the book, that you don’t like yourself. Mr. President, what is it about yourself that you don’t like? havel: I don’t like myself as such. I look in the mirror and get very irritated. grzela: You also wrote about your work on Leaving and said that the Velvet Revolution caught you at a time when you had a halfwritten play. So how had the play actually come about? havel: In the late eighties, for reasons still unclear to me, I had gotten interested in the situation of a highly placed person who suddenly loses his position and his whole world collapses. So I’d had this theme in mind long before I found myself in politics. I don’t know why it interested me at that time. Perhaps I was inspired by the situation of some of my friends— Communist reformers from 1968 —who in the process of political purges were stripped of all positions, and whose world had collapsed. Or maybe it was influenced by your countryman Jan Kott, who wrote fantastic and very inspiring essays on Shakespeare, especially on King Lear. And when our revolution came, or a revolution in quotation marks, I put aside the manuscript of the play. Or perhaps I threw it out? I thought that this theme, in the new situation, can no longer be interesting for me. But when I finished my tenure in the Castle, the manuscript suddenly and miraculously reappeared. It turned out that it had been salvaged and kept by a lady who was my neighbor and who had probably found it in a trash bin. That gave me the impulse, but I didn’t use that text. I began to write from scratch.

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grzela: The main character of the play, Chancellor Vilém Rieger, ends his tenure and has to move out of his official residence. In your play, you use populist speech, slogans, demagoguery, but at a certain point we start hearing great literature. Where did that idea come from? havel: King Lear is about a ruler who loses power and how the sycophants around him turn into traitors. It’s about the collapse of his world. By inserting quotations into the play from King Lear and The Cherry Orchard, I wanted to place the theme in a broader context, but also to pay tribute to two great playwrights, Shakespeare and Chekhov. grzela: Whom else might we find in your canon of great literature? havel: In my early youth, the author who had the greatest impact on me and whom I liked the most was Franz Kafka. Whenever I read him, I thought that if he hadn’t written it, I would have had to. Later on I was influenced by the wave of the so-called Theater of the Absurd—Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Genet. grzela: You are a playwright whom directors probably don’t like very much. By providing very precise stage directions, you are in fact directing the texts on paper. You indicate how the actors enter, you describe the costumes, and even such details as the inscription “I love you” on Rieger’s hat. havel: The first reason is that I’m a pedant. The second is that for forty years I did not have any direct contact with theater and was never able to be present at the birth of a play on stage. The third reason: the genre that I create demands information about who is on stage, from what side he enters, where he exits, et cetera. I have many years of experience with directors, and I know that if

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a director tries to enliven the play, it usually becomes more boring than the original. grzela: Do you get upset with directors? havel: If I do, I try to quickly control it, because I’m aware that the text of the play is only half-finished, and the director can do with it what he wants. If that bothered me in some fundamental way I would be writing novels. grzela: In the text of Leaving, you suggest to the actors that they perform badly. You introduce to the plot a Voice that reminds them not to try to make the play any funnier. Is that Voice you? havel: I am a shy man, and I don’t think I would be able to write about myself openly. On the other hand, I do want to write something from myself or about myself. That is why in this play I chose a compromise: it could be me, but we don’t know that it is. grzela: Who is Ferdinand Vaneˇk today, a member of the intelligentsia and the cult hero of your early plays? havel: Maybe some time I will write something with Ferdinand Vaneˇk in the main role and then I will consider in what situation he might now find himself. I created him as a mirror in which the other characters are reflected. grzela: Ferdinand Vaneˇk also became a character in the plays of other authors, your dissident friends. He began to live his own life in a different style from yours.11 havel: I was pleased that Vaneˇk inspired my friends and that they saw him as interesting material. It didn’t bother me that he began to be different, in keeping with their temperament and writing. grzela: In Pavel Kohout’s play Atest, Ferdinand Vaneˇk has a dog that he has to register. The dog happens to be of a certain Czech breed. What are the characteristics of that breed?12

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havel: My friend Pavel Kohout had a dog and loved him a lot. He wrote a novel about him called Where Is the Dog Buried? 13 In fact Pavel’s dog was a dachshund. In our dissident days the security police knew how much Kohout loved the dog, and poisoned it. grzela: Mr. President, in 2005 you wrote: “And here again we are on the subject of Czech small-mindedness. Look after Number One, don’t get mixed up in other people’s business, keep your head down, don’t look up—we’re surrounded by mountains, and those whirlwinds from the outside world will blow over our head, and we can go on burrowing away in our own little backyard.”14 havel: This is about a certain way of behaving that is not genetically determined but shaped by historical conditions. I liked to observe this phenomenon critically. Obviously, the fact that such an archetype of behavior exists does not mean that all Czechs behave like that. grzela: I asked two distinguished writers, contributors to Gazeta, to formulate one question each for you. Here is the question from Hanna Krall: “Did your defense of Milan Kundera arise from a conviction that one has to be magnanimous, or in fact from your own magnanimity?” havel: This defense arose neither from my magnanimity nor from my playing the magnanimous part. It arose from utterly cool reflection on the issue. grzela: The question from the second writer, Mariusz Szczygieł, is: “In Poland they hunt down sins. In Bohemia, they don’t. Is this the result of a generous forbearance, or rather of indifference toward everything?” havel: The Communism we lived through was the first Communism in history; so our post-Communism is also the first in

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history. The lack of any possibility of relying on historical examples makes it more difficult for us to deal with our past. We simply move as if blindfolded, and we cannot say that any other post-Communist country is in a better situation than we are. Perhaps Germany is in a slightly better situation.

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When Socrates Became Pericles Václav Havel’s “Great History,” October 2011 Adam Michnik Translated by Agnieszka Marczyk

This essay by Adam Michnik was written for the seventy-fifth birthday of Václav Havel, and published as a separate issue of Gazeta Wyborcza. It was preceded by the greeting:

Dear Vašek, Celebrating your seventy-fifth birthday, we thank you for your plays, essays, and incarcerations. Up with “the power of the powerless,” which will always be mightier than all dictatorships! May you live a hundred years, and more! Adam Michnik and your friends from Gazeta Wyborcza

I

In one of his “Letters to Dubenka,” Bohumil Hrabal wrote: Dear Miss April, On the day when Mr. Václav Havel became the new president of this republic of ours, when enthusiasm so overflowed that streams of tears swelled Vltava’s waters, I walked along 165

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the Royal Road, which was so plastered with writing that no fragment of wall and no patch of storefront window were left bare, as the resounding emotions and gestures of students expressed the desire that a man as young as they were should be president, a man who was the measure not only of our political life but also the measure of the world . . .1 Indeed, Havel was then—at the end of 1989 and beginning of 1990 —the indisputable leader of the Velvet Revolution; he was worshiped. At the backstage of a theater an eminent professor is said to have told him that he was greater than God.2 His candidacy for the presidency was supported by the street, by organizations from democratic opposition circles, by every public institution, the Women’s League, and even the Czech People’s Army. Every member of Parliament voted for him, even those who, as Havel would recall later, “only a few days or weeks before . . . had loudly approved my prosecution and imprisonment.” The Parliament was surrounded by a crowd offering bread and salt—a sign of their calling for reconciliation and a vote for Havel. His name and pictures were everywhere. This writer, dissident, and political prisoner became the face of the new Czechoslovakia and a star of international media. “Later on,” he recalled many years afterward, “I had to pay a high price for that adulation.” People’s rage at their “own former servility,” he wrote, “was not the only reason for the disfavor into which I later fell. A no less serious, and perhaps even more significant, reason was the fact that I often embodied the minority position and thus didn’t entirely fit the generally received notion of the politician as a mirror of prevailing moods or opinions or tendencies or mentalities. Though it was certainly not my intention, many saw me as their own bad conscience, not only in the period of dissent but also when I was president. And that kind of thing3 cannot be forgiven.” 166

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II

During the Communist era, Havel heard all kinds of theories directed against him, including, for example, that he was the bourgeois child of a family of multimillionaires who had owned half of Prague. He patiently explained that his father had been a real estate developer (he had built Barrandov, Prague’s exclusive residential district) and that, after the February 1948 Communist coup d’état, the family had been threatened with expulsion from the city, their wealth confiscated, and Václav’s path toward higher education blocked. He began work as a laboratory technician, meanwhile taking high school classes at night. He later remarked that if it were not for the February 1948 coup, he probably would have studied philosophy while enjoying undeserved privileges and ended up as something between a scholar and a bon vivant. Havel began early to write, to work with student avant-garde theaters, and to express his political views. In the 1960s, his first plays, Garden Party and Memorandum, were staged. At that time, he was also an editor of the literary journal Tvárˇ, which was soon broken up by the Communist Party nomenklatura. During the Prague Spring, he belonged to the circle of independent radicals who criticized Communist reformers for too much caution and lack of imagination regarding the intentions of the Soviet Union. During the era of “normalization,” after the Soviet intervention, he was banned from publishing altogether. In the words of a Czech publicist, society fell “into a moral abyss.” The fall engulfed many of Havel’s acquaintances.

III

Even in those gloomy times, the esprit of a man of the theater never left Havel. As early as January 1969, he found wiretapping equipment in his Prague apartment. The policeman whom he summoned 167

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refused to write a report and demanded the return of the apparatus. At first, Havel described the incident in the press (it was still possible), causing quite a scandal. He then made it into an amusing anecdote, which he told with verve to entertain company. In later years, from 1970 to 1974, he and his wife, Olga, lived in Hrádecˇek, their little house in the Sudeten mountains. Secret police agents were always shadowing him, every weekday and every holiday, in the summer and in the wintertime. Pavel Kosatík, Olga Havlová’s biographer, describes an occasion when Havel took pity on agents who were freezing at his front door and brought them some grog. At first, in accordance with regulations, they refused, but they soon emptied the glasses left behind by the “suspect.” Václav’s Samaritan gestures infuriated Olga, but Jacek Kuron´, when he was running for president of the Polish Republic, visited Havel at Hrádecˇek and listened to these stories with satisfaction and understanding. Kuron´’s own disposition was similar. On another occasion, when Havel was driving, he noticed that a secret police vehicle that had been following him had fallen into a ditch. He stopped and pulled the agents out. In the 1980s, in conversation with Karel Hvížd’ala, Havel remembered those days: I was constantly “shadowed”; there were interrogations; the local authorities plotted against me; I was under house arrest several times, and this was made more piquant by insults and threats, “unknown perpetrators” broke into our dwelling and vandalized it, or they did all sorts of damage to my car. It was an exciting time, what with attacks by the police, escaping from shadows, crawling through the woods, hiding out in the flats of coconspirators, house searches, and dramatic moments when important documents were eaten.

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It was also at this time that we had meetings with the Polish dissidents on our common border . . . To which Hvížd’ala adds, “The notorious antihiker Havel was compelled to walk to the summit of Sneˇžka4 five times, but there was a reward: he was able to meet and establish permanent friendships with Adam Michnik, Jacek Kuron´, and other members of KOR, the Workers’ Defense Committee.”5 Indeed, it was then, in the summer of 1978 on Mount S´niez˙ka, that my personal adventure with Václav Havel began.

IV

It was an important meeting, a symbolic confirmation of the shared aims and values of the democratic opposition in Poland and Czechoslovakia. It was when we, people from KOR and Charter 77, prepared a joint statement for the tenth anniversary of the Prague Spring, the Polish March of 1968, and the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. I listened to Havel’s conversation with Kuron´. How close they were in their anti-Communism and antifascism, their faith in the significance of building institutions of civil society, their understanding of the dissident movements that each was creating. Jacek had a rather aphilosophical mentality; action was his philosophy. Politics was a realm where Jacek, a passionate educator, was in his element. He was already famous as a talented speaker at rallies. Václav was more of an intellectual; his arguments had philosophical referents, he invoked Heidegger and Patocˇka. I was struck by how he evaded all attempts at simplistic classification: he was not a mutinous Communist (unlike Jacek), nor was he a Catholic. He was neither a conservative nor

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a liberal, nor was he a Social Democrat. He was understated, quiet, maintaining a writer’s and philosopher’s distance from sordid reality. Simply put, he was a democrat, a shy, gentle, and modest man with great courage, imagination, and determination. At the end of the meeting, Václav took out bread, cheese, and cold cuts from his backpack—to treat the Poles who came without food. He also took out a bottle that showed a man in hunting gear on the label. It was vodka called Myslivecká. He said: “Since we don’t have socialism with a human face, at least we have a vodka with a human face.” And we drank. This event has been called an act of heroism (the consequences for all of us, but especially for the Czechs, could have been very unpleasant), but it was also comical. We had to be amused by the foreseeable reaction of the security service agents who would hear about our meeting. A few criminals from both countries meeting illegally, declaring the need for friendship and cooperation between nations—there was something theatrical and absurd in all this. Oh well, I thought, theater of the absurd is Havel’s specialty. The theater of the absurd, he later explained, is neither pathetic nor didactic. It tends to be “decadently joking in tone,” but is not nihilist. It “does not offer us consolation or hope. It merely reminds us how we are living: without hope. And that is the essence of its warning.”6 For a few months in 1974, Havel did physical work in a brewery. The experience became the basis for the plot of his play Audience. The brewery foreman, asked by his superiors to inform on Vaneˇk, a dissident writer (and Havel’s alter ego), proposes that Vaneˇk himself prepare the denunciation. Vaneˇk refuses: “There’s a principle involved.”7 In response, the foreman launches into a monologue: And what about me? Going to drop me right in it, aren’t you? . . . Doesn’t matter about me being a right bugger. 170

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Never mind about me, I can be allowed to wallow in the slime, I’m just an ordinary brewery yokel—but a fine gentleman like you can’t participate. I can soil my hands as much as I like, as long as the gentleman stays clean. The gentleman has principles. Everything else can go hang. Just so he keeps his lily-white soul. Putting principles before people. . . . You bloody intellectuals. . . . Fine gentlemen, spouting fine words. You can afford to, because you always come out on top, you’re interesting, you always know how to wriggle out of things, you’re on top even when you’re down. . . . Principles! I’m not surprised you hang on to your bleeding principles—they come in handy, don’t they, you know how to make a mint out of ’em, you do, they give you a living— but what about me? Nobody gives me a hand. . . . I’m just about good enough to shovel the muck out of which your principles can grow, I’m good to find you cozy warm spots for you to play the hero in, and what do I get for all that— nothing but a raspberry. One fine day you will go back to your actresses, you’ll boast about the time you worked here rolling barrels, showing off what a fine big he-man you are— but what about me, eh? What about me? I ain’t got nowhere to go back to, have I? Where can I go? Who’ll take any notice of me?8 How many dissidents had to hear monologues like that one in those years . . .

V

Before meeting Havel, I read “A Place for Jonathan.” Composed in ˇ apek, the essay is as 1938 by the outstanding Czech writer Karel C 171

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good an illustration as could be found of the historical legacy with which Havel wrestled throughout his life: The entire nation, the entire Reich, has converted to faith in animalistic biologism, faith in race and other such nonsense—just look, the entire nation, including university professors, priests, men of letters, doctors, and lawyers. Do you think that this brutish doctrine could be proclaimed if every educated man in this enlightened Reich would shrug his shoulders and simply say he will not respond to base provocation and be drawn into street brawls? . . . To many, it appears that, given the global situation now, the intelligentsia has three paths open to it: shared culpability, cowardice, or martyrdom. But there is still a fourth way—refusal to betray one’s spiritual discipline, no matter how difficult the circumstances and no matter what the pressures, refusal to deny the spirit of independence and conscious awareness. . . . Can we help the world in any way? If I knew that we couldn’t, I would lay down my arms and I would be sad, but I feel that one can still . . . stand up against fanaticism and savagery, that one can still communicate rather than give orders, . . . that reason can still be universal, and experience, cognition, laws of the spirit, and laws of conscience can still have binding power.9 The Czechs, Jan Patocˇka—a great Czech philosopher—wrote, are a small European people that has had both a Great History and a Little History. Their history has been great when they independently and creatively have engaged in matters of universal significance—for example, when they formed the vanguard of the European Refor-

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mation movement and paved Western Christendom’s path toward “lay” forms of Christianity. Their history has been petty whenever the Czechs have ensconced themselves, or have been ensconced, in the “banality of provincialism.” The Stalinist era was certainly a petty time historically. The Prague Spring, on the other hand, together with the cultural ferment that preceded it, led Czechoslovakia onto the path of Great History. Czech culture—film, political ventures, literature—was conquering the world. Czechoslovakia was raising questions central for all: is there a possibility of democratic socialism, socialism with a human face? Is it possible to dismantle a Communist dictatorship peacefully? Among the voices posing these questions and seeking answers, Havel’s was an essential one. The Kremlin supplied an answer too, in the form of military intervention blocking the open road to freedom. And so, as a small nation, Czechoslovakia sought an answer to a different question. How to lose? A small nation, Milan Kundera wrote at the time, is one whose existence can be put in question at any point, one that knows it can disappear. That awareness always accompanied Czechoslovakia’s leaders, especially Edvard Beneš, the republic’s president in 1938, and Alexander Dubcˇek, the leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia at the time of the Prague Spring. Havel’s letter to Dubcˇek is a testimony to his way of thinking during that memorable year, 1968. Public opinion in Czechoslovakia was divided. Some said: let us save what can be saved. They urged Dubcˇek to make compromises and concessions. Others said: making concessions will save nothing; we lost; we could not win in a confrontation with the Soviet army. But let us lose with dignity, because dignity and truth are our greatest capital. Havel belonged to this latter group. He wrote to Dubcˇek:

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“For the world public, you are the symbol of Czechoslovakia’s experiment in ‘socialism with a human face.’ People see you as an honorable, honest, and courageous man. . . . They believe you to be incapable of betrayal.”10 Meanwhile, Havel continued, Communists who want to “restore the old order,” under the protection of Soviet tanks, “intend to turn you into the chief prosecutor of your own policies. It would be the first time you have publicly endorsed the action aimed at destroying those policies. . . . [The Communists’] desire to bring you to your knees will not be satisfied simply because you no longer have power; they need more: they need you to lose face.”11 Havel emphasized that much more than Dubcˇek’s personal honor and dignity were at stake: “There is the honor and pride of all those who had faith in your policies and who—now silenced— cling to you as their last chance, in the hope that you will salvage from the Czechoslovak experiment—and you alone can do it—the only thing that can now be salvaged: self-respect.” If you choose the path of truth, Havel explained to Dubcˇek, people will understand that “it is always possible to preserve one’s ideals and one’s backbone.” “There are moments,” he concluded, “when a politician can achieve real political success only by turning aside from the complex network of relativized political considerations, analyses, and calculations, and behaving simply as an honest person. The sudden assertion of human criteria within a dehumanizing framework of political manipulation can be like a flash of lightning illuminating a dark landscape.”12 Dubcˇek did not respond to the letter. He never denounced his own policies, but, as we know, he also did not choose loyalty to truth and a dignified defeat. He chose a strategy of concessions, silence, and waiting, which did not save him from humiliation and marginalization. “Unscathed, Švejk-like,” Dubcˇek sought to slip through history.13 Havel took a different path. 174

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VI

From a prison letter to Olga: “Fidelity and a kind of constancy are qualities I’ve always valued above all else, and I must say that as the years go by I value them more and more. This is not a conservative love for the status quo but a respect for human identity and continuity.”14

VII

Passages from Havel’s letter to Dubcˇek are important to me for sentimental reasons. In 1968, and later when I was in a Mokotów prison cell in Warsaw, I followed events in Czechoslovakia with emotions similar to Havel’s. Of course, at that time I was not familiar with Havel’s letter, but I observed the capitulation of the Prague Spring leadership with sadness. Not that long before, I had listened to the couplet “All of Poland’s waiting here / for its Dubcˇek to appear.” Now no one was waiting for anyone anymore. (It was another twenty years before that other memorable rhyme—“Havel to Wawel”—was heard in Poland.15) The suffocation of the Prague Spring and the capitulation of its Communist Party leadership (with a few exceptions, like František Kriegel) meant a farewell to belief in reformist tendencies within the Party, belief in the possibility of democratization of the system from above, belief in a new Polish October. We no longer pondered how to democratize the Communist system. We began to consider how to defend ourselves against it. The lines of Polish and Czech thought were similar: they led to the Workers’ Defense Committee and to Charter 77. First, however, it was necessary to take a close look at the Communist system, to explicate its nature from the perspective of those concerned for the values it had trampled. Leszek Kołakowski’s political essays served this purpose, as did Havel’s widely publicized 175

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letter to Gustáv Husák, the new leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party.16 After the Soviet intervention, there came the gloomy time of “normalization,” when defiant writers, philosophers, and historians could work only as waiters, boiler-room laborers, or night watchmen. “Normalization” turned Czechoslovakia into a cultural desert. It was a time of emigration for some, capitulation for others. Havel rejected the temptation to emigrate. He chose the fate of a marginalized man, a spiritual man (in Patocˇka’s sense of the word)—the fate of the dissident, risking future imprisonment or death. His letter to Husák threw down the gauntlet before the regime. Czechoslovakia is ruled by fear, Havel told the dictator openly. Fear, the result of police omnipotence, breeds duplicity and conformity, egoism, and careerism, the corrosion of all moral norms. The elites need fear so the country can be “at peace.” And indeed, there is peace—the peace of the mortuary. Havel warned the dictator: A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy cover of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undercutting it. It may be a long process, but one day it must happen: the cover will no longer hold and will start to crack.17 He reminded Husák, if a person must daily declare his adoration for a government that truly he cannot stand, “it still does not mean that he has entirely lost the use of one of the basic human senses, namely, the sense of dignity. . . . The man who can resist humiliation can quickly forget it; but the man who can long tolerate it must long remember it. In actual fact, then, nothing remains forgotten. All the fear one has endured, the dissimulation one has been forced into, all

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the painful and degrading buffoonery. . . . In these circumstances, it is hard to foresee all the feasible scenarios for a future “moment of truth”: to foresee how such a complex and undisguised degradation of the whole of society might one day demand restitution.”18 Probably none of us was able to imagine, as Havel did—with almost prophetic insight—both the Velvet Revolution and the later madness of lustration and de-Communization.

