For their part, the party delegates did not even wait for the ovation to end but rose and demonstratively stormed out. The leader of the party delegation said — but only the next day — that not even the most primitive anticommunist propaganda would dare voice such an appraisal.
At that moment, it was as if many of my colleagues had woken from a delirium and then descended into gloom.
Yes, we’d had our say, but they held the reins of power. They’d made it clear that we had overstepped a boundary that they had graciously shifted just a bit toward freedom. What would happen now?
All these speeches ended in the apparent and total defeat of everyone who held a different opinion of how the country might be ruled.
Our proposal for a new committee of the Writers’ Union was killed by the party bureaucracy, which then filled the committee with people it considered obedient. Literární noviny was taken out of the hands of our own union, and the editorial board dismissed. There were rumors that other union journals were under threat. But most likely all that would happen was that prominent writers would be deprived of Dobříš Castle — the horror.
Some of the speeches, of course, could not be published. These included, especially, Vaculík’s, so it was copied, and hundreds of copies began to circulate among the populace.
At the same time, it turned out that the regime no longer dared resort to more brutal and repressive measures; no one was arrested or interrogated.
Upon the determination of the presidium of the Central Committee, a disciplinary commission was formed, aimed against the primary persons involved in the writers’ revolt who were at the same time members of the Communist party: Kohout, Liehm, Vaculík, and myself.
Because I was almost completely forbidden to speak at the hearing, I subsequently wrote a brief letter in which I defended my views. I wrote that I had sought to understand and find sympathy with everything that went on, from the wrongdoing that took place in establishing the cooperatives to the arrest of my father. I continued:
I realized that everything could be comprehended (that is, everything could be explained by the occasion and the needs of a given situation), and in this ability to “comprehend” lies an inherent danger for any kind of human, let alone creative, activity. To comprehend something does not mean to resign oneself to it. I am not a politician. As a writer, if I were to resign myself to the existence of censorship, given the way it is today and the way I spoke about it in my contribution to the congress, . I would have to be somehow corrupt and internally divided. For one cannot expect me to write counter to my conscience and convictions. How then could I welcome the prior restraint placed upon me?
Of course they ousted us from the party; Pavel Kohout got off with only a reprimand.
They insisted that I report to their palace to be informed of their verdict and hand in my party card, but I had not the slightest desire to set eyes on them again. After receiving two reminders, I replied:
Dear Comrade,
I am aware via the foreign press of the results of the disciplinary proceedings. It therefore seems to me unnecessary to be made aware of the results yet again. Furthermore, I cannot bring with me my party card because I have surrendered it to our constituent organization.
I did not add that I had surrendered it with relief.
Thus, after fourteen years, concluded my membership in the Communist Party. What also ended was my attempt to understand what had happened. Everything that they had called wrongdoing, error, or a necessary sacrifice on the path toward Communism, but that caused the tragic deaths of many people, was merely a necessary, concomitant phenomenon of the building of a new society. This was the Communist Party under whose leadership a society was supposed to arise that was less selfish, more peaceful, and at the same time wealthy.
I admit that not even at this moment did I realize that the party of which I had been a member represented a nefarious confederacy that in the name of grand objectives stole the property of society and destroyed what had taken generations to create. But I did know for certain that in the name of some sort of future objectives, the party had deprived the people of freedom, usurped all power, destroyed political life, falsified history, mocked the act of voting, and transformed a free country into a colony.
I wasn’t much interested in economics and did not ponder whether a planned economy could actually work or whether the entire concept of socialism was an unrealizable utopia. But I was certain that without unencumbered scholarship and free clashes of opinion in which no subject could be forbidden, no society could evolve. Thus the party that defended its dogmas and persecuted all who refused to subordinate themselves to it was leading its society to ruin.
The fact that they had banned me from the party without even trying to understand what I was saying made me bitter. I was convinced that everything I had been trying for years to achieve and everything that I demanded was correct, even necessary, if society was not to fall to ruin.
At the same time I felt free. I was no longer a member of an organization in which a person was required to submit to the will and despotism of those who, by whatever means, had worked their way into a leadership. In the party, having one’s own opinion, let alone expressing it, was considered a deed for which one was at first sent to the hangman, later sent to prison, and later merely ostracized.
Surprisingly, I did not have any great fear of further punishment, whether I would be allowed to publish anything or whether I would even be able to find a job. I was thirty-six, and it was high time to tread a path that was, as much as possible, not subordinated to anyone who had arrogated to himself the right to define for me what was correct and what was not.
PART II
14
Just after the leadership of the Writers’ Union was dissolved, every single one of our editors was fired during the summer of 1967. I had a meeting at the writers’ club with a German journalist. (Journalists are always most interested in someone who has something scandalous going on around him.) He wanted to know if there had been an agreement among us before the writers’ congress and if I was worried I would be brought before a court or at least banned from publishing.
He was surprised that I didn’t think I’d be arrested, nor did I think I would have much trouble finding employment. He said he wished he shared some of my optimism. We said goodbye and parted on the corner by the National Theater. I’m not sure why, but I looked around and noticed a young man wearing jeans and a checkered shirt who seemed to be trying to conceal himself behind a column near the theater’s entrance.
I set off along the embankment in the direction of my former editorial offices. When I stopped after a moment and looked around again, the same man, not far away on the opposite sidewalk, also halted. Then he pulled out a camera and began photographing the castle.
I was suddenly curious and started wandering aimlessly through the streets of the Old Town. The man in the checkered shirt disappeared, but I was almost certain he was replaced by someone else, this time by a man wearing a short-sleeved shirt.
I’d never been followed before, or at least not that I’d noticed. Even with all my optimism, I had to admit that I’d suddenly found myself in a different category of people — the dubious and suspicious who are kept under surveillance — enemies of socialism.
Literární noviny continued to be published, but its entire orientation had changed. The new editors came from the military press and departments of the Communist Party; most of them, as it became clear after the Soviet occupation, had thereby ensured themselves a career for the next twenty years. Jan Zelenka was the head of the new editorial board. Under his direction, the newspaper tried to attract contributors from among the ranks of its writers, but most of my colleagues from the misappropriated newspaper refused. A letter written by Milan Kundera to Zelenka exemplifies the prevailing mood among the writers at the time.