Here his address was interrupted by applause, but what exasperated the party delegation even more was his next, quite legitimate, demand:
I recommend that the secretariat undertake effective action to ensure that members of the union be kept better informed. It is astounding that we must learn about many things that have a direct bearing on literature from
Le Monde
or West German radio broadcasts. I have in mind specifically A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s letter to the Fourth Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers.
Here Pavel Kohout announced that he had the text of the letter with him and, if the congress wished, he would read it aloud. The writers voted and, with a single exception, requested that it be read.
The reading of the letter, so deeply critical of the Soviet regime, obviously alarmed, or rather enraged, the party delegation, which demonstratively left the meeting, at least for that day.
The next day Antonín Liehm, an editor of Literární noviny, read another critical speech. The subject of his analysis was official cultural policies. The protection of state interests, something politicians typically referred to with respect to culture, must be clearly delineated and defined and can never be concealed by blanket proclamations or laws, which are being generated more and more arbitrarily. Then Liehm formulated a program demanding the freedom of culture unrestricted by anything other than criminal prosecution, and that the state undertake to be the tangible guarantor of such an emerging culture and that it do everything in its power to ensure that the culture of the nation, in all respects, will become the property of the widest strata of the nation.
My account of Literární noviny and primarily my criticism of the current press law, which fully legalized prior restraint, infuriated the party delegation.
I was talking the other day with a party official who insisted that the law was a good one. When I disagreed, he was amazed, saying that it had to be incomparably better than the previous situation, when we’d had no press law at all. This opinion is not unique. It assumes, of course, that we view our entire history as beginning in 1948. . But our history goes farther back. Permit me to quote: “Everyone has the right to express his opinion freely in work, letter, print, or pictorial representation. The press may not be subject to censorship.”
To the delight of the audience, I pointed out that this quotation came from an imperial patent issued for the Bohemian Crown Lands under No. 151 of the Imperial Statute Book. Censorship had been restored for a brief time under the absolutism of Alexander Bach, but it did not last long, and under the December constitution of 1867, press freedom was guaranteed, and censorship and the licensing system were abolished. I added that those who had issued the latest law did not lack a certain sense of absurd humor when they passed censorship regulations, which, as an outrageous holdover from Bachian absolutism, had been abolished exactly one hundred years ago. I concluded with a number of proposals, which were immediately judged by party organs as provocative. I demanded that the union protest with all vehemence any abuse of power by an administrative body. . and that the congress should express its disagreement with the literal wording of the law that, among other things, instituted precensorship, which had been outdated for decades.
Ludvík Vaculík — unknown to most of those present — offered something never before heard in a public forum the entire time the Communists had been in power, namely, an analysis and condemnation of the totalitarian nature of the regime.
Vaculík began with the concept of the citizen and the manner in which he exerts his influence on the powers that be.
The preservation of such a formal system of democracy [in other words, the level of the democratic institution] does not bring an especially solid government along with it; it merely brings the conviction that the next government might be better. So the government falls, but the citizen is renewed. On the other hand, when a government reigns continually and stands for a long time, it is the citizen who falls. Where does he fall? I will not oblige our enemies and say he falls on the gallows — this is only a few dozen or hundred citizens. But even friends realize this is plenty, for what follows is the descent of an entire nation into fear, political apathy, and civic resignation. . I believe we no longer have citizens in this country.
The introduction alone was sufficient for the entire Writers’ Union (not to mention the present author) to be denounced. But Vaculík continued his analysis that power relies exclusively on the most obedient and the most mediocre; everything is controlled by people less competent than those whom they control, and this situation has lasted for twenty years. On the status of art, he said:
Just as I do not believe that the citizen and the power structure can ever become one, that the ruled and the rulers can come together in song, I also do not believe that art and power structures will ever take pleasure in each other’s company. They will not, and they cannot — ever. They are different, incompatible.
Everyone knew that Vaculík was speaking about our contemporary Communist government, but lest anyone be in doubt, he added:
Are they really masters of everything? What, then, do they leave in the hands of others than their own? Nothing? Then we needn’t be here. Let them say, let it be completely perceptible by alclass="underline" Essentially, a handful of people seeks to decide on the existence or nonexistence of everything, of what is to be done, of what is to be thought, and what is to be desired. This reveals the position of culture in our land; it is an image of the nature of our culture. This politics of nonculture. . is creating a focal point for struggles for freedom, and it is always being talked about; it does not understand that freedom exists only when it does not have to be discussed. . [All of this imperils the one thing worthy of passion: ] the dream of a government that is identified with the citizen, and of the citizen who rules almost by himself.
In conclusion, Vaculík voiced that famous appraisal of Communist rule:
It is obvious that in twenty years no human problem has been solved in this country — from such fundamental necessities as housing, schools, or a flourishing economy to more insubstantial necessities that nondemocratic regimes cannot satisfy, such as a sense of one’s value in society, the subordination of political decision making to ethical criteria, . the necessity of trust among people, and the enhancement of education on a mass scale.
When Vaculík finished speaking, the hall erupted in enthusiastic applause, and I think most of us, for a moment at least, experienced enormous and liberating relief that this was precisely what we felt ourselves but were unable, or lacked the courage, to put into words.