VIII

Husák’s chancellery returned Havel’s letter to him, noting that Havel had “made it available to hostile press agencies and thus revealed [his] hostility to [his] country.”19 The letter was a lightning bolt in the dark night of normalization. It was likewise a harbinger of Charter 77. The Charter was “a free, informal and open association of people of different convictions, different faiths, and different professions, who are linked by the desire, individually or jointly, to insist on the respecting of civil and human rights.”20 The Charter’s first spokesmen were Jirˇí Hájek, who had been head of the foreign ministry during the Prague Spring, Václav Havel, and Jan Patocˇka, who died in 1977, shortly after a series of long interrogations conducted by the security service. A few days before his death, Patocˇka wrote: Many ask me: will Charter 77 not make our society’s situation worse? I will answer them openly: servility never led to improving the situation, it only made things worse. The greater the fear and servility, the more the wealthy go unchecked, the more they have gone unchecked, and the more

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they will go unchecked. There is no other way to reduce their influence except to make them feel insecure when they see that injustice and discrimination do not fall into oblivion, that they do not simply vanish into thin air.21 It is fitting that Havel dedicated his now-famous essay “The Power of the Powerless” to the memory of Jan Patocˇka. It was Patocˇka who, in his Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, wrote about the solidarity of those whose belief in everyday conformity had been “shaken.” Havel understood in just this way the moral significance of the “dissident” movement (he did not like the term) that had gathered around Charter 77. As he wrote, “the truth had to be spoken loudly and collectively, regardless of the virtual certainty of sanctions and the uncertainty of any tangible results in the immediate future.”22 “The Power of the Powerless” is the most mature appraisal of the genesis, political philosophy, and ethos of the dissident movements in communist East Central Europe. During the meeting on Mount S´niez˙ka, it was agreed that we, friends from Poland and Czechoslovakia, would prepare a joint volume of articles about our experiences and prognoses. The Czechs prepared their part; we were unable to prepare ours. But we published “The Power of the Powerless” and other texts in the Polish underground quarterly Krytyka. Havel’s essay speaks of the birth of Charter 77 and its solidarity of the “shaken.” The essay treats both “the power of the powerless” (dissidents) and the “the powerlessness of the powerful” (functionaries of the regime). “The powerlessness of the powerful” is a characteristic of a governing authority that can execute repressions but is uncreative, calcified, and demoralized. Yet even those who live in lies and humiliation thirst for truth and dignity. This state of affairs “is, so to speak,” Havel wrote

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presciently, “a bacteriological weapon with which, under the right circumstances, one civilian can disarm an entire army division.” Many of Havel’s arguments coincided with the ideas of those gathered around the Workers’ Defense Committee, Kuron´’s in particular; but there were differences as well. Havel and Kuron´ both distanced themselves from the Western model of parliamentary democracy. Kuron´ held that the goal of the democratic opposition should be the emancipation of labor. Parliamentary democracy, of which Kuron´ was a proponent, guarantees freedom of choice and the pursuit of one’s goals but only during the individual’s free time. But it cannot guarantee the same freedom in the realm of labor. Kuron´ believed that the aim of the democratic opposition is the emancipation of the workers. Havel’s reservations about parliamentarianism were of a different kind: for him, the crisis of Communist dictatorship, when banal consumptionism turns into an ideology, was only one component of a much broader crisis of “technological society as a whole.” Havel adapted Heidegger’s argument that this crisis arises from human helplessness against the global power of technology, which “is out of humanity’s control, has ceased to serve us, has enslaved us and compelled us to participate in the preparation of our own destruction.” Traditional parliamentary democracy is no solution, according to Havel, because in technological society “people are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in posttotalitarian societies.” Havel did not know of a way out of the crisis, but he gave thought to an “existential revolution” leading to the “reconstitution of society.” Failing that, he would repeat after Heidegger: “Only a God can save us.”23 Havel nonetheless granted that, in a Soviet Bloc country, traditional parliamentarianism “might be an appropriate transitional

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solution that would help to restore the devastated sense of civic awareness, to renew democratic discussion, to allow for the crystallization of an elementary political plurality, an essential expression of the aims of life.”24 And he located the dissident ethos and the political project of Charter 77 within the horizon of his own philosophical vision of the future. When I first read Havel, not all of his thinking was fully clear to me, though all of it was fascinating and inspiring. I did not brood over Heidegger’s prophecies and Havel’s “existential revolution”—I knew and I saw that Havel and other dissidents were carrying out an existential revolution in their own lives and surroundings. They were choosing freedom at their own risk: the one and only way to live in truth.

IX

To live in truth meant, for Havel, to bear witness. It was in this capacity that his own “power of the powerless” consisted. His attitude while in prison testified to this power. The writer understood that the Communist government’s aim was to humiliate, debase, and defame him. During his first stay in prison, which lasted for several months in 1977, Havel made the mistake of a first-time prisoner: thinking that it was of no consequence, he submitted an application for release to the authorities. A fragment of the application, taken out of context and tendentiously commented on, was announced in the official papers. He was released. Some interpreted Havel’s release as a reward for capitulation. The slander and the accompanying misunderstandings were very difficult for him, and he long remembered them. After his arrest in 1979, he was also given to understand that he would be freed if he emigrated

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to the United States. The dissidents’ dilemma in those times was to choose between freedom in emigration or prison in the fatherland. Various choices were made. Havel chose prison. His prison letters to Olga provide a moving record of this choice. Immediately after his sentencing (to four and a half years) in January 1980, he wrote to her that he would not give in: “I’m a Czech hayseed and shall remain so.”25 Somewhat later, in August, he wondered, “Hasn’t the world around us changed? Haven’t meanings shifted in it? Why, for instance, are so many friends suddenly leaving the country?”26 He did not condemn those who were leaving. Havel well understood how one could be weary of living with constant wiretapping, the daily expectation of arrest, the fear that secret police agents would maul one’s manuscripts. Such weariness destroyed a person spiritually and physically; it led to depression and submission. And so, he wrote to Olga (September 1980): One of the more frequent themes of my meditations and daydreams are the friends that have left the country. Initially, I feel a slight nostalgia and even some envy (of their artistic achievements) and a slight anxiety (they are doing what they enjoy at last, they are involved in their work, free from endless complications, no doubt viewing our toiling and moiling as pointless now, while I on the other hand am deprived of all that, without the slightest chance of working in a theater . . .). That is how such meditations begin, and they always end with a peculiar sensation of inner joy that I am where I should be, that I have not turned away from myself, that I have not bolted for the emergency exit and that for all the privations, I am rid of the worst privation of all (one

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that I have known myself, too): the feeling that I could not measure up to my task.27 The question of “emigration as the price of freedom” exercised other prisoners and their wives, among them Václav Benda, who was sentenced at the same trial as Havel. Pavel Kosatík has written that Benda especially weighed two consequences of departing the country: “on the one hand the demoralization of friends, on the other the relatively uplifting realization that, in the end, the worst thing that can happen to a Charter 77 activist was neither death nor many years of prison, but only the offer of an émigré’s passport.”28 Benda’s wife, Kamila, with whom Olga Havlová discussed these issues extensively, formulated clear advice for the prisoners: (1) the rats are the first to leave the ship, the captain leaves last; (2) prisoners, precisely because they are in prison, do crucial work for the Charter; and (3) if someone abdicates an important mission that he himself has taken on, it typically has dangerous consequences for the rest of his life. Kamila believed that Havel’s “departure would demoralize the other dissidents and destroy the moral credibility that he enjoyed in dissident circles.” In her opinion, taken “together with the disappointment that he caused during his arrest in 1977, his departure now would be equivalent to treason.”29 Václav (and Olga), it seems to me, professed a similar philosophy. He wrote to her, in March 1982, that thanks to prison he could prove “to myself, those around me and to God—that I am not a lightweight as many may have seen me, that I stand behind what I do, that I mean it seriously and that I can take the consequences.” Finally, the crux of the matter was “whether even here—and precisely here!—I can remain myself, with everything that is part of me.”30

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X

To live in truth—that sounds pompous, but during those times grandiloquence was rare. There was much running around and much talking; we had lots of problems with security service agents, though felt, if only occasionally, that we lived as free people. But this peculiar dissident subculture had snares of its own. Havel knew, and wrote, that dissident status could lead to conformity with the herdlike behaviors of one’s coterie, that it could lead to demonizing the enemy (in this case, the Communists) and to angelize oneself. For him, the enemy was the Communist system, not the Communists. Havel viewed them soberly: he remembered the Communists’ opposition to Beneš’s capitulation in 1938, as well as their 1948 coup d’état, when Klement Gottwald broke the democratic spirit of the republic. Havel saw nothing odd about the presence of their names among the signatories of Charter 77 and simply had great respect for some of them. One need only read his beautiful essay about František Kriegel, a Jew from Stanisławów, a prewar Communist, doctor, and volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, later a Party functionary, and finally a reformer during the Prague Spring. Kriegel was the only member of the Communist Party leadership who refused to sign the declaration of capitulation in Moscow in August 1968. “He managed to save the reputation of Czechoslovak politics,” Havel wrote. He regarded Kriegel as a tragic figure. Here was a man who always saw “what is good and what is evil,” what “honor and betrayal” were.31 Havel wondered: “How could such a person see eye to eye with a movement that was capable, when the need arose, of dismissing [ordinary human] feelings and common sense as sheer superstition and self-deception”?32 How could he have allowed himself to participate in solidifying the rule of the Communist Party?

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Kriegel’s tragedy came from his being simultaneously a man of faith and a man of conscience. First came his faith in an ideology “capable of justifying any momentary evil by pointing to a utopian vision of radiant tomorrows somewhere in the distant future.” Then came his faith in democratization of the Communist system. Kriegel never renounced his belief in “socialism with a human face.” Havel wrote of him: “The tragic paradoxes that I sense in the personality, achievement, and fate of František Kriegel are not exclusive to him, nor even to the communists.” Havel saw in these “the fundamental paradoxes of modern times.” He asked: Can people who are truly pure in heart, people of independent spirit determined to be guided by it alone, attain the summit of real power in a world of sectional interests, irrational passions, “political realities,” power-seeking ideologies, and blind revolt, in short, in the chaotic world of modern civilization? . . . Or have they no alternative but to get involved— either for reasons of realistic compromise or idealistic belief—in something else, something that the world finds more credible, something that may be in accord with their consciences in the immediate term but can turn against them at any time?33 No, Havel was never a “cave-dwelling anti-Communist.” For him, each person was a separate world deserving fair consideration. This model of the dissident ethos was his own special creation. Havel once wrote that a dissident resembles Sisyphus, pushing his rock up the mountain though he knows the chances of reaching the top are next to nothing; he pushes to be at peace with himself and to give his life meaning. This philosophy of the dissident’s life was, I

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think, sufficient for my dissident friends, as it was for me. But it was not enough for Havel. He wrestled not only with the Communist dictatorship but also with the evils of contemporary civilization. Man “must pay,” he wrote, “for the attempt to seize nature, to leave not a remnant of it in human hands, to ridicule its mystery; [he] must pay for the attempt to abolish God and to play at being God. . . . Man is simply not God.”34 Here is the writing not of a political dissident but of the philosophically inclined homo religiosus that Havel always in essence was. He rejected the atheist worldview. The hero of his play Temptation (the author’s alter ego) says: When a person casts God from his heart, he opens a door for the devil. When you think about the increasingly stupid willfulness of the powerful and the increasingly stubborn submission of the powerless, and the awful destruction committed in today’s world in the name of science—and after all we are its somewhat grotesque standard-bearers—isn’t all that truly the work of the devil? We know that the devil is a master of disguises, and what more ingenious disguise could one imagine than the one offered him by the godlessness of modern times? Why, he must find the most promising base of operations in those very places where people have stopped believing in him!35 Havel wrote about his own religious inclinations in a letter to Olga, stressing that, for him, faith was a state of constant questioning and creative openness. Faith was the need to experience the world immediately and therefore was not directed at any object. In another letter, he specified:

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I’m certainly not a proper Christian or Catholic (as so many of my good friends are), and there are many reasons for this. For instance, I do not worship this god of mine and I don’t see why I should. What he is—a horizon without which nothing would have meaning and without which I would not, in fact, exist—he is by virtue of his essence, and not thanks to some strong-arm tactics that command respect. . . . (I accept the Gospel of Jesus as a challenge to go my own way.)36 Havel connected this religious outlook of his with politics. He sought “the origin of the modern state and of modern political power . . . in a moment when human reason begins to ‘liberate’ itself from the human being as such, from his personal experience, personal conscience, and personal responsibility and so also from that to which, within the framework of the natural world, all responsibility is uniquely related—namely, from his absolute horizon.”37 Put another way: Havel unmasked Marxism-Leninism as a parareligion offering ready-made answers to all questions, while respecting and in his own way professing belief in a religion that demands humility in the face of Mystery. He viewed death in the same way: “the awareness of death is the most essential starting point for any genuinely human, i.e., conscious and deliberate, will to life. . . . If we go on living despite the knowledge that our death is inevitable, and if we even live like human beings, that is, meaningfully and with dignity, then we can do so only thanks to an unshakable inner experience of the absolute horizon of Being, aroused in us precisely by this awareness of death.”38 Many years later, in December 2005, he observed:

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I am constantly preparing for the last judgment, for the highest court from which nothing can be hidden, which will appreciate everything that should be appreciated. . . . Why does this final evaluation matter so much to me? After all, at that point I shouldn’t care. But I do care because I’m convinced that my existence—like everything that has ever happened—has ruffled the surface of Being, and that after my little ripple, however marginal, insignificant, and ephemeral it may have been, Being is and always will be different from what it was before.39 Václav Havel—in his own words, “a bourgeois child, a laboratory assistant, a soldier, a stagehand, a playwright, a dissident, a prisoner, a president, a pensioner, a public phenomenon, and a hermit, an alleged hero but secretly a bundle of nerves”—believed that he would “remain here forever.”40 “It is better not to live at all,” he said in 1986, “than to live without honor,” which is why he lived with honor as few others have. He strove to “put morality before politics and responsibility before striving for a goal, to restore meaning to the human community and sense to human existence.” These aspirations never left Havel; they remain with us today.

XI

Dissident reflection about politics was entirely unlike political activity in a democratic state. A dissident typically did not consider himself a politician; he was a writer, physicist, sociologist, architect, or student; sometimes he was a dissident without profession.

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Havel used to say that he never wanted to be a politician. Political matters interested him and he often got involved in them, but he did not want to enter into active and practical politics. He had no ambition to become a “professional” dissident either. He wanted to be a writer, to work in the theater. And for that reason he did not reflect on the details of economic or health-care reform. His personal “utopia” consisted of political and economic pluralism, along with dialogue between democratic representatives and expert opinion. He was skeptical of the party system. He thought that individual people, not parties, should be elected to Parliament. He also attached great importance to civil society. He was afraid of all closed ideologies. From prison he wrote to Olga that “the moment when any system of thought culminates and declares itself complete, when it is brought to perfection and universality, has more than once been described as that deceptive moment when the system ceases to live, collapses in upon itself (like the material collapse of a white dwarf star) and reality eludes its grasp once and for all.”41 Embitterment tends to be the result of such a crash. A bitter man loses faith in the world and in people. He comes to the conclusion, Václav wrote to Olga, “that all moral principles are naively utopian and that one must accept the world ‘as it is’—which is to say unalterably bad.”42 Yet it is “not the evil of the world that ultimately [leads] the person to give up, but rather his own resignation that [leads] him to the theory about the evil of the world.” Furthermore, a bitter man begins to evolve: as he adapts to the “evil world,” its reality begins to change “into one that is ‘not as bad as it could be,’ [and] certainly better than the eventual state of uncertainty created by ‘utopian’ efforts to improve the world.”43

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“And thus,” Havel wrote, “we arrive at the sad state of affairs wherein the ruthless critic of the world is indiscernibly transformed into its defender.”44 Havel allowed that bitterness is understandable in light of human weakness, loneliness, and defenselessness. “And yet I am convinced,” he wrote, “that there is nothing in this vale of tears that, of itself, can rob man of hope, faith, and the meaning of life. He loses these things only when he himself falters.”45 This moving confession and definition of the indomitable attitude of the dissident pointed toward dangerous hidden traps, of which fanaticism was the most perilous. Fanaticism, Havel wrote to Olga, is “self-alienated faith.” At first, the fanatic believes that he is “responsible for everything. And this feeling is all the more boundless, of course, the more one feels threatened by the shock of alienation from the freshly perceived world.” Faith in an idea transforms itself into faith in an institution. Herein lies the “fatal mistake.” The transposition of the idea “from the boundlessness of the dream to the reality of human actions” causes one to be blindly obedient to institutions in which the fulfillment of these ideals can be seen. Obedience can be tempting: it replaces reflection, so one is freed from the demand to think independently and is drawn instead to serve an institution (a milieu, a party, or a sect) in which a path toward realizing the “boundless dream” seems to exist. “A fanatic is someone who,” Havel added, “without realizing it, replaces the love of God with the love of his own religion; the love of truth, freedom, and justice with the love of an ideology, doctrine, or sect that promises to guarantee them once and for all; love of people with love of a project claiming that it—and it alone, of course— can genuinely serve them.”46

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“The more fanatical a person is,” Havel concluded, “the easier it is for him to transfer his ‘faith’ to another object: Maoism can be exchanged overnight for Jehovism or vice versa, while the intensity of the dedication remains unaltered.” Fanaticism can make life easier— but the price is the destruction of life. The tragedy of fanaticism “lies in the fact that it takes the beautiful and profoundly authentic [human] longing . . . to take the suffering of the world upon [oneself ], and transforms it into something that merely multiplies that suffering: an organizer of concentration camps, inquisitions, massacres, and executions”47

XII

Now let us return to Jan Patocˇka, who was an intellectual mentor and moral authority for the Czech dissidents. In the epoch of “normalization,” he wrote that “the intellectual has three possible ways of proceeding: internal emigration, like Plato; the path of compromise, like the sophists; or, like Socrates, consistent living in truth, conflict with the authorities, and death.”48 In his essay about T. G. Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, Patocˇka argued: “For the most part, philosophers constructed the ideal state, but in all of history its realization by means of actual political action was given only to one thinker, namely Masaryk.”49 But then Havel made a second attempt. He chose, like Socrates, uncompromising conflict with the authorities. And astoundingly, by happenstance, this time Socrates became Pericles. In December 1989, Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia. His first New Year’s address, on January 1, 1990, about the state of the country after years of dictatorship, contained these memora-

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ble sentences: “We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. . . . I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all—though naturally to differing extents— responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery; none of us is just its victim: we are all also its co-creators.” The new president spoke, moreover, about the need to remember those “who defended the honor of our nations during the Second World War, those who rebelled against totalitarian rule, and those who simply managed to remain themselves and think freely.” He spoke about the need for justice administered by independent courts. He emphasized that neither the Communists nor various “international mafias” were now the most important threats. At that moment, he added, “our main enemy is our own bad traits: indifference to the common good; vanity; personal ambition; selfishness; and rivalry.”50 Invoking the tradition of Masaryk, who “based his politics on morality,” Havel said: “Let us try to restore this concept of politics.” What was needed, he went on, was a politics that would support people’s happiness and not serve as a means of cheating them. For “politics can be not only the art of the possible, especially if this means the art of speculation, calculation, intrigue, secret deals, and pragmatic maneuvering, but . . . it can even be the art of the impossible, namely, the art of improving ourselves and the world.” In conclusion, he dreamed of “a humane republic which serves the individual and which therefore holds the hope that the individual will serve it in turn.”51 Such was the creed of this Socrates turned Pericles. The story of Havel’s life until January 1, 1990, was a marvelous fairy tale with a marvelous ending. Many of us, yesterday’s dissidents, saw

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things that way: if all has gone so well up until now, all will continue to go well . . . Banishment from the fairy tale, however, was soon to come.

