1968 by Mark Kurlansky Read Free Book Online Page A

struggle for socialism, Stefan was disappointed with the United States and Pavlina missed her country, so in 1921 they took their baby and, with Pavlina pregnant, moved back to Slovakia to a newly created Czechoslovakia, and that is how Alexander Dubek, born a few months later, came to be a Czechoslovakian. He had many relatives on both sides in America, though he had no contact with them until near the end of his life when they started writing him letters after the fall of communism.
    The new country where Stefan vowed to build socialism at first seemed exciting. Czechoslovakia had been thought up by a Prague professor, Tomás Garrigue Masaryk. At first the country seemed as though it would be an equal union among Bohemians, Moravians, and Slovaks. To Slovaks this was an enormous reversal of history, because since the tenth century they had always been the downtrodden and abused fiefdom of some powerful state. The Czech lands, Bohemia and Moravia, had had a late-nineteenth-century industrial revolution that had produced a literate middle class, including bureaucrats and technocrats with which to staff a new government. But after one thousand years of rule by the Magyars of Hungary, Slovakia was an impoverished agricultural region much like the neighboring part of Poland. Few Slovaks could read or write even in their native Slovak language. Most were peasants on very poor land. They had first expressed their nationalism in 1848, a year of rebellion not unlike 1968 except that the events were limited to Europe. In 1848 the Slovaks rose up against the Hungarians and demanded equal rights in a document known as Demands of the Slovak Nation. This became the model for Slovak nationalism, and its author, Ludovit Stur, became the Slovak national hero long before and after Masaryk. By a strange coincidence, when Stefan and Pavlina Dubek moved back to Slovakia, they settled into a cottage where Stur had been born in 1815, and it was there that Alexander Dubek was born.
    The Slovaks’ Hungarian masters and Czech neighbors had always regarded them with condescension. If Slovaks had listened closely to Masaryk, they would have realized that he harbored that same contempt. He tended to characterize Slovaks as backward, lacking political maturity, and being “priest-ridden”—all familiar, pejorative Czech stereotypes of Slovaks.
    But Masaryk enjoyed great popularity among not only the Czechs but the Slovaks. At the end of World War I, he traveled to America and gained the support of Woodrow Wilson; then he moved to Paris, where in October 1918 he formed a united Czechoslovakian government, managed to get it recognized by the allies, and returned two months later to a newly created nation in which he was the national hero.
    From the beginning there was the “Slovak problem.” The Slovaks demanded that the new nation be called Czecho-Slovak and not Czechoslovakia, but the Czechs refused to grant that small hyphen of separation. This was the first of many arguments the Slovaks lost.
    Little Alexander had almost no memory of childhood in Slovakia except a tame deer that lived behind the church and a St. Bernard dog that it grieved him to give up. He would be seventeen the next time he saw Slovakia. If Slovakia was backward, it was not nearly as underdeveloped as Kirghizia in the Soviet Union, where the Dubeks moved voluntarily in 1925 to raise their children on an agricultural cooperative.
    Soviet Kirghizia, now called Kyrgyzstan, was four thousand miles from Slovakia, near China. It was not enough in the Iron Age to have metal for plowshares, and nearly the entire population was illiterate, since Kirghiz was not a written language. The Dubeks never reached their original destination. After traveling twenty-seven days, the rail line ended in a barren place called Pishpek and there they stayed, living in decrepit, abandoned military barracks. They helped build a farming cooperative, bringing in tractors. The local people, who had never