H. Klein reports from Prague IN THE HEYDAY of Stalinism, the geography of Prague matched its politics: both were dom. inated by the awesome Hradcany Castle, home of the head of state and meeting place of the party leadership.
Today, on the eve of Czechoslovakia's biggest political trial for more. than two decades, looks trom unchanged. But close up, in the maze of ancient streets in Malostranske below the Castle, and across the river in the Old City, life has radically — even since the early 1970s.
The Castle is still ever present - it is difficult to escape for long from its blank, pitiless gaze. But the inhabitants of the wine bars and cafes of the Old City look back in a new way. The fear and awe of the 1950s and the great hopes 1968 replaced by quite different attitudes.
Irritated On my way from the airport, past Ruzyne prison where the ten Charter 77 campaigners arrested at the end of May are being held incommunicado, I unintentionally irritated a busy and efficient newsagent by asking her for a copy of Party Life which was prominently displayed in her window. She didn't know — and couldn't find — the price of this CP ideological rag and shrugged her shoulders.
I bought the party daily, Rude Pravo, instead and innocently down with my dictionary in a café to decipher it. minutes later, young man two tables away loudly demanded why I was reading that He crushed my feeble reply with, 'It's good only for the rubbish manager. My critic turned out to be a journalist who had left college two years ago. Not a veteran of 1968.
I stayed in a small pre-war hotel of come serumena vanc Trotskyists had held a public meeting there at the time of the Moscow trial in the 1930s. It was not supposed to take Western tourists, but the desk clerk didn't give a damn and gave me a room.
A scientist who had gone to work in the West in 1968, he had come back after being told that his brother would perfectly power of been arrested.
Cobbled the capital city of much of changed evening are greedy for much rip-off in the West.
and will not be bought blackmarket.
DeCi Castle and young, long-haired indigestible do what they like.
enough to a Western fourist.
this is misleading -them earn me, Husak-style hour working day!
Calle Boisterous These noisy, second rights in Eastern Europe. it is here, among thes ment lives and be refused entrance to university if he stayed in the West. His father was a worker who had been jailed in the late 1940s. He told me about Charter 77, said he thought they were right, and explained that some of the leaders had It would appear that the aim in life the middle class is to enrich themselves by any means possible Manv regard some blackmarkel deals to pay for a week's holiday in the West as a better cause than getting mixed up with the official politics.
But the young people who pack the wine bars of the Old City every more than next year's week-long holiday They want an entirely new world all the year round, off by the The small but strategically placed patchwork of cobbled streets between the summit of the bureaucracy in the plush Wenceslas Square has been invaded during the last few years by these and totally enemies of Stalinism.
They dress as they like, say what they like, and give the impression that they At first sight they seem familiar They look like students or drop-outs, but!
• a great many ofi their living manual workers. Yet unlike young workers in the West, many don't seem to have a back-breaking eight-hour day to get through: as somebody explained to 'socialism' has inspired people to achieve the two, boisterous. bars and cafés are part of a different universe from that of the party bosses up the hill in Hradcany. They are also lightyears away from pompous editorials in the bourgeois press about the lonely and courageous struggle for human Eastern 'drop-out flourishes. Walking around the Old City with activists you 1968: statue of King Wenceslas in Prague find Charter supporters in every bar. Minutes you enter, a people will jostle around the table to say hello, exchange information, talk. New documents and statements are passed around, every conceivable subject discussed argued out quite openly.
And all this continues amidst one of the fiercest repressive drives seen in Europe for decades. closest friends of people you meet are waiting, totally isolated in prison, to discover how many years over the minimum of three they are going to spend in jail.
The police are watching crowd people's houses, and leaders of th movement have been threatened and physically attacked. Yet these people seem anything but isolated and are totally lacking in political paranoia. and This is difficult for observers to grasp. But it reflects the fact that possesses formidable political power: The its capacity to inspire or convince wit!
its ideas has suffered catastrophically. It penetrates deeply into everyday life, yet is unable to win any disinterested loyalty from significant sections of the population.
many the Western although the regime still country. be bloodbath HO W The Castle still stands, glaring down on the Old City below it. Only an earthquake will turn the geography of Prague upside down. And the same is true of its politics.
In my last discussion with one of Chartists leaving the country, he told me: 'You think there will be a big political crisis in this When that happens it will like 1968. will be civil When happens, I don't want to be around.
The round-up of the 10 Chartists jail has brought the earthquake a step closer.
WHAT'S LEFT