XIII

As early as February 1990, on the anniversary of the February 1948 coup, Havel encountered an unpleasant surprise. He was at the height of his popularity, he spoke to a friendly public; but when he announced the abolition of the death penalty, he provoked grumbles of opposition. “For some reason,” he commented years later, “people are very fond of the death penalty.”52 Here was a first sign of his eviction from the fairy tale. Here a different face of society was revealed—a society that, for many years, had hidden all its faces, the best and the worst alike. Years later, he spoke about a “strangely stifling atmosphere in our public life,” which reigned after the “banishment from the fairy tale.” By far the highest ideal was conforming to “norms— essentially the ideal of mediocrity, banality, and a kind of middle-class bourgeois philistinism. . . . Hostility to the former dissidents at that point was in its heyday . . .”53 Shortly after the revolution and the arrival of freedom, a very special kind of anticommunist obsession established itself in public life. It was as though some people—people who had been silent for years . . . and had been careful not to get into trouble—now felt the sudden need to compensate in some aggressive way for their earlier humiliation, or for the feeling or suspicion that they might have been found wanting. . . . And so they took aim at people who least held it against

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them, that is, the dissidents. They still felt, unconsciously, that the dissidents were the voice of their bad conscience, living proof that you didn’t have to completely knuckle under if you didn’t want to. It is interesting that, at a time when the dissidents appeared to be a tiny group of crazy Don Quixotes, the aversion to them was not as intense as it was later, when history, as it were, had proven them right. That was too much; that was unforgivable. And paradoxically, the clearer it became that the dissidents blamed no one for anything, and that even less did they hold themselves up as an example to others, the greater the antagonism against them grew. Ultimately, many a new anticommunist vented more anger against the dissidents than against the representatives of the old regime. Out of this trend was born the strange legend that the dissidents were “left-wing,” that they were “elitists” (how could somebody who spent ten years in a boiler room or in prison and has never turned his nose up at anyone be considered an elitist?), or that they were insufficiently respectful of tried-and-true Western institutions, and so on. “By the way,” Havel wrote of “this ideology,” it revealed a lot about itself in a recent article claiming that the dissidents played no special role in the fall of communism because communism was brought down by “normal” citizens behaving conventionally, that is, by putting their own private interests first, which means that they may have stolen

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the occasional brick from a building site. That kind of thinking obviously resonates with a large part of the public, which sees it as a confirmation that they made the right choices in life: now, when it’s permissible, we praise capitalism to the skies and condemn everyone who thinks critically about it; earlier when it was not possible, we marched obediently to the polls to vote for the communists so that we could, in peace and quiet, look after ourselves. And who is constantly stirring things up? The left-wing dissident!54 In all such thinking, Havel saw the philosophy of Czech smallmindedness, which decreed: “don’t get mixed up in other people’s business, keep your head down, don’t look up—we’re surrounded by mountains and those whirlwinds from the outside world will blow over our heads and we can go on burrowing away in our own little backyard.”55 Havel often returned to this thought: In modern Czech history, a situation repeatedly comes up in which society rises to some great occasion but then its top leaders execute a retreating maneuver; . . . here they capitulate, there they give something up or sacrifice something, and naturally they do it all to save the nation’s very existence. And society, traumatized at first, quickly backs down, “understands” its leaders, and ultimately sinks into apathy or goes straight into a coma. . . . It was that way in the post-Munich period, then between 1939 and 1945 during the Protectorate, then in the 1950s, and finally in 1968 after the Soviet occupation. First you hear sentences like

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“They betrayed us.” . . . “They sold us out,” “They conspired against us.” Next you hear things like “There’s nothing to be done,” and it ends with the shouting of nationalistic slogans, and speeches about “national interests,” and silent consent to the persecution of some minority. It’s the triumph of Czech smallmindedness in the worst possible sense of the word.56 ˇ echácˇek, or the “small-minded Czech,” is the symbol of petty C bourgeois provincialism and hatred of everyone who thinks differently. It is from that source that calls are issued to “get rid of Jews, then Germans, then the [grand] bourgeoisie, then dissidents, then Slovaks—and who will be next in line? The Roma? Homosexuals? All foreigners? And who will be left? Pure-blooded little Czechs in their own little garden.”57 After 1989, the small-minded Czech reached for a more subtle formulation—anti-Europeanism. According to Havel, this development was essentially an expression of the same relationship to the world. “Why should we have to consult with anyone? Why should we have to listen to anyone? Why should we have to share power with anyone? Why should we have to help someone else? What do we care about their technical norms? . . . We are quite sufficient unto ourselves.” This is merely the new face of the old familiar Czech small-mindedness. “But a word of caution,” Havel emphasized: “The small-minded Czech will have the nerve to shout out valiant slogans only if there’s no danger to him; on the contrary, if he’s facing a powerful and cruel opponent he withdraws and ultimately becomes servile.”58 It seems to me that only a man capable of telling his country such bitter truths is a man who truly loves his country.

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XIV

In a speech given in 2002, on his retirement from politics, Havel confessed: “I am just beginning to understand how everything has, in fact, been a diabolical trap set for me by destiny. Because I really was catapulted overnight into a world of fairy tales, and then, in the years that followed, had to return to earth.”59 These words surprised me: for Havel, the fairy tale opened when he became president, whereas for me the fairy tale ended precisely then. After all, it was from the first days of freedom in 1989 that the time of wrestling with the resistant substance of reality began. His presidential addresses are a great mirror of the dilemmas and ambiguities, the successes and disenchantments, of that time. In August 1990, this time to the surprise of many of his friends, Havel said: “our revolution remains incomplete,” because behind our everyday troubles there “hide tentacles of invisible mafias” that strive “to deal in large sums of money that do not belong to them, to establish joint stock companies and seek ways to safely deposit illegally obtained capital. Invisibly, such tentacles are ensnaring our entire economy.”60 These were astonishing opinions. They suggested, in the language of those years, a call for personal purges and an atmosphere of alarm in the face of an omnipresent enemy. It was not only in Czechoslovakia, by the way, that such calls were raised. After the phase of fighting for freedom came the phase of fighting for power. Havel retrospectively said that such slogans, together with calls for lustration and de-Communization, were used by self-appointed avengers, slandering those struggling to restore democracy. I have sometimes wondered, therefore, whether the expressions “unfinished revolution” and “invisible tentacles” indicate Havel’s actual convictions at the time, or whether they constituted a tactical appropriation

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of the slogans of radical populists and were meant to fill dangeroussounding platitudes with different meanings. I am unable to answer that question. I am nonetheless convinced that, though Havel’s diagnosis was mistaken when he spoke about “completing the revolution,” he certainly did not desire to unleash a “witch hunt”; he was not calling for a wave of postrevolutionary violence. He understood the importance of tactics in politics, but he never agreed with the proposition that politics must be dirty. Indeed, he stubbornly repeated, “Whoever says that politics must be dirty makes it so.” Hence in his public statements he was very personal and brutally honest; likewise, when he spoke about his own mistakes and illusions. He often admitted to the sin of impatience: “In short, I thought time belonged to me. It was, of course, a big mistake.”61 History changes gradually, and one cannot accelerate the changes by violent means. The world is not a machine. Havel said so himself: “We must patiently plant the seeds and water the ground well, and give the plants exactly the amount of time they need to mature. Just as we cannot fool a plant, we cannot fool history. But we must water history as well, patiently and every day. We must water it not just with understanding, not just with humility, but with love as well.”62

XV

Havel pointed out, moreover, that the peculiar axiological void that the loss of old values occasions gives rise to a frustration that produces dangerous tendencies. There appear demands for ironfisted government and calls for a nationalistic, ethnically “pure” state. There also appear hunts for “culprits guilty of causing the frustration, so that in

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the process of fighting them people can heal their own diminished sense of self-worth.”63 In 1993, Havel itemized the results: A significant increase in criminal behavior, collective violence, intolerance, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and indifference to it, growing corruption, “gold fever,” and the conviction that life is a jungle and that man is a wolf to man—those are the most visible indications of the particular condition in which a society finds itself after the collapse of the world of values of a totalitarian state.64 From this condition comes a general paranoia, a tendency to hunt for scandal, and a “loud uproar meant to drown out expressions of personal anxiety.” The worst traditions of Czech history return to the scene: provincialism, humility before the powerful and brutality against the weak, and “the attempt to slip past history at any price, including the price of losing face.”65 Reading Havel’s harsh words, the words of a gentle and delicate man, I felt as if I were reading a report from the “Polish hell” of those and later years. Despite the obvious successes of democratic transformation, painful defeats also happened from time to time. The breakup of the Czechoslovak Republic was among them. Havel was against it, having done much to build a truly democratic federation where everyone would feel at home. Still, in the end, he had to admit that those efforts had failed. He remained ever faithful to his belief in the value of civil society and its institutions; he held that “a democratic state cannot consist only of the administration, political parties, and private businesses.” In such a state, a democracy cannot consist solely of a bureaucracy, political parties, and business enterprises. For in such a state our lives

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would comprise a one-dimensional pursuit of profit. Here was the subject of an ongoing, if often camouflaged, argument with Václav Klaus. The allusions to Klaus were unmistakable: Today we often hear the word “standard.” We are building a standard market economy, a standard political system, and standard political parties; we are passing standard laws, norms, and principles; we watch standard advertising on television. . . . We should, however, guard against recognizing “standardness” as such, “standardness” in itself. . . . After all, life itself is a phenomenon that is intrinsically nonstandard, and I would be horrified by a world that demanded I have a standard wife, a standard smile, or a standard soul, or that I be a standard president. Yes, I am calling for a standard civil society. But what does that mean? Nothing less and nothing more than respect for everything that is nonstandard, unique, personal, unusual, even provocative. It simply means respect for life and its mystery, confidence in the human spirit, and an opportunity for all nonstandard beings that derive pleasure from occasionally doing something that gives pleasure to others.66 “Today,” Havel argued, “the only alternative to a programmatically nationalist state is one based on civic principles—principles which do not divide people but bind them, without, however, suppressing any of man’s various identities.” The condition necessary for the creation of such a state was the existence of civil society. Havel was a consistent critic of all ideologically determined forms of statehood. World War II and the Yugoslav war revealed the nature of the “ethnically pure state.” Communism revealed the nature of the state

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organized by “class and ideology.” The nature of a religious state was revealed by fundamentalism in some Islamic countries. Thus, “in the end, an ideology which would build a state solely on what divides people always leads to violence.”67 Yet Havel was not a cosmopolitan. He always underscored his pride in his Czech identity and in the Czech tradition characterized by the names of Hus, Komenský, Masaryk, and Patocˇka. Like every patriotic democrat, he nonetheless looked critically at the dark parts of his national history.

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As early as 1969, in his letter to Alexander Dubcˇek, Havel had raised the example of Edvard Beneš and 1938: “And at that time, it was you, the communists, who resisted the persuasive arguments for capitulation, and who rightly understood that a de facto defeat need not be a moral defeat; that a moral victory may later become a de facto victory, but a moral defeat, never.”68 At the source of Beneš’s tragic dilemma there was the suicidal betrayal by France and Great Britain. Czechoslovakia was left for Hitler to plunder, and Beneš faced the choice: to fight against Hitler alone or to capitulate? Havel wrote that Beneš was aware that . . . the right thing to do was to refuse to give in to the diktát and proceed to defend the country. On the other hand, he knew what that could have meant: thousands of lost lives, the devastation of the country, and the probability of early military defeat by a far stronger adversary. He realized that such a decision could well have met with misunderstanding and even rejection on the part of the democratic

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world, and that he himself might have been branded as a peace-breaker and provocateur foolishly attempting to draw other nations into a totally unnecessary war. He decided to capitulate without fighting, because that course seemed more responsible than risking an eventual capitulation after heavy losses. The result of Beneš’s capitulation in 1938, and likewise the capitulation of 1948, was “a deep traumatization and a long-term demoralization of the society.” There arose “a specific type of moral frustration”: democracy surrendered without a fight.69 Havel honestly admitted that, though he always saw Beneš’s decision as a “fatal mistake,” this estimate came too easily in his dissident years. Once he himself was president, Havel said, he became aware of the burden that weighs on a man responsible for the “fate of his citizens and their descendants.” In 1995 he asked himself what he would have done had he been in his predecessor’s place. He answered carefully: I do not know. The choice of armed resistance probably would have brought many casualties and suffering. Would resistance not, however, have prevented other losses “caused by the damage done to the moral integrity of our national community?”70 In conclusion, although he thought that he “would probably have acted differently,” Havel did not rule out that he thought so only because he knew, “as [Beneš and his colleagues] did not, the consequences of their decisions.” Still, he added, “I would probably turn to . . . my conscience, my moral instincts, the part of me that—as I see it—transcends me.”71 Havel’s reflections have often brought me to ponder Beneš’s dilemma myself. I understand Havel’s axiology, but I also understand Beneš’s arguments. Anyone may risk his or her own life, and Havel

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did so with a consistency that deserves the greatest admiration. But is one allowed to risk the lives of hundreds of thousands of people? Max Weber saw this difference as a conflict between an ethics of conviction and an ethics of responsibility. Havel defined it as a conflict between morality and pragmatism. For an honest politician, this choice can be truly tragic and is at the heart of any argument about choosing the “lesser evil.” I think that, in the situation that the Czechs faced in 1938, resistance was essential but that a military confrontation, unless it was a symbolic gesture only, would have probably been a mistake. Such is and must be the political wisdom of a “small nation.” In any case, Havel specified his viewpoint further in an extensive interview with Karel Hvížd’ala: “If you wish to sacrifice your life for our common freedom, you may. If I wish to sacrifice my life, I may. But neither you nor I have any right to compel anyone else to do it, or not to ask him and simply sacrifice his life.”72 When the issue of “expulsions” returned to European debates, the question of Beneš’s decision to expel Germans from Czechoslovakia returned with it. For some German politicians, Beneš had become an icon of evil. In an article about Beneš’s dilemmas, Havel now distributed the accents of his argument differently. He recounted that he had always been critical of Beneš’s decision in 1938 to capitulate and also of the decrees for the expulsion of a million Germans from Czechoslovakia after the defeat of the Third Reich. At the same time, however, Havel also recounted the entirety of Beneš’s achievements—that he embodied the best European democratic traditions in the 1930s, was cocreator of the League of Nations and an early opponent of Hitlerism who “attempted, unfortunately without success, to arouse the apathetic West.”73 Hitler sent the Czech president’s relatives to concentration camps. And when Beneš emigrated to London, he became an emblem of Czechoslova-

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kia’s struggle against Hitlerism, just as de Gaulle was symbolic for the French. But why did Beneš decide that lasting peace required expelling the Germans? “It is cheap and superficial,” Havel noted, “to dismiss this question and to simplistically name Beneš in the same breath with Miloševic´ or with Stalin. Edvard Beneš shared that concept with politicians like Churchill and Roosevelt.” At the same time, Havel made note of the hidden motives of the anti-Beneš campaign incited by the German Federation of Expellees: we must, he wrote, “also pay regard to the question of whether some, by ascribing all responsibility to one man, do not attempt to deny their own responsibility.”74 Havel’s two public statements about Beneš differ not in terms of their assessment but in terms of their context. In the first case, Havel was writing for Czechs and was guided in the search for truth by the “ethics of conviction.” He wrote the second article for foreigners and was guided in the search for truth by the “ethics of responsibility.”

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The tension between the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility accompanied Havel’s actions throughout his presidency, manifesting itself whenever he faced a difficult dilemma, such as the following: “A democratically elected Parliament passed a bill I considered to be morally flawed, yet which our constitution required me to sign.” The bill in question prohibited those who had violated human rights from working in state administration. In Havel’s opinion, “The legislation [is] based on the principle of collective responsibility; it prohibits certain persons from holding certain positions solely because they belonged to groups defined by their external characteristics. It does not allow their cases to be heard individually. This runs

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counter to the basic principles of democratic law. The files kept by the now-abolished secret police are made the final and sole arbiter of eligibility to work.”75 I remember the arguments surrounding this bill. I judged it much more critically even than Václav did, and I advised him not to sign it. I saw in it a strategic move of the radical populists who desired to make bureaucratic anti-Communism into the ideology of the republic. Václav was restrained in his judgment. He wrote: “It is a necessary law, an extraordinary law, a rigorous law. Yet from the viewpoint of fundamental human rights, it is fraught with problems.” Refusal to sign the bill could have meant open conflict between the president and the Parliament, therefore a political crisis in the country. “It would have been,” Havel explained, “a morally upright, yet immensely risky act of civil disobedience, one typical of a dissident.”76 He signed the bill. It paved the way for “savage lustration.” In an interview with Gazeta Wyborcza, he said that when the journal Rudé Krávo published a list of those who supposedly had collaborated with the secret police, it caused many human tragedies. Two authors of that publication (incidentally, both former signatories of Charter 77) sued Havel on charges of defamation. Havel’s testimony in the Prague municipal court is among the classics of antilustration. Havel, as defendant, cited many letters regarding tragedies caused by the lists’ publication. He asserted that persons from the lists— even though they were often entirely innocent— “are smeared forever and have no chance to clear themselves.” “Many people,” he continued, were put on these lists without their knowledge, many others were there merely because they had accepted a secret service agent’s invitation to a restaurant, still others because they gave in and signed something in a difficult moment—a kind of 204

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moment that my accusers cannot fathom —when they were physically and psychologically tormented and blackmailed in a variety of ways, most often by threats that their children or relatives would pay a price. They frequently didn’t even know what they were signing; and often everything ended with this signature decades ago, because the same people later mustered the courage to resist, and they were duly punished for that too. “It may be,” Havel noted furthermore, that some of those who have written to me do not have an entirely clear conscience, and they present themselves as better than they are. But that is not the issue here. By what right should someone be condemned in this unruly and deeply suspect way, without the possibility of defense? By what right should his children and his relatives, who knew nothing of his moment of weakness, be made to suffer? Why should those who are no longer alive and have taken their stories to the grave, be disgraced? “For decades,” Havel concluded, Our society was subjected to the lawlessness of a government that did not hesitate to use any form of blackmail and violence. . . . Children were the primary hostages, because their future was made to depend on the submissiveness of their parents. Our nation, like other nations, does not consist only of heroes, and therefore many tried, in various ways—some more effectively, some less so—to fool the powers that be, refusing to surrender their souls to it, while compensating 205

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for this by small concessions. Concessions like meaningless conversations with secret police agents. But even such conversations got the names of countless people into police registries. Studies show that active informants were probably a minority, that most of those on the lists were people whose only fault was passive contact with the secret police or who were not even guilty of that much. A high percentage of those whose names were on the lists were persecuted, and they suffered in ways that those who were able to slide through the former era because they were not worthy of the authorities’ attention would find hard to imagine. These alleged lists of alleged secret police collaborators have very unclear origins; they are full of factual mistakes, and much suggests that they are the work of clever disinformation emanating from the ranks of the secret police—both of those who composed the lists over the years and of those who made them available to the press. . . . I see the whole matter as one of the greatest successes of the secret police. They have managed to poison the atmosphere of the democratic state for many years to come; they have been able to mobilize the mob, whose greatest joy is harming others, and to cynically put the banner of antiCommunism in the mob’s hands. . . . The self-appointed judges—who sit here on the prosecutors’ bench—are nothing but perpetuators of the Communist ideology of hatred, revenge, and totalitarian contempt for the law. Their newspaper is a sewer spreading evil and hatred.77 As president, dissident, and defendant, Havel offered a superb diagnosis. Guided by the ethics of responsibility as president, as a defendant he reached for the dissident ethics of conviction.

