1968 by Mark Kurlansky Read Free Book Online Page B

seen one, ran after them, shouting, “Satan!” In the early years, there was so little food that Dubek remembered eating raw sparrow eggs in the shell. From there they went to the Russian industrial center of Gorkiy. Stefan did not bring Alexander back to Slovakia until 1938, when Stalin decreed that foreigners had to take Soviet citizenship or leave.
    Alexander was now seventeen, and the exciting new Czechoslovakia was twenty years old and full of disorder and disillusionment. He had inherited his parents’ ideology but for a long time, it seemed, not their rebellious natures. He was an orthodox, Soviet-educated communist. During World War II he was a partisan in a band of guerrilla fighters known as the Jan Ziska Brigade, named after a fifteenth-century fighter. They fought a rear guard action against the Germans. Years later his official Party biography made much of this wartime experience. He was wounded twice in the leg. His older brother was killed. In 1945 his father, Stefan, was deported by the Germans as a communist to Mauthausen concentration camp. There he found one Antonín Novotny´, a prominent Czech communist who had also been deported. Novotny´ vociferously vowed that if he survived, he would never again have anything to do with politics.
    In 1940, in a house where his father was being hidden, Alexander met Anna Ondrisova, about whom he said, “I think I was in love at first sight.” In 1945 Dubek married her and remained in love with her until she died in 1991. Rare for such an orthodox communist, Dubek married her in a church. When in 1968 Dubek became leader of Czechoslovakia, he was the only chief of a European communist country who had been married in a church.
    Czechoslovakia is the one country that became communist by a democratic vote. Unfortunately, as often happens in a democracy, the politicians were lying. In 1946 Czechoslovakia, newly liberated by the Soviet Red Army, voted for a communist government that promised there would be no collectives established and that small businesses would not be nationalized. By 1948 the communists had complete control of the country, and in 1949 the government began taking over the economy, nationalizing all enterprises, turning farms into state collectives.
    Alexander Dubek was a hardworking, serious-minded Slovak Party official carefully sidestepping the issue of Slovak nationalism. He was Slovak enough to be acceptable at home, but not so much that it would be of concern to the Party leadership in Prague. In 1953 he became regional secretary for an area of central Slovakia. That year Stalin died and Khrushchev began dismantling the most rigid excesses of Stalinism—everywhere but in Czechoslovakia. That same year Frozen Face Novotny´ was appointed first secretary of the Communist Party. Novotny´ was poorly educated and his career had shown little promise until he displayed a flair for fabricating evidence in Stalinist purges such as the campaign against the number two government figure, Party secretary-general Rudolph Slansky. Slansky was a brutal member of the dictatorship, probably guilty of many crimes, but he was tried and executed for Zionism. It did not matter that Slansky, far from being a Zionist, had disagreed with the Soviet Union’s early support of Israel. The word
Zionist
was being used not to designate supporters of Israel but to refer to people of Jewish origin, which Slansky was.
    Before the Slansky trials, Novotny´ and his wife had once been invited to the home of Foreign Minister Vladimir Clementis, and Novotny´’s wife had admired the Clementises’ porcelain tea service. After Clementis was executed in the Slansky purges, with the help of Novotny´’s doctored evidence, Novotny´ bought the porcelain for his wife.
    Paper pulp for construction was made from millions of library books full of dangerous Western ideas. The people of Czechoslovakia were listened to and closely watched by a tight network of secret police agents and