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XVIII

There is no hatred to be found in Havel’s writing. He once confessed to being incapable of hating. His motto—mocked by cynics, conmen, and fools—was this sentence: “Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred.”78 He was capable, however, of closely and unempathetically observing those who hate. Havel detailed his observations in an excellent essay, titled “The Anatomy of Hate,” which he presented as a lecture in Oslo in 1990. I listened to him deliver it, and I remember very well my fascination with the simplicity and ironclad logic of his reflections on the who, why, and how of hatred: Their hatred always seems to me the expression of a large and unquenchable longing . . . a kind of desperate ambition. . . . [They] harbor a permanent, ineradicable feeling of injury, a feeling that is, of course, out of all proportion to reality. It is as though these people wanted to be endlessly honored, loved, and respected, as though they suffered from the chronic and painful awareness that others are ungrateful and unforgivably unjust toward them, not only because they don’t honor and love them boundlessly, as they ought, but because they even— or so it seems—ignore them. In the subconscious of haters there slumbers a perverse feeling that they alone possess the truth, that they are some kind of superhuman or even god. . . . Hatred is a diabolical attribute of the fallen angel. It is a state of spirit that aspires to be God, that may even think it is God, and is tormented by evidence that it is not and cannot be. . . . For the hater hatred is more important than its object; he can rapidly change objects without changing anything essential in the relationship. . . . The man who hates

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does not smile, he merely smirks; . . . he can’t be genuinely ironic because he can’t be ironic about himself. Only those who can laugh at themselves can laugh authentically. . . . Collective hatred eliminates loneliness, weakness, powerlessness, a sense of being ignored or abandoned. This, of course, helps people deal with lack of recognition, lack of success, because it offers them a sense of togetherness. . . . They can endlessly reassure one another of their own worth . . . through exaggerated expressions of hatred for the chosen group of offenders. . . . Collective hatred arises imperceptibly. There are many apparently innocent and common states of mind that create the almost unnoticeable antecedents for hatred, a wide and fertile field on which the seeds of hatred will quickly germinate and take root. In conclusion, Havel noted: Some observers describe Central and Eastern Europe today as a powder keg, an area of growing nationalism, ethnic intolerance, and expressions of collective hatred. . . . I don’t share the pessimism of such observers. Even so, I admit that the corner of the world I come from could become—if we do not maintain vigilance and common sense—fertile soil in which collective hatred could grow.79 During all the years that followed, Havel maintained both that vigilance and that commitment to common sense. This handful of quotations may give a sense of the range of Havel’s reflections on hatred. Anyone who has observed the evolution of post-Communist transformations, and especially the tragic Yugoslav war, can appreciate the accuracy of Havel’s penetrating remarks. One cannot possi208

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bly, even in an extended analysis, convey the full richness of Havel’s writing. It is essay writing of the highest order, on a par with the essays of George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Josif Brodsky and István Bibó, Leszek Kołakowski, and Czesław Miłosz. At any rate, “The Anatomy of Hate” should be required reading in all East and Central European schools.

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Havel in his writing is tremendously sensitive to the message of Christianity. At a meeting with Pope John Paul II in 1994, he expressed his conviction that “at the basis of all religions there are principles of tolerance, of helping one’s neighbor, and understanding the other person— or simply the principle of goodness which God expects from man.”80 When he received the Saint Adalbert Prize in 1999, Havel said of its patron: St. Adalbert must have been a great dreamer, one would say today, an idealist. He must have been a charismatic intellectual. He must have been an impractical person, unpragmatic, who seemed to be permanently floating—like Baudelaire’s albatross—slightly above the ground, which he was prevented from walking on owing to “a pair of colossal wings.” Actually, in his earthly endeavors he was continuously unsuccessful, persecuted by destiny and his surroundings, and little understood. The external course of history acknowledged others instead. Nevertheless, if he is permanently with us, then it is because he lives here, as an ancient mirror of our narrow-mindedness, our selfishness, as our guilty conscience of sorts. . . . 209

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Yet . . . even more important than his serving as a merciless mirror of the times was the fact that he embodied a living, open, unfulfilled transcendence that was never entirely fulfillable. He must have been the one who articulated certain values and ideals without being able to visibly enforce them, or to project them into social circumstances. Precisely due to this fact he was influential, during his times and the ensuing centuries, as a challenge, an appeal, a reproach, an inspiration, a fine example, and a warning. His legacy seems to be the inconspicuous, yet never-ending, resolve to disturb a state of affairs which is based on a withdrawal from ideals to the benefit of so-called reality.81 I am no expert on the life of Saint Adalbert. Still, I think that Havel, although he did not experience as many defeats in politics, will be described by historians in exactly this way: as the conscience of his time, a prophet among pragmatists, one who disturbed the still waters of the European pond. At the time of his passing, Havel was no longer a politician. He had become once again a writer—unsettling, original, and rebellious. But even when president, he was a politician of a particular kind, one like Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Andrei Sakharov, and Jacek Kuron´. In politics, he was a man of witness, one of the great moral authorities of his time. Havel was a remarkable president because he was a remarkable person. This president felt a connection with the post-1968 tradition of contestation; he belonged, he said, to the generation of the Beatles. With sympathy he observed the hippie movement, the art and music of the 1960s, and the barefoot kids who walked the New York streets with garlands around their necks. In his dissident days, he had

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loved the music of the Rolling Stones and Frank Zappa; as president, he hosted them in Prague. As a dissident, he had helped organize a mass protest against the trial of musicians from Plastic People of the Universe, a Prague-based band. In their music and in their attitudes, Havel had found purity, shame, metaphysical sadness, and a communication from the poor and downtrodden. The protest against the Plastics’ trial had brought various opposition groups together and led to the creation of Charter 77. Years later, as president, Havel attended the Plastics’ concerts. As a dissident, he had been fascinated by Heidegger, Patocˇka, and Levinas, and one can easily trace those fascinations in his presidential speeches. As a young author, he had been the first to publish an essay on the writing of Bohumil Hrabal; as president of the Czech Republic, he invited Hrabal for a pitcher of beer with U.S. President Bill Clinton. Havel did not care much for contact with Prime Minister Václav Klaus. They differed in every way: in their temperament, height, value systems, biography, and sense of humor. Shrewd and hardworking, a Narcissus free of scruples, Klaus is a man—Havel wrote—who either is “afraid of someone or he’s out to humiliate them.”82 After the first democratic parliamentary elections, the Czech Civic Forum and the Slovak Public against Violence decided jointly that Klaus would not be finance minister in the new government. The Slovaks wanted to fill the post. Havel as president had the “unpleasant task” of informing Klaus that he would be not finance minister but president of the national bank. “I failed shamefully,” Havel wrote of this episode: When I informed Klaus of this, he shot back that it was out of the question, that the entire world knew him as the Czechoslovak minister of finance, that he could hold no

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other position, and that his departure from the government would be catastrophic. And I, rather than telling him that that was the decision of the winning party, and if he didn’t want to head the state bank, then he could do whatever he pleased, I politely backed down and said something like, “All right, then!” The Civic Forum was very upset with me for not doing the job, and Klaus’s antipathy toward me grew into hatred. I had behaved like a typical bad politician: I hadn’t done what I’d promised to do and, in the process, managed to make everyone mad at me.83 How many politicians can speak of themselves with such distance and such irony? One can see this aspect of Václav mostly clearly in the film Citizen Havel, an extensive project carried out during both of his terms as president. Havel was not a typical politician. He practiced a politics deriving from the conviction that “none of us as an individual can save the world as a whole, but that nevertheless each of us must behave as though it were in our power to do so.”84 Speaking this way he annoyed others with his idealism and truthfulness, his courage in opposing stupefied public opinion. Still, while not a politician of his time, he made his distinctive mark upon it. Who was he, then, in politics? He was—I will repeat Havel’s own metaphor—like Baudelaire’s albatross, forever hovering slightly above the ground because “a pair of colossal wings” prevented him from walking. This albatross of Czech politics stubbornly wrestled with a quite unpolitical question—the question of the meaning of life. For him, it was identical to the religious question of the “absolute horizon.”

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XX

When Jan Patocˇka juxtaposed the great and small traditions of Czech history, he was thinking of Masaryk—a man who was bold, decisive, consistent—and of Beneš, a weak man, and “an ambitious, diligent, verbose mediocrity.”85 Patocˇka wrote of Beneš that, in 1938, “the weight of the decision about the future moral profile of the Czech nation came to depend on such a man. He had to choose and he chose smallness.”86 I do not know whether Patocˇka was not perhaps too harsh about Beneš. I do know that Václav Havel led the Czechs onto the path— of a Great History. But will they stay on it?

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Notes

Introduction 1. Adam Michnik, “Wielka Historia Václava Havla,” Gazeta Wyborcza, no. 235, October 8, 2011. The essay is included in this book as its final chapter. 2. The concept of the “happy performative” is usually associated with J. L. Austin’s set of lectures on language in which he discusses sentences that do not just describe reality or state facts but have the quality of enacting what they actually say. I am following here my own insights expressed in Performative Democracy (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2009). 3. Petr Blažek and Grzegorz Majewski, “Granica Przyjaz´ni” (Border of Friendship), Karta, no. 45, 2005. 4. Andrzej Friszke, Opozycja Polityczna w PRL. 1945 –1980 (London: Aneks, 1994), 447– 48. 5. In 1978 alone more than fifty documents prepared by Charter 77 were issued, ranging widely from open letters to commentaries on persecutions, a communiqué on the safety of nuclear power stations in the country, a fifty-two-hundred-word analysis of the situation of the Roma (Gypsies) in Czechoslovakia, a letter to the Czechoslovak prime minister requesting the lifting of the surveillance of Charter 77 spokesman Václav Havel’s home, a list of further signatories to Charter 77, and a New Year’s message expressing the wish that fundamental human rights would be gradually implemented in Czechoslovakia. The statements were published in a mimeographed newsletter Informace o Charteˇ 77 (Infoch). 6. Jan Patocˇka, distinguished philosopher and a spiritus movens behind Charter 77, referring to the trial against the Plastic People of the Universe, said: “Could you understand, sir, how it is at all possible that the regime oppresses its own children?”; Peter Balun, “Karta 77. Wola ponad siła˛” (Charter 77: Will over Power), Karta, no. 51, 2007, 102 –39.

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7. The Helsinki Agreement on Human Rights was part of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in Helsinki, signed at the conclusion of the conference on August 1, 1975. The conference was to lessen Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and its satellite countries in Eastern Europe and the countries of Western Europe. The Final Act, signed by thirty-five European countries, recognized the inviolability of the post–World War II borders in Europe, but it included a pledge to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms. Though it was a nonbinding agreement which did not have treaty status, it was a major diplomatic accomplishment that produced declarations on the principles guiding relations between participating states, along with three “baskets of co-operation” between East and West. The first basket was concerned with the political-military aspects of security; the second covered cooperation in areas of economy, technology, science, and the environment; and the third basket addressed matters of a humanitarian dimension, human rights, and fundamental freedoms. 8. Jacek Kuron´, a cofounder of the Committee for the Defense of Workers (KOR), was a dedicated educator, and in his youth a leader in so-called red scouting, a 1950s Polish version of the Soviet pioneer organization modeled on the teachings of the Soviet pedagogue Anton Makarenko. But Kuron´’s scouts, in a fudging of orthodoxy, were encouraged to be active, critical, and creative—and they were. In the 1970s, many of them became instrumental in creating various outlets for democratic opposition in Poland. 9. Adam Michnik, “Thank You, Vašek,” Gazeta Wyborcza, no. 27, February 1, 2003, 1. 10. Gustáv Husák was a longtime functionary of the Communist Party, who, following the Prague Spring and with support of the Soviet Union, replaced Alexander Dubcˇek as first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Havel wrote his open letter to Husák in April 1975; in August, Husák became president of the country. 11. Adam Michnik, “Niewygodna Rocznica” (An uneasy anniversary), Gazeta Wyborcza, no. 49, February 27, 1993, 8. 12. Zdeneˇk Mlynárˇ, Nightfrost in Prague (New York: Karz, 1980), 76. 13. Lityn´ski’s statement at a panel discussion on the occasion of the book launch of Havel’s collected essays, Siła Bezsilnych i inne Eseje, ed. Andrzej Jagodzin´ski (Warsaw: Agora, 2011), hosted by Gazeta Wyborcza in Warsaw, June, 18, 2012. 14. Informace o Charteˇ (Infoch), a monthly typewritten and mimeographed newsletter about twenty pages long, had been distributed in Prague since early 1978. It

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published declarations and information on imprisonments and abuses of the regime, along with the names and addresses of the editors. The complete digital version of the newsletter is available at http://www.vons.cz/information-Charter77. 15. Krytyka (1978 –94), published by the underground publishing press NOWA, had on its editorial board the Hungarian dissident Miklós Haraszti. It was a sizable publication (150 –300 pages per issue). Among its authors were Czesław Miłosz, Milan Kundera, and Józef Tischner. Beginning in 1983 Krytyka published its own book series, and among its forty titles were Havel’s Political Essays (1984) and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1989) (both in Polish translations). 16. Documents listed in Vilém Precˇan, ed., Ten Years of Charter 77 (Hannover: CSDS, 1986). 17. Blažek and Majewski, “Granica Przyjaz´ni.” 18. “The Power of the Powerless” was published in the fifth issue of Krytyka (1979), along with essays by three other Czech intellectuals: Václav Benda, Peter Uhl, and Jirˇí Neˇmec. 19. Adam Michnik, “The New Evolutionism,” in Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 20. Kuron´’s unsigned piece “Opozycja Polityczna w Polsce,” published in the Polish émigré journal Kultura, no. 11, 1974, quoted in Friszke, Opozycja Polityczna w PRL, 318. 21. Andrzej Jagodzin´ski, relaying his conversation with Bujak and Janas at the launch for Havel’s collected essays. Several months earlier, in a December 9, 2011, radio interview, Zbigniew Janas talked about how difficult it was for them to believe that they—two workers from the Ursus Tractor Factory— could change anything, and how they realized, after they got hold of Krytyka, with Havel’s essay, that every instance of protest, no matter how tiny, is of great significance; it became clear to them then that what they were doing made sense. See “Znałem prawdziwego Havla. Zbigniew Janas,” Radio WNET.pl, http://www.radiownet.pl /publikacje/ znalem–prawdziwego-havla-zbigniew-janas. 22. Paul Wilson, Introduction to Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless: Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965 –1990 (New York: Knopf, 1991), 125 –26. 23. For an extensive account of the activities on the border, see Blažek and Majewski, “Granica Przyjaz´ni.” 24. Among those who took part in the 1987 meeting were Václav Havel, Jacek ˇ arnogurský, Petr Uhl, Jaroslav Šabata, Jirˇí Dienstbier, Józef Pinior, Kuron´, Ján C

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Jan Lityn´ski, and Zbigniew Bujak. See the account by Mirosław Jasin´ski, one of the Wrocław students active in Polish-Czech-Slovak Solidarity, who—as he said—learned to speak Czech in the forest. After 1989 he became governor of the Wrocław region, and later director of the Institute of Polish Culture in Prague; Mirosław Jasin´ski, “From the Underground to Diplomacy: The History of PolishCzechoslovak Solidarity,” Visegrád Group, http://www.visegradgroup.eu/the -visegrad-book/jasinski-miroslaw-from. 25. The plays, directed by Feliks Falk, were originally staged at the Powszechny Theater in Warsaw, in November 1981. After eleven performances, martial law was imposed in December and the plays were removed from the stage by the military regime. They were not reintroduced to their Warsaw audience until February 1989. 26. Michnik, “Thank You, Vašek.” 27. Adam Michnik, “Gray Is Beautiful: A Letter to Ira Katznelson,” Letters from Freedom: Post–Cold War Realities and Perspectives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 28. Adam Michnik, “Pocza˛tek: Po spotkaniu w Bratysławie” (The beginning: After the meeting in Bratislava), Gazeta Wyborcza, no. 253, April 11, 1990, 6. 29. Adam Michnik, “Pakt Warszawski Pogrzebany” (The Warsaw Pact buried), Gazeta Wyborcza, no. 621, July 2, 1991. The Warsaw Pact was disbanded at a meeting of defense and foreign ministers from Pact countries on February 25, 1991, in Hungary. On July 1, 1991, it formally ended its existence. In March 1999 Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO as the first post-Communist countries to do so. 30. See also Michnik’s “The Trouble with History,” in The Trouble with History: Morality, Revolution, and Counterrevolution, ed. Irena Grudzinska-Gross (New Haven: Yale University Press 2014), 33 –52. “Dear Adam, here’s that essay I promised . . .” 1. Zapis (Censored), a clandestine journal published quarterly in Warsaw in 1977– 81 and edited by a group of writers and intellectuals, among them Jacek Bochen´ski, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and Stanisław Baran´czak. “Welcome to freedom, Václav!” 1. On October 1, 1938, the Polish Army invaded Czechoslovakia and took over the disputed Zaolzie region populated by a Polish minority. The annexation of

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Zaolzie was enabled by the Munich Conference on September 29, 1938, when the major Western powers legitimized the annexation by Hitler’s Germany of German ethnic areas in the northeastern part of Czechoslovakia, called the Sudetenland. Two days later Polish troops annexed the territory of Czechoslovakia “beyond the Olza River,” arguing that Poles in Zaolzie deserved the same rights as Sudeten Germans in the Munich Agreement. Thirty years later, on August 20, 1968, Polish soldiers were among the troops of the Warsaw Pact armies—the Bulgarian, Hungarian, and East German armies were also represented—that invaded Czechoslovakia in response to the political liberalization of the Prague Spring. The Polish contingent that participated in the invasion was second in size to the Soviet forces. On the twenty-first anniversary of the invasion, in August 1989, Michnik, then a newly elected member of the first post-Communist parliament in Poland, proposed the resolution in which the Polish parliament apologized to Czechs and Slovaks for taking part in the military intervention in August 1968. 2. Charter 77 was a declaration signed by Czech writers and intellectuals in January 1977, demanding the recognition of basic human and civil rights as granted both by the Helsinki Accords, which Czechoslovakia, along with thirty-four other European countries, had signed two years earlier, in 1975, and by the U.N. Covenants on Human Rights, ratified by Czechoslovakia in 1976. Though in its original declaration Charter 77 maintained that it was not an organization, as it had neither a leadership nor a membership, but was a free and open community of people that “springs from friendship and solidarity” and “embraces everyone who agrees with its ideas,” it was nevertheless a civic initiative that issued regular documents, reports, and letters concerning the human, civil, and social rights situation in Czechoslovakia (and the region), and was overseen by a rotating system of spokespersons. The issuance of the declaration met with both anti-Charter propaganda orchestrated by the government and the systematic harassment and imprisonment of its signatories and sympathizers. 3. At the 1985 trial, held in Gdan´sk, Adam Michnik was sentenced to three years in prison for attempting to organize a strike at the Gdan´sk shipyard. On June 29, 1985, Charter 77 issued an “open letter to Adam Michnik, Władyslaw Frasyniuk, and Bogdan Lis—activists of the banned trade union organization Solidarnos´´c — assuring them of Charter 77’s solidarity following their conviction by a Polish court”; Vilém Precˇan, ed., Ten Years of Charter 77 (Hannover: CSDS, 1986). After seventeen months in prison Michnik and his colleagues were released, thanks to an amnesty.

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The Uncanny Era of Post-Communism Gazeta Wyborcza, no. 279, November 30, 1991 1. Hradecˇek—Havel’s house in the Krkonoše Mountains, diminutive of Hrad (castle). 2. The Extraordinary 14th Congress of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, known also as “the secret congress,” took place on August 22, 1968, two days after Czechoslovakia was invaded by the Warsaw Pact armies. The delegates, summoned by clandestine radio to arrive at the CKD industrial plant in Vysocˇany, a district of Prague, managed to outmaneuver the Soviet roadblocks. They had been arriving overnight, in disguise and with appropriately forged IDs stating that they were employees of the CKD factory for the 6:00 a.m. work shift. The congress expressed complete trust in the direction of the Prague Spring reforms and in its leadership, demanded immediate talks on the withdrawal of the invading troops, and threatened to take decisive steps should the party leaders imprisoned by the Soviets not be released. The CKD plant’s People’s Militia provided security for the proceedings of the Congress and for its delegates. 3. Petr Uhl, a journalist and signatory of Charter 77, after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 became the Czechoslovak government’s commissioner for human rights. 4. Jacek Kuron´ (1934 –2004), educator and historian, one of the most prominent figures of democratic dissent in Poland, and cofounder of the Committee for the Defense of Workers (KOR), became minister of labor and social policy in the first democratic government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki (September 1989 –December 1990). 5. Zbigniew Herbert, “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito,” The Collected Poems, 1956 – 1998 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). 6. Tom Stoppard, Czech-born British playwright (b. Tomáš Straussler). 7. Ustasha was the radical fascist movement established in Croatia in the 1930s, aiming at a racially “pure” Croatia, and promoting persecution of Serbs, Jews, and Romanies. 8. Chetniks were members of a Serb nationalistic paramilitary organization, established in the early twentieth century in resistance to the Ottoman Empire. During World War II, the Chetnik Detachment of the Yugoslav Army became known for its collaboration with the Italian occupying forces and its actions carried out against Croats and Bosnian Muslims. 9. Endecja (ND), an acronym for National Democracy (1886 –1939), a political movement in Poland grounded in nationalism, which with catchphrases like

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“Poland for the Poles,” and “a Pole, a Catholic,” became a powerful right-wing political force in the interwar period in Poland. 10. Stepan Bandera (1909 –59), a leader of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, and from 1933 head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in western Ukraine, that with the entry of the German Nazi Army in June 1941 proclaimed an Independent State of Ukraine in L’viv. A military arm of the OUN (the Ukrainian Insurgent Army) was formed in 1943. 11. Jozef Tiso (1887–1947), Slovak Roman Catholic priest, one of the leaders of the nationalistic Slovak People’s Party, who after the German invasion of the Czech lands in 1939, became head of the Slovak Republic, a puppet state of Nazi Germany (1939 – 45). 12. Ion Antonescu (1882 –1946), Romanian marshal and politician, who became the military dictator under the pro-German government during World War II. 13. Miklós Horthy (1868 –1957), regent of the Kingdom of Hungary (1920 – 44), who surrendered Hungary to Nazi Germany in October 1944. 14. The Second Czechoslovak Republic existed from October 1, 1938, to March 14, 1939, following the Munich Agreement signed by the European leaders— Chamberlain (England), Daladier (France), Hitler (Germany), and Mussolini (Italy)— at the September 1938 conference in Munich. The Czechoslovak government was excluded from the talks. The pact made possible the annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland by Hitler’s Germany in September 1938, and opened a path for the entry of German troops and occupation of the country in March 1939. ˇ apek (1890 –1938) was a Czech writer and journalist known for his 15. Karel C antifascist views. 16. Pavel Tigrid (1917–2003), while in exile in West Germany, the United States, and France, established the influential Czechoslovak journal Sveˇdectví (1956 –92). Returning to Prague after the Velvet Revolution, he served as minister of culture in 1994 –96. Karel Schwarzenberg (Prince of Schwarzenberg) a prominent human rights advocate who grew up in Austria and returned to Prague in 1990, became chancellor to Václav Havel, then a senator, and eventually minister of foreign affairs (2007–10). Jirˇí Pelikán (1923 –99), a journalist and writer, was director general of Czechoslovak television and a member of the Communist Party. During the Prague Spring, the state television under his leadership was able to broadcast without censorship. After the August 1968 invasion by Warsaw Pact troops, he was involved in setting up a clandestine broadcasting network, Legal and Free Radio

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Czechoslovakia. Removed from his position and harassed, he received political asylum and citizenship in Italy, where he became a member of the European Parliament on behalf of the Italian Socialist Party. After the Velvet Revolution, Pelikán became a member of the Consultative Council of President Havel (1990 –91). Vilém Precˇan, historian and dissident, while in exile in Germany established the Documentation Center for the Promotion of Independent Czechoslovak Literature in ScheinfeldSchwarzenberg, which collected the works of dissident authors and political exiles. In 1990 Precˇan became the first director of the Institute for Contemporary History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. 17. Joseph Švejk is a good-natured but preposterous literary character created by Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek during the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The character became most widely known through Hašek’s later antiwar and antimilitary satirical novel The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War and is often considered the quintessence of the Czech national character. 18. Miroslav Sládek is a Czech politician who in the 1990s became leader of a ˇ (Coalition for Republic–Republican Party of right-wing populist party SPR-RSC Czechoslovakia). Maciej Giertych in the early 1990s was the leading member of the Stronnictwo Narodowe (National Party of Poland), which later merged with the populist League of Polish Families (LPR). Jean-Marie Le Pen, a French nationalist politician, was a founder and the leader, 1972 –2011, of the National Front, a farright political party which in 1980 and the 1990s began to enjoy considerable support among the French electorate, winning as much as 15 percent of the vote nationally. 19. Civic Forum was a political movement that emerged during the 1989 Velvet Revolution out of the milieu of Charter 77 in the Czech part of Czechoslovakia. 20. Leszek Balcerowicz, Polish economist, was minister of finance and deputy prime minister in the first democratic government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki (1989 –91). He is particularly known for implementing in the 1990s the economic transformation program commonly referred to as “shock therapy” that facilitated Poland’s rapid transition from a state-run to a market economy. The Balcerowicz Plan was activated by ten radical bills approved by Parliament in December and signed by the president into law December 31, 1989. It was criticized for causing a sharp decline in living standards for large groups of people, mainly workers from the unprofitable state-owned enterprises and state-run farms that were dissolved after 1989. 21. Havel frequently cited this O’Neill maxim, and his reference has been quoted by many others, but to the best of my knowledge this quotation has not been found in the writings of O’Neill.

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22. Jerzy Giedroyc´ was the founder and editor in chief of the influential Polish émigré monthly Kultura, published in Paris (1947–2000). Smuggled into Poland, Kultura, which ran works by such émigré writers as Witold Gombrowicz and Czesław Miłosz, played a crucial role in nurturing independent thinking and strengthening the culture of the democratic opposition. 23. Stanisław Tymin´ski, an obscure émigré businessman—with Canadian citizenship and business ventures in Peru— emerged as a dark-horse challenger to Lech Wałe˛sa in the first completely free presidential elections in Poland in 1990. 24. At the time of the conversation the debate around Tymin´ski was still heated, as he had turned out to be an anti-Semite and in the opinion of many a charlatan, and in the end he became the rather pathetic butt of jokes. 25. Bohumil Hrabal (1914 –97), an eminent Czech novelist and poet, best known for his Closely Watched Trains, I Served the King of England, and Total Fears: Letters to Dubenka. 26. New York University, October 27, 1991. 27. Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, philosopher, and an architect of the Czechoslovak Republic (1918 –35), was the first president of Czechoslovakia, a well-functioning democracy that emerged after World War I and the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was succeeded by his friend the foreign minister of Czechoslovakia, Edvard Beneš, who was president from 1935 to 1938. During World War II, Beneš was in England, heading the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. He resumed the presidency after World War II in 1945. Jan Masaryk, the son of T. G. Masaryk, was foreign minister of Czechoslovakia from 1940 to 1948. At the request of President Beneš, Jan Masaryk remained at his post after the Communist takeover of February 25, 1948, but died a few weeks later under suspicious circumstances. 28. Valerian Zorin (1902 – 86), a Soviet ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1945 – 47 and then deputy foreign minister of the Soviet Union, arrived in Prague in February 1948 to oversee the replacement of Edvard Beneš’s democratic government with a pro-Soviet Communist government to be led by Klement Gottwald. 29. Klement Gottwald (1896 –1953) was a Communist politician, leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, president of Czechoslovakia in 1948 –53, and emblematic leader of the Czechoslovak version of Stalinism. 30. The Czechoslovak coup d’état of 1948 began in late February when the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, supported by the Soviet Union, forced the appointment of Communist ministers, thus getting full control over the country. It concluded with the resignation of President Beneš on June 2 and the installation

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of Gottwald. For the entire Eastern Bloc the year 1948 concluded the process of solidifying Soviet power. The construction of a one-party state system was finalized, and the making of the Iron Curtain had started. A Completed Revolution and Belated Avengers Gazeta Wyborcza, no. 246, October 21, 1995 1. Vladimír Mecˇiar was the leader of the People’s Party–Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, which led Slovakia in 1993 to separation from the Czech Republic, a split known as the Velvet Divorce. Notorious for his autocratic style of governance, Mecˇiar served three times as prime minister of Slovakia (1990 –91, 1992 –94, 1994 –98). 2. Józef Oleksy, a prime minister of Poland (1995 –96), was a former member of the Communist Party, which in 1991 transformed itself successfully into a social democratic party, the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD). 3. Many so-called post-Communist parties—that is, parties with a Communist pedigree that owned considerable capital and well-trained party cadres—had reconstructed themselves into a variety of socialist or social democratic parties and successfully entered into competitive electoral politics. As such, they represented a phenomenon characteristic of countries in transition to democracy. 4. Gyula Horn, the last Communist foreign minister of Hungary, opened up the border for East Germans escaping to the West in 1989. He was then the prime minister of Hungary from 1994 to 1998. Aleksander Kwas´niewski, member of the Polish United Workers Party until 1990, held various posts in the government until 1989. A key actor on the government side of the Roundtable Talks that ultimately led to the dismantling of communism in Poland, Kwas´niewski succeeded Lech Wałe˛sa in 1995 as president after winning 51.7 percent of the vote. A popular political figure, he was reelected in 2000 for his second and final term as president. 5. In 1993 the post-Communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) and the Polish Peasant Party (PSL) combined to win a majority of seats in both houses of Parliament and formed a coalition government. 6. Václav Klaus, the founder of the Czech Republic’s largest center-right party, was prime minister of the Czech Republic from 1992 to 1997. In 2003, following Havel, he became the second president of the Czech Republic. 7. Jan Patocˇka (1907–77), a distinguished Czech philosopher, was a disciple of Husserl and Heidegger, and a professor at Charles University and later at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Forced to retire under the wave of “normalization” in 1971, he conducted private seminars that were known as Patocˇka University.

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One of the key founders of Charter 77, he was in the first team of its spokespersons, along with Václav Havel and Ladislav Hejdánek. Three months after the launching of Charter 77, he died of a heart attack, widely attributed to the strain of relentless police interrogation. Havel dedicated to him The Power of the Powerless. Paul Ricoeur celebrated him as a “philosopher of resistance” whose work and life advanced the fundamental precepts of phenomenology. 8. “Normalization” was a period following the Prague Spring when the path of reform taken by the Communist Party was reversed, political liberalization terminated with the help of the tanks of the Warsaw Pact Armies, and the authoritarian rule of the Communist regime restored. Normalization was formally launched in April 1969 with the official elevation of Gustáv Husák to power, the restoration of censorship, massive party purges, and the firing of tens of thousands of Prague Spring activists from their jobs. 9. Alois Indra, Vasil Bil’ak, Oldrˇich Švestka, Drahomír Kolder, and Miloš Jakeš were all Communist hard-liners of pro-Soviet orientation who considered the Prague Spring a work of counterrevolutionaries and hence supported the invasion. They became major actors of the normalization period: Indra was minister and chairman of the National Assembly of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (1971); Bil’ak was active in preparation for the invasion, then became secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia (1968 – 88); Švestka was a journalist, high Communist Party official, and longtime editor of the official party newspaper, Rudé Právo (editor in chief, 1975 – 83); Kolder was minister of governmental control and chairman of the Slovak National Council; and Jakeš was a key proponent of the “normalization policy,” secretary of the Central Committee, and first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (1987– 89). 10. Miroslav Šteˇpán, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia before 1989, after the Velvet Revolution became the leader of the Party of Czechoslovak Communists, which was one of the only nonreformed Communist parties in the region that successfully competed in parliamentary elections. 11. Josef Škvorecký (1924 –2012) was a Czech writer and translator in exile in Canada. The Cowards (Zbabeˇlci) was his first novel (1958), capturing the life of a young jazz musician during wartime Czechoslovakia; soon after it was published, it was banned by the Czechoslovak regime. 12. František Kriegel (1908 –79), Czechoslovak politician and physician, was a Communist who joined the International Brigade to fight in the Spanish Civil War. He was deputy minister of health (1949 –52) and in the 1960s a health adviser to

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the Cuban government. A leading figure in the Prague Spring, Kriegel was the only one who refused to sign a Moscow Protocol stating that “an agreement was reached on the terms of the withdrawal of [the allied] troops from the territory of Czechoslovakia depending on the normalization of the situation in the Republic”; Tad Szulc, Czechoslovakia since World War II (New York: Viking, 1971). After signing Charter 77 Kriegel was under constant surveillance and police harassment. Havel wrote an essay presenting Kriegel as an extraordinary but tragic person who tried to humanize an inhuman political system. The essay was written for the eightieth anniversary of Kriegel’s birthday ( January 23, 1988), and was originally published in Obsah (Contents), an underground monthly started by a Czech writer, Ivan Klíma. 13. Willy Brandt (1913 –92) was chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1969 to 1974; he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971. 14. The meetings of the members of Charter 77 and the Committee for the Defense of Workers (KOR) took place on the mountaintop S´niez˙ka, part of the Karkonosze (Krkonoše in Czech) Mountains along the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia. 15. Konrad Adenauer was the first postwar chancellor of Germany (1949 – 63); General Charles de Gaulle was the first president (1959 – 69) of the French Fifth Republic; Alcide De Gasperi was the prime minister of Italy (1945 –53) and one of the founding fathers of the European Union. 16. Havel and Michnik are referring here to the Visegrád Group, a post-1989 arrangement for regional cooperation, launched by the presidents of Czechoslovakia and Poland and the prime minister of Hungary, at a meeting in the Hungarian city of Visegrád in 1991. After an initial period of close collaboration and exchanges, the activities of the Visegrád countries tapered off, to resume again in 1998. 17. Radovan Karadžic´, a Bosnian Serb politician, president of the Serb Republic (1992 –96), was accused of war crimes during the siege of Sarajevo, and of ordering the Srebrenica massacre. The U.N. Yugoslav war crimes tribunal that began in 2009 reinstated in July 2013 a genocide charge against Karadžic´ linked to a campaign of killing and mistreating non-Serbs at the start of the Bosnian War in 1992. 18. Josip Broz Tito (1892 –1980), president of Yugoslavia from 1953 to 1980, was known for being the most benevolent dictator in the Soviet bloc; he broke with the Soviet Union and developed a policy of nonalignment with either side in the Cold War. 19. At the time of this Havel-Michnik conversation, the possible resolution of the conflict in former Yugoslavia was on everybody’s mind. Preparations for the

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negotiations to end the three-and-a-half-year-long war in Bosnia were in full swing. The peace conference—involving all the main actors in the Yugoslav conflict: Slobodan Miloševic´ (Serbia), Franjo Tuđman (Croatia), and Alija Izetbegovic´ (Bosnia and Herzegovina)—began days later, on November 1, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. The key architects of the Dayton Peace Accords, which were signed in Paris on December 14, 1995, were U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke and the former prime minister of Sweden Carl Bildt. 20. Leaders of the extreme right-wing movements in Europe of the 1990s: JeanMarie Le Pen in France, Jorg Haider in Austria, Miroslav Sládek in the Czech Republic, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky in Russia. 21. The United Nations Protection Force was the peacekeeping force in Croatia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav wars, 1992 –95. 22. The Warsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1968, to crush the political reforms launched during the Prague Spring. 23. Kundera’s essay “Czech Destiny,” translated also as “The Czech Deal” or ˇ eský údeˇl), was published in Listy, nos. 7–9, in December 1968; “The Czech Lot” (C Havel’s polemic entitled “Czech Destiny?” appeared in February 1969 in the literary monthly Tvárˇ. Kundera replied with an essay “Radicalism and Exhibitionism” (Radikalismus a exhibicionismus) in yet another journal, Host do domu, no. 15, March 1969. ˇ apek (1890 –1938), a major Czech writer and playwright of the twen24. Karel C tieth century. 25. The Committee for the Defense of Workers (KOR) was established in 1976 by Polish intellectuals and democratic opposition leaders to provide legal and financial aid to the workers of Ursus and Radom who suffered beatings and imprisonment after their protests in June 1976. Gradually KOR became an inspiration and shield for a variety of human rights activities like underground printing, an independent press, and educational initiatives. 26. See “Welcome to Freedom, Václav!,” note 2. 27. See “The Uncanny Era of Post-Communism,” note 29. 28. See “The Uncanny Era of Post-Communism,” note 21. Everything Is Still in Motion Gazeta Wyborcza, no. 273, November 21, 1998 1. Members of Charter 77 and KOR, Committee for the Defense of Workers, met in August 1978 at the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia, on Mount

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Sneˇžka (Czech) or S´niez˙ka (Polish), to prepare a joint statement on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies, and to discuss closer collaboration between the dissident movements in the two countries. 2. A reference to the impeachment charges brought against President Bill Clinton in 1998 by a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, based on the investigation by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr. 3. The name, concocted by Michnik, blends Kenneth Starr’s name with that of Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, chief of the Soviet security and secret police (NKVD) under Joseph Stalin, and a key player in the purges of Stalin’s opponents. 4. Elections took place in early November and ended with the loss of a few House seats for the Republicans. 5. The Forum 2000 Foundation was established in 1996 as a joint initiative of Václav Havel, Japanese philanthropist Yohei Sasakawa, and the Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel. The Foundation organizes annual conferences in Prague to facilitate a platform for global dialogue and to encourage religious, cultural, and ethnic tolerance. 6. Tadeusz Pieronek (1934 –), Roman Catholic priest and professor of theology, credited for his support of open-mindedness. Endecja (National Democracy) was a Polish right-wing nationalistic movement present from the late nineteenth century until the end of World War II, particularly influential during the interwar period. Here Michnik uses the term to describe en bloc the politicians of the extreme right wing of the political spectrum in post-1989 Poland. 7. According to the report of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), in the parliamentary elections held June 19 –20, 1998, the Czech ˇ SSD) won seventy-four seats in Parliament, the Civic Social Democratic Party (C Democratic Party (ODS) sixty-three, the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moraˇ M) twenty-four, the Christian and Democratic Union Czechoslovak Peovia (KSC ple’s Party (KDU) twenty, and the Freedom Union (US) nineteen. Source: OSCE / ODIHR Election Observation report on the Czech Republic Parliamentary Elections of 19 and 20 June 1998. Among the parties that did not attain the 5 percent minimum for representation in Parliament were the Pensioners for Life Security (3.1 percent), the Democratic Union (1.4 percent), the Green Party (1.1 percent), Independents (0.9 percent), the Moravian Democratic Party (0.4 percent), the Czech National Social Party (0.3 percent), and the Civic Coalition–Political Club (0.3 per-

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cent). Source: D. Nohlen and P. Stöver, Elections in Europe: A Data Handbook (Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos, 2010), 471. 8. AWS (Solidarity Electoral Action), established in 1996, was a coalition of more than thirty parties, representing a mixture of liberal, conservative, and Christian democratic views. In 1997–2000 this party, in coalition with the liberally oriented Freedom Union, created a government led by Jerzy Buzek of AWS, with Leszek Balcerowicz and Bronisław Geremek of the Freedom Party. AWS disappeared from the political scene in 2001 due to disagreements between members of the coalition over Poland’s accession to the European Union. 9. FIDESZ (Alliance of Young Democrats), established clandestinely in 1988, emerged in 1990 as a major, liberally oriented political force in Hungary. After its 1994 electoral defeat, FIDESZ changed its political platform, moving gradually to the right and becoming a key national-conservative force in Hungary. After the 1998 elections it gained power under the leadership of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, entering into coalition with the Independent Smallholders’ Party. Since 2005 FIDESZ, frequently criticized for illiberal and undemocratic policies, has dominated politics in Hungary. 10. József Torgyán was chairman of the Independent Smallholders’ Party (1991– 2002). In the government of Viktor Orbán, he was appointed minister of agriculture and rural development and deputy prime minister. 11. Vladimír Mecˇiar was the leader of the People’s Party–Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, which led Slovakia to separation from the Czech Republic in 1993. A Communist in his youth, he became a member of the anti-Communist opposition in 1989 and turned ultranationalist in the early 1990s. An autocratic prime minister of Slovakia throughout the 1990s, he was voted out of office in the 1998 elections. 12. Both the Czech Republic and Slovakia joined the European Union on May 1, 2004. 13. The Munich Agreement (September 1938 conference in Munich) between England, France, Italy, and Germany was a victory for Hitler’s policy of “peaceful aggression” that enabled Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, populated by an ethnic-German majority. Since Czechoslovakia was not present at the conference, and because France and Great Britain signed the agreement despite their military alliance with Czechoslovakia, the document is also referred to as “the Munich Betrayal,” or “the Munich Diktat,” an evidence of the Western powers’ acquiescence to Hitler’s demands. President Beneš signed the agreement but resigned

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soon afterward and moved to the United States. After World War II, as the president of postwar Czechoslovakia, he again found himself in a similar position. Following the Communist coup in February 1948, he was requested to sign a Soviet-style constitution that ended any hopes for democracy in Czechoslovakia. He refused to sign the constitution and resigned as president on June 6, 1948. He died three months later. 14. A speech accepting the Catalonia International Prize, Barcelona, May 11, 1995. In 2002 Havel wrote an essay, “Edvard Beneš: Dilemmas of a European Politician,” published in several European newspapers, including Gazeta Wyborcza, Le Monde, and Süddeutsche Zeitung. 15. The Bohemian priest Jan Hus (1369 –1415), a thinker and theologian, was known as the grandfather of the Protestant Reformation. A rector of the University at Prague, he was burned at the stake for heresy against the Roman Catholic Church. Following his execution, his teachings found enormous resonance in the Czech lands, and his followers, the Hussites, defeated several papal crusades against them. An Account of Our Victories, an Accounting of Our Freedom Tygodnik Powszechny, no. 43, 2003 1. Václav Havel’s play Audience (1975) is the first of a trilogy whose main character, Ferdinand Vaneˇk, is a blacklisted dissident writer who—to avoid being qualified as a social parasite—works in a brewery. The plays are loosely based on Havel’s experience as a worker at the Trutnov brewery, near his country cottage. Since the play could not be performed in public, Havel and a fellow dissident, the actor and director Pavel Landovský, also prohibited from working in the theater, made a voice recording of the play in a private apartment in Prague in 1978. Produced before video technology became available, this “samizdat performance” tapped into the unparalleled popularity of the recorded voice as broadcast unofficially throughout the Soviet Bloc by Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America, and BBC, offering everything from uncensored commentary to forbidden songs. The recording of Audience, published in Sweden by Czech exiles as an LP, was smuggled back into the country and circulated throughout Czechoslovakia. In 1990 it was officially published by Bonton, a Czech record company, and later that year the play itself, directed by Jirˇí Menzel and with Pavel Landovský as the brewmaster, was performed before Czechoˇ inoherní Club in Prague. slovak audiences at the legendary C 2. The Medal of Saint George is an award given by Tygodnik Powszechny, a liberal Roman Catholic weekly published in Kraków since 1945. Tygodnik, known

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for maintaining substantial independence during the Communist period and for supporting the democratic opposition, remained a site of key debates in post-1989 Poland. The Medal of Saint George recognizes “a striving against evil and the persistent encouragement of good in public life.” 3. Churchill’s speech given at the House of Commons on April 18, 1947. 4. COMECON, or the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (1949 –91), was an economic organization of the Soviet Bloc countries under the leadership of the Soviet Union. 5. Creating the Warsaw Treaty Organization of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance (1955 –91), the pact signed in Warsaw in 1951 was a political and military alliance among the countries of the Soviet Bloc (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania) under the leadership of the Soviet Union. 6. Edward Gierek (1913 –2001) was the first secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party between 1970 and 1980. The beginning of his rule saw an impressive rise in the standard of living, thanks mainly to substantial loans that Gierek secured from Western countries. ˇ apek’s Misto pro Jonathana (A place for Jonathan), a collection of his 7. Karel C writings between 1917 and 1938, which was published in 1970. 8. In the Polish bishops’ letter to the Communist authorities on May 8, 1953, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyn´ski, the primate of Poland, declared, “non possumus”—we cannot go any farther—refusing further concessions by the Catholic Church to the Communist government. He was imprisoned soon thereafter. 9. The conversation in Olomouc took place in the midst of a major controversy associated with the three wise men from the East, Václav Havel, Adam Michnik, and György Konrad. In March 2003, Christian Semler, a prominent columnist and political editor of Die Tageszeitung, published a sharp critique of the three former dissidents from Central Europe for supporting the invasion of Iraq and thus betraying their own commitment to nonviolent change. While Havel, Michnik, and Konrad had never issued any joint declaration as Semler implies, they all saw Saddam Hussein as a tyrant and abuser of human rights, and roughly at the same time each of them had expressed support for an intervention in Iraq, “even though,” as Michnik emphasized later, President Bush supported it, too. Michnik’s strong response to Semler’s piece, “We the Traitors,” was published first in Gazeta and then began a life on the Internet and in the foreign media. Michnik writes of the experience the three shared, the “experience of the acute loneliness of people subject to the pressures

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of totalitarian despotism and doomed to the world’s indifference.” Havel’s indirect response appeared in To the Castle and Back, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Knopf, 2007): “I have always preferred consensual resolutions, even compromise. . . . But I must add that I have always thought that my tolerance has its limits” (314). The July 17, 2008, issue of the New York Review of Books offered a piece, “After Five Years,” written by Michnik and a former Hungarian dissident and thinker, János Kis, two friends from the region who—though still themselves divided over the Iraq War—were now “united on the necessity to end it. . . . The disastrous outcome of the Iraqi adventure does not suggest that the very idea of humanitarian intervention should be abandoned. The protection of human rights is a responsibility of the international community and there are occasions when force must be used in order to discharge that responsibility properly.” 10. Andrei Sakharov (1921– 89) was a Russian scientist who became a dissident human rights activist. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. Jacek Kuron´ (1934 –2004), historian, educator, and a prominent figure in the Polish democratic opposition movement, was one of the founders of the Committee for the Defense of Workers (KOR). 11. The Sudetenland was a mountainous borderland region of Czechoslovakia that nearly encircled Bohemia and Moravia (northern, southwest, and western areas), populated mostly by the country’s German minority. At the Munich Conference in 1938 Great Britain and France agreed to Hitler Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland even though they both were in a military alliance with Czechoslovakia at the time. 12. Aleksander Kwas´niewski, an active member of the Communist Party in the 1980s, was a cofounder of the Social Left Alliance in 1990. In democratic elections in 1995 he defeated the incumbent Lech Wałe˛sa and served as president until 2005. Václav Klaus was a cofounder of the Civic Democratic Party, the largest center-right political party in the Czech Republic, and was prime minister of the Czech Republic from 1992 to 1997. He was elected president in 2003. The Times Are Favoring What’s Mean Also published in Gazeta Wyborcza, no. 232, October 4, 2007 1. Michnik’s essay “Modlitwa o deszcz” (Prayer for rain) was published on July 30, 2007, in Gazeta Wyborcza, and in a shorter version in El Pais on July 29. Michnik voices there his concern about illiberal and antidemocratic directions taken by the

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ruling right-wing coalition in Poland led by Jarosław Kaczyn´ski of the Law and Justice Party. The twin brother of Jarosław Kaczyn´ski, Lech Kaczyn´ski, was then president of Poland. The brothers, active in the anti-Communist opposition, established the Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwos´c´) in 2001. The need for a “Fourth Republic”—a moral and political renewal of Poland, including radical lustration (screening of public officials) and a fight against corruption—was a slogan used by Law and Justice during the 2005 parliamentary elections. The party won the elections, and at the same time Lech Kaczyn´ski won the presidential election. Jarosław Kaczyn´ski was prime minister in the years 2006 –7. Lech Kaczyn´ski was president from 2005 until his death in the crash of a governmental plane in Smolensk, Russia, in April 2010. 2. Adam Michnik, “Powstanie Listopadowe—polskie pytania,” Polskie Pytania (Paris: Zeszyty Literackie, 1987). 3. The First Republic refers to the period of 1573 –1795 —the “democracy of nobles”—when the Parliament, made up of nobility, elected the monarch, until the partition of Poland by its three neighbors and its disappearance from the map of Europe. The Second Republic was the brief period between the First and Second World Wars (1918 –39), when Poland regained its statehood. The Third Republic began in 1989, with the dismantling of Communism and the beginning of democratic transformation. 4. This is an allusion to a Churchill quotation: “Democracy means that if the doorbell rings in the early hours, it is likely to be the milkman.” Janusz Kaczmarek was appointed minister of internal affairs and administration by Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyn´ski. Quickly dismissed, he was accused of warning the leader of the Samoobrona (Self-defense) Peasants Party, Andrzej Lepper, about an action planned by the Central Anticorruption Bureau. Kaczmarek was arrested and held for fortyeight hours on allegations of submitting false testimony. The investigation against him was ultimately discontinued. The court ruled the arrest was against procedures, and that it was done for political purposes. 5. Emil Wa˛sacz served in the Ministry of the Treasury from 1997 to 2000. He was unpopular among the right-wing parties, particularly for his take on privatization. In 2005 the Parliament voted to have Mr. Wa˛sacz put on trial by the Constitutional Tribunal. He was accused of negligence of his duties while privatizing the major telephone company (TP SA) and the insurance company (PZU). In September 2006 he was detained and released, as the court deemed the detainment irregular.

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The trial took place on October 26, 2006, but then the investigation was discontinued, because of formal errors in the act of prosecution. In 2007 this decision was overruled and the investigation started again. As of 2013, it had not concluded. Barbara Blida (1949 –2007) was a left-wing politician who was minister of housing construction in 1993 –96. In April 2007, while she was detained at her house by the Agency for Internal Security, she committed suicide in her bathroom. She was expected to be charged with facilitating corruption in a coal transaction. A physician, Mirosław Garlicki, chief cardiologist of one of the hospitals in Warsaw, was detained and handcuffed by Central Anticorruption Bureau agents in the presence of media before being charged with more than fifty counts of corruption and murder. Most of them were later dismissed, but as of 2013 the case was still not concluded. In the meantime Garlicki applied to the European Tribunal of Human Rights and was granted a decision that his arrest was against the European Convention for Human Rights. 6. Zbigniew Ziobro, lawyer, minister of justice in the years 2006 –7, famous for announcing the war against corruption during his term. Two days after the detainment of Mirosław Garlicki, Ziobro organized a special press conference, presenting the case as a great success of the Central Anticorruption Bureau and accusing Garlicki of murder. 7. On October 21, 2007, early elections were held—after the Polish parliament had voted for its own dissolution as a result of allegations of massive corruption on the part of Andrzej Lepper, leader of the party that was a coalition partner to the government of Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyn´ski. The elections brought a victory for the center-right Civic Platform and launched the government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk. 8. Havel’s Prosim Strucˇneˇ (Please be brief ) was published in Czech in 2006; in Polish (Tylko krotko, prosze) in 2007, translated by Andrzej Jagodzin´ski; and in English under the title To the Castle and Back, translated by Paul Wilson (New York: Knopf, 2007), quotation 143 – 44. 9. The term “pseudoelites” was first used by Jarosław Kaczyn´ski to describe intellectuals of the Third Republic in a derogatory way—implying that they jeopardize his project of the Fourth Republic and that they are to be blamed for any difficulties his government might experience. 10. Havel, To the Castle and Back, 116 –17.

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11. Vladimír Mecˇiar (Slovakia), Václav Klaus (the Czech Republic), Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Viktor Yanukovych (Ukraine). The President and the Playwright The first conversation, published in Gazeta Wyborcza, no. 267, November 15 –16, 2008, was conducted with the collaboration of Andrzej Jagodzin´ski. Havel’s 2007 play Leaving, translated into English by Paul Wilson, is a satirical play capturing the life of a politician, Chancellor Vilém Riegel, as he is leaving his post. It had its world premiere in May 2008 at the Archa Theatre in Prague. In 2011 Havel directed a film adaptation of the play in which his wife, Dagmar Havlová, plays Vilém’s commonlaw wife, Irena. 1. With the growing territorial claims by Hitler’s Germany, initially to include in its territory those borderlands inhabited by German minorities, like the so-called Sudeten Germans who lived within Czechoslovak borders, the Czechoslovak government came up with a defense strategy (and a considerable budget). Already in 1934 it had decided to construct along the nation’s borders a system of fortifications similar to the Maginot Line. The work began in 1935 and continued until the German invasion enabled by the Munich Agreement in 1938. 2. In fact, the Kremlin’s decision to intervene militarily—as Zdeneˇk Mlynárˇ has written—had already been made in May 1968; Nightfrost in Prague (New York: Karz, 1980), 161. Similarly, thirteen years later, the decision to introduce martial law in Poland, which had been left to a Polish general, was made in May 1981, several months before it was actually imposed in December 1981. In each case the extra time afforded the affected country a precious extended experience of democratic self-governance. 3. The so-called Normalization policy that followed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 aimed at reversing the reformatory spirit of the Prague Spring. On normalization see the conversation “A Completed Revolution and Belated Avengers.” 4. Jan Palach was a twenty-one-year-old student of history at Prague’s Charles University, who on January 19, 1969, set himself on fire in protest against the disappearance of the spirit and resolve of the Prague Spring, following the August 1968 invasion by the Warsaw Pact armies. Palach’s funeral was one of the last public demonstrations against the policies of the new neo-Stalinist leadership and policies of

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the Communist Party. Set in the pavement of Prague’s Veˇnceslav Square is a striking memorial to Palach’s self-immolation. 5. Havel’s country home in the Krkonoše Mountains. 6. Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian human rights activist, journalist, and writer, was known for her investigative reporting from the war in Chechnya, and for her opposition to the policies of President Putin. She received various death threats, and in October 2006 she was shot dead in an elevator of her building in Moscow. Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian secret service officer, fled Russia and while in England published two books implicating the Russian secret service in terrorist acts against its own citizens, including Anna Politkovskaya. He died of poisoning in late November 2006. Alexander Yakovlev was a Soviet politician exposed to the West (scholarship at Columbia University, ambassadorship to Ottawa) and an early ally of Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika, resulting in sweeping changes in the Kremlin in the late 1980s. 7. Alexander Lukashenko, since 1994 the first—and as of 2013 still the only— president of the Republic of Belarus, which emerged as an independent state after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Under Lukashenko’s protracted autocratic rule, Belarus has become known for its systematic repression of journalists, civil society organizations, and human rights activists, and for its large number of political prisoners. 8. Media mogul Silvio Berlusconi became the longest-serving prime minister of Italy, a total of nine years between 1994 and 2011. His four-term tenure was notorious for corruption, sex scandals, and political blunders. 9. The Schengen zone is a part of Europe currently constituted by twenty-six countries that have agreed to eliminate passport and immigration control at borders, allowing for free travel within the zone. Schengen is the place in Luxembourg where the agreement was signed in 1985. The Eurozone, since 1999, consists of the countries that have adopted a common monetary policy (as of 2013, seventeen, all in Europe) with the euro as their currency. 10. Václav Havel, Prosim Strucˇneˇ (Please be brief ) (Prague: Gallery, 2006); the book is constructed around Havel’s diary entries, letters, and conversations with Czech writer Karel Hvížd’ala. The English edition, translated by Paul Wilson, is entitled To the Castle and Back (New York: Knopf, 2007). The Polish version, Tylko krotko, prosze, was translated by Andrzej Jagodzin´ski (Kraków: Znak, 2007).

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11. Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz, ed., The Vaneˇk Plays: Four Plays, One Character (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987), collects the plays sharing the protagonist Ferdinand Vaneˇk, created by Havel in 1975. In addition to Havel, the playwrights are Pavel Kohout, Pavel Landovský, and Jirˇí Dienstbier. 12. Pavel Kohout’s Atest is a four-act play about Vaneˇk written in 1978. 13. Pavel Kohout, Kde je zakopán pes (Brno: Atlantis, 1990). 14. Havel, To the Castle and Back, 117. When Socrates Became Pericles The essay was originally published in Gazeta Wyborcza, no. 235, October 8, 2011, and later appeared in English in Common Knowledge, vol. 18, no. 3, Fall 2012. 1. Quoted in Monika Zgustová, Bohumil Hrabal (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Dolnos´la˛skie, 2000), 233. 2. Václav Havel, To the Castle and Back, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Knopf, 2007), 59. 3. Ibid., 88, 60. 4. Mount Sneˇžka in Czech is Mount S´niez˙ka in Polish. 5. Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvížd’ala, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Knopf, 1990), 54. 6. Ibid., 54. 7. Václav Havel, Audience, in The Garden Party and Other Plays, trans. Vera Blackwell, George Theiner, and Jan Novák (New York: Grove, 1993), 208. 8. Ibid., 208 –9. ˇ apek, “Miejsce dla Jonathana,” in We własnych oczach. XX-wieczny 9. Karel C esej zachodnio i południowosłowian´ski, ed. Halina Janaszek-Ivanicˇkova in collaboration with Edward Madany, Jan Wierzbicki, and Teresa Da˛bek-Wirgowa (Warsaw: Pan´stwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1978). 10. Václav Havel, Letter to Alexander Dubcˇek, Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965 –1990, ed. Paul R. Wilson (New York: Vintage, 1992), 38. 11. Ibid., 38 –39. 12. Ibid., 38, 43, 48 – 49. 13. Ibid., 42. See “The Uncanny Era of Post-Communism,” note 17. 14. Václav Havel, Letters to Olga: June 1979 –September 1982, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Knopf, 1988), 75.

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15. Wawel is the castle of Polish kings in Kraków. 16. See Adam Michnik, “The Prince and the Pauper: In Strange Communion with Leszek Kołakowski,” trans. Jennifer Croft, Common Knowledge 16 (2010), 177–97. 17. Havel, Open Letters, 75. 18. Ibid., 78 – 80. 19. Ibid., 88. 20. “Declaration of Charter 77,” in Ten Years of Charter 77 (Hannover: CSDS, 1986), available at http://libpro.cts.cuni.cz/charta/docs/declaration_of_charter_ 77.pdf. 21. The last text by Jan Patocˇka, written on March 8, 1977, cited in Mariusz Surosz, Pepiki (Warsaw: W.A.B., 2010), 273. 22. Havel, “The Power of the Powerless” in Open Letters, 157. 23. Ibid., 206 – 8. 24. Ibid., 208 –9. 25. Havel, Letters to Olga, 68. 26. Ibid., 102. 27. Ibid., 112. 28. Pavel Kosatík, Olga Havlová. Opowies´´c o niezwykłym z˙yciu, trans. Andrzej Jagodzin´ski (Warsaw: Rosner i Wspólnicy, 2003), 147. This biography of Olga Havˇ loveˇk má deˇlat to, lová was not translated into English. The Czech publication was C nacˇ má sílu (život Olgy Havlové) (Prague: Mlada Fronta, 1997). 29. Ibid., 147– 48. 30. Havel, Letters to Olga, 300, 302. 31. Havel, Open Letters, 363, 364. 32. Ibid., 367. 33. Ibid., 368, 371–72. 34. Ibid., 255. 35. Václav Havel, Temptation: A Play in Ten Scenes, trans. Marie Winn (New York: Grove, 1989), 37–38. 36. Havel, Letters to Olga, 101. 37. Havel, Open Letters, 256 –57. 38. Havel, Letters to Olga, 239 – 41. 39. Havel, To the Castle and Back, 329 –30. 40. Ibid., 330.

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41. Havel, Letters to Olga, 192. 42. Ibid., 235. 43. Ibid., 235 –36. 44. Ibid., 236. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 363. 47. Ibid., 364 – 65. 48. Patocˇka, Pepiki, 261. 49. Patocˇka, “Tri studie o Masarykovi,” cited in Pepiki, 270. 50. Havel, Open Letters, 391–93. 51. Ibid., 395, 396. 52. Havel, To the Castle and Back, 143 – 44. 53. Ibid., 175. 54. Ibid., 115 –16. 55. Ibid., 117. 56. Ibid., 118. 57. Ibid., 119. 58. Ibid. 59. Václav Havel, “A Farewell to Politics,” speech delivered in New York on September 19, 2002, published in the New York Review of Books, October 24, 2002, trans. Paul Wilson. 60. Václav Havel, “Wzia˛´sc´ sprawy we własne re˛ce” (To take things into our own hands), speech in Prague’s Wenceslas Square, delivered on August 21, 1990, the twenty-second anniversary of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact Armies, Siła Bezsilnych i Inne Eseje (Warsaw: Agora, 2011), 234. 61. Václav Havel, speech delivered in Paris at the Academy of Arts and Sciences, October 27, 1992, old.hrad.cz/president/Havel /speeches/1992/2710_uk.html. 62. Ibid. 63. Václav Havel, “Trzy Lata—Dzieje Dramatu,” (Three years later: History of a drama), speech delivered at the Parliament of the Czech Republic, February 27, 1993, Siła Bezsilnych i Inne Eseje, 262. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 262, 264. 66. Václav Havel, New Year’s Address to the Nation, January 1, 1994. Also in Havel, The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice—Speeches and

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Writings, 1990 –1996, trans. Paul Wilson et al. (New York: Fromm International, 1998), 142 –51. 67. Ibid. 68. Havel, Open Letters, 40. 69. Havel, “Catalonia International Prize, Barcelona, May 11, 1995,” The Art of the Impossible, 211, 212, 213. 70. Ibid., 213. 71. Ibid., 214. 72. Havel, Disturbing the Peace, 102. 73. Havel, “Edvard Beneš—Dilemmas of a European Politician,” written for Süddeutsche Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Gazeta Wyborcza, Magyár Hírlap, Sme, and Le Monde, April 19, 2002, full text available athttp://vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans .php?cat=clanky&val=41_aj_clanky.html&typ=HTML. 74. Ibid. 75. Václav Havel, speech at New York University, October 27, 1991, http://old .hrad.cz/president/Havel /speeches/1991/2710_uk.html; print edition: The Art of the Impossible, 82 – 86. 76. Ibid. 77. Václav Havel, “Najwie˛kszy sukces bezpieki” (The biggest success of the security service), statement before the Municipal Court in Prague, December 14, 1993, in Siła Bezsilnych i Inne Eseje, 384 – 86. This essay had not been previously translated into English. I would like to thank Paul Wilson for checking my translation from Polish against the Czech original. 78. Ibid., 386. 79. Václav Havel, The Oslo Conference on “The Anatomy of Hate,” Oslo, August 28, 1990, in The Art of the Impossible, 55 – 62, available at http://old.hrad.cz/ president/Havel /speeches/index_uk.html. 80. Václav Havel, “Transcendentalny horyzont ludzkiego działania” (Transcendental horizon of human action), meeting with Pope John Paul II, March 7, 1994, in Siła Bezsilnych i Inne Eseje, 388. 81. Václav Havel, speech at the acceptance of the Saint Adalbert Prize, Bratislava, September 18, 1999, http://old.hrad.cz/president/Havel /speeches/1999/1809_uk.html. 82. Havel, To the Castle and Back, 206. 83. Ibid., 203.

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84. Václav Havel, Speech at Wrocław University, Wrocław, Poland, December 21, 1992, http://old.hrad.cz/president/Havel /speeches/1992/2112_uk.html; print edition: The Art of the Impossible, 109 –14. 85. Jan Patocˇka, Kim sa˛ Czesi? trans. Jacek Baluch (Kraków: Miedzynarodowe Centrum Kultury, 1997), 86. Patocˇka’s essay “Who Are the Czechs?” was an unfinished manuscript originally written in German—Was sind die Tschechen?—in the form of a letter between 1970 and 1976. The essay—which is a critical examination of Czech history, raises the question of circumstances and conditions that allowed the small Czech nation to attain moral eminence, and discusses lost opportunities— ˇ eši? (Prague: Panorama, 1992). An annotated was published in Czech as Co jsou C edition of the essay was published in The Collected Works of Jan Patocˇka [Sebrane ˇ eši II, vol. 13 (Prague: Oikúmené, 2007). There is no English spisy Jana Patocˇky], C publication of “Who Are the Czechs?” 86. Ibid., 91.

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Index

Berlusconi, Silvio, 125, 153, 236n 8 Bibó, István, 209 Bierezin, Jacek, 9 Bil’ak, Vasil, 87, 225n 9 Biuletyn Informacyjny, 4 Blida, Barbara, 141, 234n 5 Bohemia, 163 Bolshevism, 43, 82, 91, 128 Bosnia, 94, 226n 17, 227n 19 bourgeoisie, 43, 85 Brandt, Willy, 90, 226n 13 Bratislava, 3, 16 Brezhnev, Leonid, 32, 84 Brno, 13 Brodsky, Josif, 209 Bujak, Zbigniew, 11, 12, 15, 217n 21 Bulgaria, 83, 94 Burian, Václav, 121 Burnetko, Krzysztof, 121 Bush, George H. W., 64 Bush, George W., 231n 9

abortion, 60, 61, 67 Adalbert, St., 209 –10 Adenauer, Konrad, 91, 226n 15 Albright, Madeleine, 139 Amanpour, Christiane, 139 anti-Communism, 47, 192 –93 anti-Europeanism, 195 anti-Semitism, 18, 46, 55, 198 Antonescu, Ion, 45, 221n 12 appeasement, 133 Arendt, Hannah, 16, 209 Ash, Timothy Garton, 16 atheism, 129, 130, 131, 185 Australia, 85 Austria, 90, 115, 128 AWS, 113, 229n 8 Balcerowicz, Leszek, 66, 113, 222n 20, 229n 8 Balkans, 72, 93 –95, 107; ethnic cleansing, 93 –95 Baltic countries, 115 Bandera, Stepan, 45, 221n 10 Basque country, 95, 154 Baudelaire, Charles, 212 Beatles, 210 Beckett, Samuel, 161 Bednarˇ, Jirˇí, 3, 5 beer, 121, 122, 211 Belarus, 236n 7 Belgium, 96, 113, 154 Beˇlohradský, Václav, 53, 118 –19 Benda, Kamila, 182 Benda, Václav, 182 Beneš, Edvard, 79, 116, 173, 183, 200 –203, 213, 223n 27, 229n 13, 230n 13

Camus, Albert, The Plague, 134 ˇ apek, Karel, 46, 98, 221n 15, 227n 24; “A C Place for Jonathan,” 125, 171–72, 231n 7 capitalism, 67, 72, 85, 194 ˇ arnogurský, Ivan, 36, 62 C Catalonia, 95 Catalonia International Prize, Barcelona, 117, 230n 14 Cathedral of Saint Wit, 61 Catholicism, 12, 26, 39 – 40, 50, 59 – 64, 112, 114, 125, 130, 186, 230n 15, 231n 8 cell phones, 153 Chalupecký, Jindrˇich, 118 Chamberlain, Neville, 117

243

INDEX

Charter 77, 3 –7, 13, 20, 29 –30, 100, 118, 122, 151, 169 –71, 175, 177– 80, 182, 183, 211, 215nn 5 – 6, 219nn 2 –3, 225n 7; drafting of, 5 Chechnya, 152 Chekhov, Anton, The Cherry Orchard, 161 Chetniks, 45, 220n 8 Christianity, 59 – 64, 129, 173, 186, 209. See also specific denominations Churchill, Winston, 123, 141, 203, 233n 4 Church of the Holy Cross, Warsaw, 9 Citizen Havel (film), 212 Civic Forum, 61, 222n 19 civil society, 3, 11, 123, 188 –90, 197–200 Clinton, Bill, 91, 108, 211, 228n 2 Cold War, 79, 216n 7 COMECON, 123, 231n 4 Communism, 5, 20, 199 –200; collapse of, 19, 31, 48, 50 –52, 63, 81–103, 106, 114, 122, 123, 126 –27, 150, 193; Czech era of, 8, 15, 20, 32 –37, 41, 46 –52, 97, 98, 101–2, 150, 167, 173, 183 – 84, 201, 205 – 6; 1948 coup, 20, 116, 167, 183, 201, 223n 30, 230n 13; normalization and, 7, 86, 128, 136, 149 –51, 155, 167, 176, 177, 190, 193, 225n 8, 235n 3; Prague Spring and, 1, 5, 6, 10 –11, 20, 35, 86, 87, 97, 114, 147–50, 167, 169, 173 –75, 183, 194, 219n 1, 220n 2, 227n 22, 235nn 2 – 4; return of, 31–32, 45, 84 – 87; “Uncanny Era of PostCommunism,” 31– 80. See also specific countries Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, 35, 173 community, 105 –7, 114 concentration camps, 90, 190, 202 consumerism, 67, 106 conviction, ethics of, 203 – 6 corruption, 133, 141, 198 Corsica, 95, 154 crime, 107, 198 Croatia, 44 – 45, 93 –95, 220n 7 Cromwell, Oliver, 43, 85 culture, 4 –5, 14, 118 –19, 173, 210 –11; crackdown on alternative culture scene, 4 –5

Czech Civic Forum, 211–12 “The Czech Complex,” 116 –17 Czechoslovakia, 1, 16; Charter 77, 3 –7, 13, 20, 29 –30, 100, 118, 122, 151, 169 –71, 175, 177– 80, 182, 183, 211, 215nn 5 – 6, 219nn 2 –3, 225n 7; collapse of Communism, 50 –52, 81–103, 123, 150, 166, 193; Communist era, 8, 15, 20, 32 –37, 41, 46 –52, 97, 98, 101–2, 150, 167, 173, 183 – 84, 201, 205 – 6; de-Communization, 16 –17, 57–58, 67, 68, 177, 196; democracy, 2, 70 –73, 81–103, 184, 196, 198 –99; dissolution of, 97, 154, 198; elections, 67, 73; Havel as president of, 2, 15, 17, 31, 38 –39, 77–78, 81– 82, 101, 120, 134, 147, 158 – 60, 165 – 66, 190 –91, 196 –97, 201– 6, 210 –12; lustration, 19, 33 –38, 68, 77–78, 88, 98, 155 –56, 177, 196, 204; Nazi invasion of, 20, 97, 101, 113, 117, 200, 219n 1, 229n 13; 1938 Polish invasion of, 29, 218n 1, 219n 1; 1948 Communist coup, 20, 116, 167, 183, 201, 223n 30, 230n 13; normalization, 7, 86, 128, 136, 149 –51, 155, 167, 176, 177, 190, 193, 225n 8, 235n 3; Path of Friendship, 1–21, 169 –71, 178; politics, 2, 15, 31– 80, 147–51, 166, 183, 190 –91, 211–12; postwar expulsion of Sudeten Germans, 101–3, 202 –3; Prague Spring, 1, 5, 6, 10 –11, 20, 35, 86, 87, 97, 114, 147–50, 167, 169, 173 –75, 183, 194, 219n 1, 220n 2, 227n 22, 235nn 2 – 4; religiosity and, 59 – 64; return of émigrés, 74 –75; Second Republic, 46, 221n 14; -Slovak conflicts, 64 – 68, 154 –55; smallmindedness, 163, 194 –95; society, 6 –7, 15, 39, 55 –58, 65, 99 –103, 111–12, 149 –51, 167, 172 –73, 188 –95; “Uncanny Era of Post-Communism,” 31– 80; underground publishing, 7– 8, 9, 12 –13, 14, 29, 216n 14; Velvet Underground, 18, 31, 42, 81–103, 136, 147, 150, 160, 166, 177, 192, 196; Visegrad Group, 16 –17, 19, 92 –93, 226n 16; Warsaw Pact invasion of, 8, 20, 51, 89, 93, 97, 114, 123, 147–50, 167, 169, 173 – 75, 183, 194, 219n 1, 220n 2, 227n 22,

244

INDEX

235nn 2 – 4; xenophobia, 55 –58. See also Czech Republic; Slovakia Czech People’s Army, 166 Czech Republic, 19, 33, 84 –103, 108, 124, 144, 147– 64, 198, 211, 224n 6, 229n 12; “An Account of Our Victories, an Accounting of Our Freedom,” 121–37; “Completed Revolution and Belated Avengers,” 81–103; creation of, 97; “Everything is Still in Motion,” 105 –20; existential revolution and, 147–58; lustration, 19, 33 –38, 68, 77–78, 88, 98, 155 –56, 177, 196, 204; politics, 81–103, 113, 119 –20, 137, 155, 166, 196, 203 – 6, 211–12, 228n 7; press, 135; -Slovak conflicts, 154 –55. See also Czechoslovakia

conviction, 203 – 6; former, 89 –90, 191–94; hunger strikes, 9 –10; KOR, 3 – 6, 24, 100, 122, 169 –71, 216n 8, 227n 25, 232n 10; life, 177–90; marginalization of, 68 – 69; milieu, 89 –90; Path of Friendship, 1–21, 169 –71, 178; reflection on politics, 187–90; religion and, 134. See also specific dissidents and groups Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 152 drugs, 67, 155 Dubcˇek, Alexander, 7, 173 –74; Havel’s letter to, 173 –74, 175, 200 –201 ecology, 64 economy, 64, 66 – 68, 105, 154, 196; market, 41, 66 – 67, 72, 85, 105 – 6, 123, 124, 140, 199; post-Communism and, 66 – 68, 72, 85 – 86, 105 – 8, 123 Edelman, Dr. Marek, 9 –10 education, alternative, 5 e-mail, 17 émigrés, return of, 74 –75 Endecja (ND), 45, 112, 220n 9, 228n 6 entrepreneurship, 75, 85, 16, 108 Estonia, 124 ethnic intolerance and cleansing, 18, 46, 54, 55 –58, 72, 93 –95, 101–3, 107, 114, 150, 199 –200, 208 euro, 154, 236n 9 European Union, 91, 112 –15, 123, 152, 229n 12 “exchange of backpacks,” 12 –13 existential revolution, 147–58, 180 Extraordinary Party Congress, Vysocˇany, 35, 220n 2

Daladier, Édouard, 133 Dalai Lama, 101 Davenport, Marcia, 78 death penalty, 50, 62, 136, 144, 192 de-Communization, 16 –17, 57–58, 67, 68, 88, 177, 196 de Gaulle, Charles, 91, 203, 226n 15 democracy, 2 –3, 6, 16, 19, 58, 69, 83 – 84, 94, 107, 123, 153, 179, 187, 204; “An Account of Our Victories, an Accounting of Our Freedom,” 121–37; crisis of, 128 –30; Czech, 2, 70 –73, 81–103, 184, 196, 198 –99; “Everything is Still in Motion,” 105 –20; parliamentary, 179 – 80; Path of friendship, 1–21; Polish, 13 –16, 81–103, 139 – 46; Slovakian, 114 –15; threats to, 107–9, 146; “Uncanny Era of Post-Communism,” 31– 80 Depardieu, Gérard, 115 Derrida, Jacques, 16 Descartes, René, 52, 53 Dienstbier, Jirˇí, 80 dissidents, 1, 18, 37, 51, 68, 75, 89 –90, 100, 129, 134, 135, 145, 156, 163, 168 – 69, 177– 87, 228n 1; anger against, 193 –94; arrests, 4, 5, 9, 12 –13; Charter 77, 3 –7, 13, 20, 29 –30, 100, 118, 122, 151, 169 –71, 175, 177– 80, 182, 183, 211, 215nn 5 – 6, 219nn 2 –3, 225n 7; ethics of

factories, 11–12 fanaticism, 189 –90 Fascism, 46 fear, 6, 34, 144, 176 FIDESZ, 113, 229n 9 Final Act, 216n 7 Forum 2000, 112, 114, 152, 228n 5 Fotyga, Anna, 142 Foucault, Michel, 16 France, 55, 85, 91, 130, 200, 203; Arabs in, 55; World War II, 134

245

INDEX

Franco, Francisco, 99, 146 freedom, 11, 55 –56, 61, 82, 94, 98, 124, 192, 202; “An Account of Our Victories, an Accounting of Our Freedom,” 121–37; of speech, 1 free market, 17, 72, 123 Fuchs, Jürgen, 38 fundamentalism, 19, 59 – 64, 130, 200

Gypsies, 46, 53, 55, 56, 102, 112, 195; attacks on, 56 Habermas, Jürgen, 16 Haider, Jorg, 95 Hájek, Jirˇí, 177 “happy performative,” 1, 215n 2 Hašek, Jaroslav, The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War, 51, 222n 17 hatred, 207–9 Havel, Václav, ii, 2, 20; “The Anatomy of Hate,” 207–9; Audience, 121, 170 –71, 230n 1; background of, 167; on civil society, 188 –90, 197–200; as Czech president, 2, 15, 17, 31, 38 –39, 77–78, 81– 82, 101, 120, 134, 147, 158 – 60, 165 – 66, 190 –91, 196 –97, 201– 6, 210 –12; dissident life and, 3 –7, 177–90, 211; dissident reflection on politics, 187–90; essay on Kriegel, 183 – 84, 226n 12; ethics of conviction vs. ethics of responsibility and, 203 – 6; first meeting with Michnik (1978), ii, 1– 6, 105, 122, 150, 157, 169 –71, 178; on Iraq War, 231n 9, 232n 9; Leaving, 147, 158, 160 – 62, 235; letter to Dubcˇek, 173 –74, 175, 200 –201; letter to Husák, 6, 176 –77; Medal of Saint George, 121, 123, 134; Michnik’s essay written for seventy-fifth birthday of, 165 –213; Path of Friendship, 1–21, 169 –71, 178; as playwright, 6, 14, 78, 121–22, 147, 158 – 64, 167, 170 –71, 185, 230n 1; popularity of, 166, 192; “The Power of the Powerless,” 7–13, 17, 23 –27, 30, 105, 122, 133, 150, 157, 178 – 80, 217n 18, 217n 21; Prague Spring and, 1, 5, 6, 10 –11, 20, 35, 86, 87, 97, 114, 147–50, 167, 169, 173 –75, 183, 194, 219n 1, 220n 2, 227n 22, 235nn 2 – 4; in prison, 3, 6, 9, 14, 18, 76, 100, 168, 175, 180 – 82; release from prison, 14, 100 –101; religious views, 185 – 86, 189 –90, 209; resocialization, 6; on retirement from politics, 196 –97, 239nn 59 – 61; Temptation, 185; To the Castle and Back, 144, 159 – 60, 234n 8, 236n 10; Vaneˇk plays, 14, 121, 162, 170 –71, 218n 25, 230n 1,

Gamsakhurdia, Zviad Konstantinovitch, 69 Gandhi, Mahatma, 210 Garlicki, Mirosław, 234nn 5 – 6 Gasperi, Alcide De, 91, 226n 15 Gazeta Wyborcza, 14, 16, 19, 21, 29, 81, 92, 104, 120, 125, 135, 147, 158, 163, 165, 204, 232n 1; readership, 16; “When Socrates Became Pericles,” 165 –213 Gdan´sk trial, 30, 219n 3 Genet, Jean, 161 George, Saint, 121, 127, 136 Georgia, 69, 152 Geremek, Bronisław, 113, 229n 8 German Federation of Expellees, 203 Germany, 38, 39, 54, 66, 91, 112 –13, 130, 164; invasion of Czechoslovakia, 20, 97, 101, 112, 117, 200, 219n 1, 229n 13; Munich Agreement (1938), 20, 97, 101, 116, 117, 133, 218n 1, 219n 1, 221n 14, 229n 13, 232n 11, 235n 1; Nazism, 20, 38, 49 –50, 55, 97, 102, 117, 125, 200, 202 –3; politics, 113; postwar, 90, 202; Stasi, 38; World War II, 49 –50, 87, 101, 116; xenophobia, 55 –58 Giedroyc´, Jerzy, 74, 223n 22 Gierek, Edward, 124, 231n 6 Giertych, Maciej, 57, 222n 18 Giertych, Roman, 146 glasnost, 13 globalization, 52, 96, 114, 154 “Globalization on the Prague Model,” 114 Glucksmann, André, 63 Gott, Karel, 14 Gottwald, Klement, 79, 102, 183, 223nn 28 –30 Great Britain, 85, 200 Gruša, Jirˇí, 74 Grzela, Remek, 158 guilt, 34, 36, 102, 130, 209

246

INDEX

237n 11; Velvet Revolution and, 18, 31, 42, 81–103, 136, 147, 150, 160, 166, 177, 192, 196; views on death, 186 – 87; wiretapping of, 167– 69, 181. See also Havel-Michnik conversations Havel-Michnik conversations, 17–21; “An Account of Our Victories, an Accounting of Our Freedom,” 121–37; “A Completed Revolution and Belated Avengers,” 81–103; “Dear Adam, here’s that essay I promised . . . ,” 23 –27; “Everything is Still in Motion,” 105 – 20; “It Could Be Me, But We Don’t Know That It Is,” 158 – 64; logistical difficulties of, 17–18; “On Existential Revolution,” 147–58; “The President and the Playwright,” 147– 64; “The Times Are Favoring What’s Mean,” 139 – 46; “The Uncanny Era of PostCommunism,” 18, 31– 80; “Welcome to Freedom, Václav!” 29 –30 Havlová, Daša, 158 Havlová, Olga, 15, 168, 175, 182; Havel’s letters to, from prison, 175, 181– 82, 185, 188 Heidegger, Martin, 52, 169, 179, 180, 211 Helsinki Agreement on Human Rights (1975), 5, 10, 20, 216n 7, 219n 2 Herbert, Zbigniew, 40 Herzegovina, 94 Hitler, Adolf, 20, 49, 50, 57, 58, 117, 124, 133, 200, 202 –3, 219n 1, 229n 13, 235n 1 Holland, 96 Holocaust, 130 Horn, Gyula, 84, 224n 4 Horthy, Miklós, 221n 13 Hospodárskie Noviny, 139 Host do Domu, 97 Hrabal, Bohumil, 76, 117–18, 211, 223n 25; “Letters to Dubenka,” 165 – 66 Hrádecˇek, 3, 31, 81, 150, 168, 220n 1 humanitarianism, 34, 95 human rights, 4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 36, 152, 204, 219n 2; abuses, 4, 5; Helsinki Agreement, 5, 10, 20, 216n 7, 219n 2 Hungary, 16, 39, 45, 49, 83, 84, 92, 108, 124, 128, 221n 13, 224n 4; FIDESZ, 113, 229n 9; politics, 113; Visegrad Group, 16 –17, 19, 92 –93, 226n 16

hunger strikes, 9 –10 Hus, Jan, 117, 128, 200, 230n 15 Husák, Gustáv, 6, 7, 176, 216n 10, 225n 8; Havel’s letter to, 6, 176 –77 Hussein, Saddam, 64, 231n 9 Hvížd’ala, Karel, 168 – 69, 202 Iceland, 71 identity, 54 –55, 113 –14, 199 –200 Indra, Alois, 87, 225n 9 Inquisition, 40 intellectual elites, 99 –100, 135, 136 Internet, 17 Iranian revolution, 62, 63 Iraq, 64 Iraq War, 231n 9, 232n 9 Islam, 59, 62, 95; fundamentalism, 59 – 64, 200 Israel, 63 Italy, 91, 125, 130, 236n 8 Jacobinism, 44, 82, 91, 128 Jagger, Mick, 119 Jagodzin´ski, Andrzej, 81, 105, 158, 217n 21 Jakeš, Miloš, 87, 225n 9 Janas, Zbigniew, 11, 12, 15, 217n 21 Jaruzelski, General, 116, 148 Jasin´ski, Mirosław, 218n 24 Jelenia Góra, 3 Jews, 50, 53, 63, 112, 114, 195; anti-Semitism and, 46, 55, 198; deportation of, 50; fundamentalism, 63; Holocaust, 130 John Paul II, Pope, 123, 130, 131, 209 Juan Carlos, King of Spain, 99 Kaczmarek, Janusz, 141, 142, 233n 4 Kaczorowski, Aleksander, 105 Kaczyn´ski, Jarosław, 139 – 46, 233n 1, 234n 7, 234n 9 Kaczyn´ski, Lech, 139, 143, 233n 1 Kafka, Franz, 15, 51, 161; The Castle, 52 Karadžic´, Radovan, 94, 226n 17 Karkonosze, 12, 122 Kasarda, Martin, 62 Kavan, Jan, 37 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 43 Khrushchev, Nikita, 149 King, Martin Luther, 210 Kis, János, 16

247

INDEX

Klaus, Václav, 86, 102, 113, 137, 145, 199, 211–12, 224n 6, 232n 12 Klima, Viktor, 128 Kohout, Pavel, 162 – 63, 237nn 11–12; Atest, 162; Where Is the Dog Buried? 163 Kołakowski, Leszek, 13, 16, 117, 175, 209; “Hope and Hopelessness,” 10 Kolder, Drahomír, 87, 225n 9 Konrád, György, 16, 130, 231n 9 KOR (Committee for the Defense of Workers), 3 – 6, 24, 100, 122, 169 –71, 216n 8, 227n 25, 232n 10 Kosatík, Pavel, 182, 238n 28 Kosík, Karel, 35 Kosovo, 94, 117 Kott, Jan, 160 Kowalska, Anka, 9, 26 Kraków, 10 Krall, Hanna, 163 Kriegel, František, 88 – 89, 114, 118, 175, 183 – 84, 225n 12, 226n 12; Havel’s essay on, 183 – 84, 226n 12 Krytyka, 7– 8, 9, 11, 217n 15; “The Power of the Powerless,” 7–13, 17, 23 –27, 30, 105, 122, 133, 150, 157, 178 – 80, 217n 18, 217n 21 Kubišová, Marta, ii, 3, 5 Kultura, 222n 22, 223n 22 Kulturny Život, 62 Kundera, Milan, 96 –98, 117, 135, 155 –56, 163, 173, 227n 23 Kurds, 64 Kuron´, Jacek, ii, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 26, 40, 131, 168, 169 –70, 179, 210, 216n8, 220n4, 232n10; Open Letter to the Party, 6 Kuwait, 64 Kwas´niewski, Aleksander, 84, 137, 224n 4, 232n 12

Litvinenko, Alexander, 152, 236n 6 Lityn´ski, Jan, ii, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9 London, 5, 55, 202 Lopatka, Jan, 133, 136 loyalty, 77 Lukashenko, Alexander, 152, 236n 7 lustration, 19, 33 –38, 68, 77–78, 88, 98, 142, 143, 155 –56, 177, 196, 204 Macedonia, 94 Macierewicz, Antoni, ii, 5, 8 Mac´kowiak, Tomasz, 105 Majewski, Janusz, ii Malý, Václav, 12 Mandela, Nelson, 210 Marczyk, Agnieszka, 165 market economy, 41, 66 – 67, 72, 85, 105 – 6, 123, 124, 140, 199 Markuszewski, Jerzy, 9 Marshall, George, 79 Marxism, 54, 126, 128, 186 Masaryk, Jan, 78 – 80, 223n 27 Masaryk, T. G., 58, 79, 103, 137, 190, 191, 200, 213, 223n 27 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz, 33, 222n 20 Mecˇiar, Vladimir, 82, 114, 115, 145, 224n 1, 229n 11 Medal of Saint George, 121, 123, 134, 230n 2, 231n 2 metaphysics, 130 Michnik, Adam, ii, 2, 13, 16, 19, 20, 169, 219n 1; first meeting with Havel (1978), ii, 1– 6, 105, 122, 150, 157, 169 –71, 178; as Gazeta Wyborcza editor, 14, 16, 19, 29, 92; Gdan´sk trial, 30, 219n 3; on Iraq War, 231n 9, 232n 9; Medal of Saint George, 121, 123, 134; “The New Evolutionism,” 10; Path of Friendship, 1–21, 169 –71, 178; “Prayer for Rain,” 139, 232n 1; in prison, 30, 175, 219n 3; “When Socrates Became Pericles,” 165 –213. See also Havel-Michnik conversations Mikołajska, Halina, 9 Miłosz, Czesław, 16, 209, 223n 22 Milota, Standa, 44 Mitterand, François, 119 Moczulski, Leszek, 8 morality, 132, 187, 202 Moravia, 68

language, 44 – 45, 55, 73 League of Nations, 202 Lederer, Jirˇí, 25 –26 leftism, 47– 48, 110 –11, 193, 194 legal system, 41, 44, 131–32, 199, 204; lustration, 19, 33 –38, 68, 77–78, 88, 98, 142, 143, 155 –56, 177, 196, 204 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 57, 95, 222n 18 Lipski, Jan Józef, 4, 10 Lithuania, 83

248

INDEX

Moscow, 89, 114, 154, 183 Moscow Protocol, 114 Mount S´niez˙ka, 1, 7, 9, 15, 105, 122, 169, 178, 226n 14, 228n 1 multiculturalism, 93, 94, 114 Munich, 5, 97 Munich Agreement (1938), 20, 97, 101, 116, 117, 133, 147, 218n 1, 219n 1, 221n 14, 229n 13, 232n 11, 235n 1 Muslims, 59; fundamentalism, 59 – 64, 200

Pelikán, Jirˇí, 51, 221n 16 People’s Militia, 35 perestroika, 13 Pericles, 190, 191 Petrˇivý, Tomáš, ii, 3, 5, 9 Pieronek, Tadeusz, 112, 228n 6 Pinter, Harold, 161 Plastic People of the Universe, 4 –5, 118, 211, 215n 6 Plato, 52, 190 pluralism, 48, 53, 72, 153, 180, 188 Poland, 1, 12, 16, 19, 26, 39, 40, 45, 57, 66, 124, 134, 168, 175, 224nn 2 –5; “An Account of Our Victories, an Accounting of Our Freedom,” 121–37; anticommunism, 144 – 45; AWS, 113, 229n 8; Communist era, 14, 141, 145; “Completed Revolution and Belated Avengers,” 81–103; democracy, 13 –16, 81–103, 139 – 46; economy, 66 – 67; elections, 14, 15, 29, 113, 139, 143, 234n 7; “Everything is Still in Motion,” 105 –20; First Republic, 233n 3; “Fourth Republic,” 139, 140, 141, 233n 1, 234n 9; justice system, 142 – 44; KOR, 3 – 6, 24, 100, 122, 169 –71, 216n 8, 227n 25, 232n 10; Law and Justice (PIS), 139, 143, 233n 1; lustration, 142, 143; martial law, 12, 235n 2; National Party, 57; 1968 student rebellion, 1, 6, 169; 1938 invasion of Czechoslovakia, 29, 218n 1, 219n 1; Path of Friendship, 1–21, 169 –71, 178; policy of the “thick line,” 33; politics, 13 –15, 29 –30, 33, 82, 84 – 85, 112 –13, 136 –37, 139 – 46; post-1989, 139 – 46; religiosity and, 62, 112; revolution, 13 –15, 29 –30, 82, 83, 87, 136 –37; Round Table Talks, 13 –15, 29, 224n 4; Second Republic, 233n 3; society, 139 – 46; Solidarity, 12 –15, 18, 29 –30, 61, 118, 136 –37, 140; solidarity hunger strikes, 9 –10; Third Republic, 139, 140, 233n 3, 234n 9; “The Times Are Favoring What’s Mean,” 139 – 46; “Uncanny Era of Post-Communism,” 31– 80; underground publishing, 7– 8, 9, 12 –13, 14, 29, 217n 15; Visegrad Group, 16 –17, 19, 92 –93, 226n 16; World War II, 50, 87

Napoleon Bonaparte, 43, 85 nationalism, 18, 52 –55, 63, 91, 96, 102, 107, 154, 197, 199, 208 nation-state, 53 NATO, 91, 92, 93, 95, 218n 29; expansion, 115 Nazism, 20, 38, 49 –50, 102, 117, 125, 200, 202 –3; neo-, 55, 56 New York, 55, 76, 77, 210 NGOs, 154 normalization, 7, 86, 128, 136, 149 –51, 155, 167, 176, 177, 190, 193, 225n 8, 235n 3 novelty, cult of, 154 nuclear weapons, 148 Obama, Barack, 155 oil, 64 Oleksy, Józef, 82, 224n 2 Olomouc, 121, 231n 9 O’Neill, Eugene, 68, 102, 222n 21 Open Letter to the Party, 6 Orbán, Viktor, 128, 145, 229nn 9 –10 organized crime, 107 Orwell, George, 209 pacifism, 130 –34 Palach, Jan, 150, 235n 4 Paris, 5, 55, 97, 133, 134 parliamentarianism, 179 – 80 paternalism, 33 Path of Friendship, ii, 1–21; first meeting (1978), ii, 1– 6, 105, 122, 150, 157, 169 –71, 178 Patocˇka, Jan, 5, 16, 86, 118, 119, 169, 172, 176, 177–78, 190, 200, 211, 213, 215n 6, 224n 7, 225n 7, 238n 21; Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, 178; “Who Are the Czechs?” 213, 241n 85

249

INDEX

policy of the “think line,” 33 Polish-Czech-Slovak Solidarity, 12 politics, 20, 119 –20, 187–90; “An Account of Our Victories, an Accounting of Our Freedom,” 121–37; “Completed Revolution and Belated Avengers,” 81–103; émigrés, 74 –75; “Everything is Still in Motion,” 105 –20; existential revolution and, 147–58, 180; Havel on retirement from, 196 –97, 239nn 59 – 61; left vs. right, 47– 48, 110 –11; theatricalization of, 128 –29; “The Times Are Favoring What’s Mean,” 139 – 46; “Uncanny Era of Post-Communism,” 31– 80; Western, 91–92. See also specific countries, politicians, and parties Politika, 46, 55 Politkovskaya, Anna, 152, 157, 236n 6 population growth, 64 populism, 73, 91, 95, 197 pornography, 67 Portugal, 92, 96 Pospíchal, Petr, 13 post-Communism, 16 –17, 18 –19, 31– 80, 208, 224n 3; “An Account of Our Victories, an Accounting of Our Freedom,” 121–37; “Completed Revolution and Belated Avengers,” 81–103; CzechSlovak conflicts, 64 – 68, 154 –55; “Everything is Still in Motion,” 105 – 20; existential revolution and, 147–58; former party hierarchy and, 32 –37, 43 – 44; justice and, 17, 18 –19, 32 – 44; lustration, 19, 33 –38, 68, 77–78, 88, 98, 142, 143, 155 –56, 177, 196, 204; religiosity and, 59 – 64; “The Times Are Favoring What’s Mean,” 139 – 46; uncanny era of, 31– 80; xenophobia and, 55 –58. See also specific countries “The Power of the Powerless” (Havel), 7–13, 17, 23 –27, 30, 105, 122, 133, 150, 157, 178 – 80, 217n 18, 217n 21; Havel’s instructions on publishing, 23 –27 Prague, 2, 4, 10, 15, 17, 18, 31, 35, 81, 86, 93, 105, 112, 114, 116, 117, 133, 139, 150, 158, 167, 204, 211; hunger strikes, 9 Prague Spring, 1, 5, 6, 10 –11, 20, 35, 86, 87, 97, 114, 147–50, 167, 169, 173 –75,

183, 194, 219n 1, 220n 2, 227n 22, 235nn 2 – 4 Precˇan, Vilém, 222n 16 press, 2, 14, 16, 44, 92, 134 –35, 156, 158; anti-Semitic, 46; Czech Republic, 135; samizdat, 12 –13, 122; Solidarity, 14, 16, 29; underground, 7– 8, 9, 12 –13, 14, 29, 216n 14, 217n 15; Western, 8, 151. See also specific publications privatization, 75, 86, 106, 140 profanum, 59 property relations, 72, 85, 108 Protestantism, 39 – 40, 63, 114, 230n 15 Putin, Vladimir, 146, 151–53 radio, 44, 113 Radom, 4 Rakowski, Mieczysław, 14 Reformation, 172 –73, 230n 15 religion, 12, 39 – 40, 59 – 64, 112, 114, 129, 209; dissidents and, 134; fundamentalism, 59 – 64, 130, 200; Havel’s views on, 185 – 86, 189 –90, 209; post-Communism and, 59 – 64, 129 –31 Resnais, Alain, 43 responsibility, 36, 157, 187, 202; ethics of, 203 – 6 revolution, 11, 13 –15, 18, 135; existential, 147–58, 180; negotiating, 13 –15; nonviolent, 13; Poland and, 13 –15, 29 –30, 82, 83, 87, 136 –37; terminology, 41– 43; “unfinished,” 41– 43, 83, 196 –97; Velvet Revolution, 18, 31, 42, 81–103, 136, 147, 150, 160, 166, 177, 192, 196. See also specific countries and revolutions right-wing values, 47– 48, 110 –11 rock music, 4 –5, 14, 118 –19, 210 –11 Rolling Stones, 119, 211 Roma. See Gypsies Romania, 45, 221n 12 Romania Mare, 45 Romaszewski, Zbigniew, 4 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 203 Round Table Talks, 13 –15, 29, 224n 4 Rudé Krávo, 204 Rushdie, Salman, 62, 101

250

INDEX

Russia (post-Soviet Union), 86, 93, 94, 107, 108, 151–53; politics, 93, 108, 151–53; Putinism, 151–53; society, 152 Russian Revolution, 43 Rydzyk, Father Tadeusz, 146

“Uncanny Era of Post-Communism,” 31– 80. See also specific countries Socrates, 190, 191 Solidarity, 12 –15, 18, 29 –30, 61, 118, 136 –37, 140; press, 14, 16, 29 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 151 Sontag, Susan, 128 Soviet Union, 8, 13, 35, 58, 69, 151, 167, 179, 216n 7, 223n 30, 231n 4; collapse of, 19, 32, 123, 127; invasion of Czechoslovakia, 8, 20, 51, 89, 93, 97, 114, 123, 147–51, 167, 169, 173 –75, 183, 194, 219n 1, 220n 2, 227n 22, 235nn 2 – 4 Spain, 38, 39, 99, 114, 146; Civil War, 43, 99, 183 spojki, 18 Stalin, Joseph, 32, 79, 173, 203, 228n 3 Starr, Kenneth, 108, 109, 228nn 2 – 4 Stasi, 38 Stendhal, The Red and the Black, 124 Šteˇpán, Miroslav, 87, 225n 10 Stoppard, Tom, 42 Sudeten Germans, 219n 1, 235n 1; postwar expulsion of, 101–3, 202 –3 Sudetenland, 133, 232n 11; annexation of, 20, 219n 1, 221n 14, 229n 12, 232n 11 Švestka, Oldrˇich, 87, 225n 9 Sweden, 124 Szczygieł, Mariusz, 163

Šabata, Jaroslav, 3 – 4, 9, 27 Šabatová, Anna, 2, 3, 12 Saint Adalbert Prize, 209 Sakharov, Andrei, 131, 210, 232n 10 samizdat, 12 –13, 122 Schell, Jonathan, 16 Schengen zone, 154, 236n 9 Schwarzenberg, Karl, 50, 74, 75, 221n 16 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 125 Scylla and Charybdis, 33 –34, 37 Semler, Christian, 231n 9, 232n 9 Semprun, Jorge, 38, 43 Serbia, 44 – 45, 93 –95, 226n 17, 227n 19 Shakespeare, William, King Lear, 160, 161 Silesia, 68 Singapore, 109 SKS (Student Solidarity Committee), 10 Škvorecký, Josef, The Cowards, 87, 225n 11 Sládek, Miroslav, 57–58, 70, 95, 222n 18 Slovakia, 19, 36, 40, 45, 46, 92, 139, 145, 211, 221n 11, 224n 1, 229nn 11–12; Christian Democratic movement, 60; clerico-fascism, 46; -Czech conflicts, 64 – 68, 154 –55; democracy, 114 –15; lustration, 19, 33 –38, 68, 77–78, 88, 98, 155 –56, 177, 204; politics, 36, 49 –50, 65 – 68, 82, 114 –15; religiosity and, 60 – 64; society, 65 – 68, 115; statehood, 66; World War II, 49 –50 Slovak Public against Violence, 211 Slovenia, 44 – 45, 115, 124 smallminded Czech, 163, 194 –95 socialism, 1, 6, 173, 174 society, 6, 39, 64, 188 –90, 192, 198; alienation of, 128 –29; civil, 3, 11, 123, 188 –90, 197–200; community, 105 –7, 114; Czech, 6 –7, 15, 39, 55 –58, 99 –103, 111–12, 149 –51, 167, 172 –73, 188 –95; “Everything is Still in Motion,” 105 – 20; existential revolution and, 147–58; Polish, 139 – 46; Slovakian, 65 – 68, 115; smallminded Czech, 163, 194 –95;

Taiwan, 109 technology, 129, 153 television, 44, 91, 107, 111, 113, 141, 156, 199 theater, 14, 158 – 64 Theater of the Absurd, 161 Tigrid, Pavel, 50, 51, 74, 75, 221n 16 Tiso, Jozef, 45, 49, 50, 221n 11 Tito, Josip Broz, 94, 226n 18 Tolstoy, Leo, 152 Torgyán, József, 113, 229n 10 torture, 5, 38 totalitarianism, 3, 10 –11, 32, 42, 46 – 47, 130, 133, 151, 191, 198, 206 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance, 16 Truman, Harry, 79, 91 truth, 77, 157, 183, 207 Tvárˇ, 97, 167

251

INDEX

Tygodnik Powszechny, 121, 123, 125, 134, 230n 2 Tymin´ski, Stanisław, 74, 223nn 23 –24

Warsaw Ghetto uprising, 10 Warsaw Pact, 1, 8, 16, 20, 231n 5; disbanding of, 17, 19, 93, 123, 218n 29; invasion of Czechoslovakia, 8, 20, 51, 89, 93, 97, 114, 123, 147–50, 167, 169, 173 –75, 183, 194, 219n 1, 220n 2, 227n 22, 235nn 2 – 4 Warsaw University, 9 Wa˛sacz, Emil, 141, 233n 5 Weber, Max, 202 Wilson, Paul, 11 wine, 121 Women’s League, 166 Workers’ Defense Committee, 175, 179 World War II, 49 –50, 87, 88, 101, 116, 130, 134, 191, 199 Wrocław, 12 Wrocław Festival of Polish-Czech Solidarity, 50 Wyszyn´ski, Cardinal, 125; non possumus declaration, 125, 231n 8

Uhl, Peter, 3, 12, 37, 220n 3 Ukraine, 45, 221n 10 underground press, 7– 8, 9, 12 –13, 14, 29, 216n 14, 217n 15 United Nations, 64 United States, 63, 79, 91, 92, 111, 124; antiwar movement, 132; Congress, 111; politics, 111, 125, 155; religiosity and, 63; Revolution, 83 universities, 11, 35 UNPROFOR, 95, 227n 21 Ursus, 4 Ursus Tractor Factory, 11–12 Ustasha, 45, 220n 7 utopia, 53, 72, 91, 188 Velvet Divorce, 224n 1 Velvet Revolution, 18, 31, 42, 81–103, 136, 147, 150, 160, 166, 177, 192, 196 Vienna, 128 Vietnam War, 132 Visegrad Group, 16 –17, 19, 92 –93, 226n 16 Vlajka, 46 Vlk, Miloslav, 60, 61 vodka, 5 – 6, 170 Voltaire, 125 Vondra, Saša (Alexandr), 31, 71 Vonnegut, Kurt, 159 VONS (Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Prosecuted), 7, 13 Vysocˇany, 35, 220n 2

xenophobia, 18, 46, 53, 55 –58, 113, 198 Yakovlev, Alexander, 152, 236n 6 Yanukovych, Viktor, 145 Yeltsin, Boris, 93 Yugoslavia, 44 – 45, 94, 199, 226nn 17–19, 227n 19 Žantovský, Michael, 31 Zaolzie, annexation of, 29, 218n 1, 219n 1 Zapis, 27, 218n 1 Zappa, Frank, 211 Zbrosza, Mała, 9 Zeman, Miloš, 113 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, 95 Ziobro, Zbigniew, 142, 146, 234n 6 Zorin, Valerian, 79, 223n 28

Wałe˛sa, Lech, 13, 82, 137, 223n 23, 224n 4, 232n 12 War Has Ended, The (film), 43 Warsaw, 2, 3, 6, 10, 11, 16, 50, 93, 112, 139, 147, 158, 175; hunger strikes, 9; theater, 14

252