Thirty years after the Revolution--what I learned about Czech-Slovakia and the former East Bloc
A few of the books I have which have given me an insight into life during Communism
Do you ever have the feeling you were lied to?
I’m a product of the Cold War. I went to school in the 1970s and 1980s when the world was divided between the free “West” and the Communist “East Bloc”. One side was dominated by American and western European-influenced politics, while the other followed the Soviet-style of Communism. I cannot speak for those educated, say, in the United Kingdom or in West Germany, but as a US citizen, I can say I was lied to. Or at least I was fed Cold War propaganda and, as I later learned, misinformation about the region. I don’t want to diss the education I received, because I am grateful for it. But I was taught to believe that I lived in a system so superior to anything the Soviet-influenced sphere of the world had to offer that I would never want to leave it. I remember teachers saying things like “Be thankful you live in the United States of America and not the Communist Soviet Union!”
As a child, I really don’t remember much happening in the world if it didn’t directly affect or influence the United States of America. The Soviet Union couldn’t be trusted, that much I learned. I was 14 years old when the evening TV news and morning newspapers were flooded with stories of Lech Wałęsa and the Solidarity movement growing out of the shipyards in Gdańsk. Then there was General Jaruzelski, that shadowy Communist figure with the mysterious dark glasses. I hated him, not because he was individually a bad person, per se, but because my society and the ideology of freedom in which I was brought up taught me to believe that all Party Secretary Generals of the Communist world were loathsome, evil characters who preached an ideology counter to what was right. The constant stream of news and attention the media was giving to Poland and its declaration of martial law had us believing we were in the best place in the world. No one was getting beaten and there were no shortages of food, as the news reports indicated. “Put a candle in your window this Christmas to pray for the people of Poland”, one news presenter suggested. So I did just that. I remember thinking that Poland, and countries like it, were just plain stupid. I couldn’t fathom how anyone could live under a system like that. I vowed I would never set foot in any of these rotten places! What they didn’t teach me was that these countries had long, rich histories prior to their Communist regimes.
About the same time, I studied the geography of Eastern Europe in 8th grade Social Studies. I saw a divided Germany, a People’s Republic of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia on the pull-down map in the classroom. These were all satellites of the Soviet Union. I only vaguely recall learning that they actually spoke different languages, not Russian, as I think many of us were inclined to believe in those days. Fast forward about five years, to Chernobyl (April 1986). I was then in my first year of university studies when the evening news reported a major nuclear accident in the Soviet Union. Thanks to Sweden, we knew the truth, because otherwise, the Soviets would never have openly admitted such a catastrophe. That evening, walking from the dormitory, where we’d just watched the news, to the on-campus dining hall, my fellow dorm mates and I were somber. We ate our dinner in silence. We’d always joked that the food was bad enough—poisoned, perhaps. But now we believed it. What if this cloud of radioactive dust came over the United States and blanketed everything? We’d be poisoned for sure! Would we all start glowing in the dark? Sprout extra fingers and toes? This was not going to end well. Those foolish Communists!
Gradually, we coped with Chernobyl. It defined our lives, those of us coming of age then. The effects of it were not nearly as bad as anyone had initially predicted, and life went on. During the next couple of years, I only remember Mikhail Gorbachev and his “Glasnost” policy. I paid rather little attention to it because I’d given up having any faith that the Soviet-controlled world could ever do any good. Talk of “openness” meant nothing to me. Perhaps I was becoming cynical the closer to adulthood I got. The US-Soviet arms race and threat of nuclear war were still real to me in 1989, so why should I trust the Soviet secretary general with the port stain on his forehead?
Then it was November 1989, November the ninth, to be exact. The Berlin Wall came down. I was only vaguely aware of rumblings of discontent in the Soviet-controlled East Bloc before that date. Suddenly something credible was happening, something I could see and believe in. As I studied for a Japanese test that night (I had one every Friday, so Thursday nights were spent frantically reviewing my kanji), I was at a Japanese friend’s apartment and we watched the Wall come tumbling down on live TV. Unbelievable that this was happening! Suddenly Gorbachev’s “Glasnost” began to make sense. After that, the dominoes began to fall, one right after the other.
I remember November 17, 1989. It was a Friday and I had just made the drive home from the University of Oregon in Eugene, one week before the four-day Thanksgiving weekend. It was my final year in college and I was only beginning to consider what I might do after graduation. At home, my mother had the TV news on, showing (hundreds?) of thousands of people in the streets of Prague, jamming Václavské náměstí (Wenceslas Square) and Prague Castle, singing, chanting, waving flags and banners, and jangling bunches of keys in their hands. There were undoubtedly scenes from Bratislava, too, as Slovak people took to Námestie SNP (Square of the Slovak National Uprising), doing the same as their Czech counterparts in Prague were doing. The awe of watching ordinary people making a difference in their futures was astounding, as I had never dreamed it was possible behind the Iron Curtain, and I never gave thought that I would or could ever set foot here. Even to this day, the scenes I witnessed on television still captivate me, and in a way, I regret that I couldn’t have been a part of this momentous event.
Apparently Poland and Hungary started a bit early, both having protests in June that year, and Hungary reportedly dismantled part of its “Iron Curtain” border with the West, leading to an exodus of East Germans, which seems to have triggered protests in East Germany.
The next major event I remember was Christmas Day 1989, when Romanian Communist Party General Secretary Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were executed following days of unrest in the country. It had been the first bloodshed since the Fall of the Berlin Wall started it all, and by year’s end, it seemed as if the whole of eastern Europe collapsed in a domino effect. Suddenly it was as if a new world had been born, bringing with it new possibilities for people on both sides of the borders. Five years after all this, I found myself in the newly-founded Czech Republic (which had split with Slovakia just a year prior), and very quickly I found myself at home in this new world. (See the initial blog entries under the heading Memoirs of a Pub Adventure - the Czech Republic for stories of my first experiences in this part of the world.) The possibilities seemed limitless, and I quite enjoyed living a society in transition from a Communist state to a democratic, free-market one.
Quickly, too, I learned through the people I came into contact with what life had been like behind the Iron Curtain. Aside from the obvious: that people couldn’t travel abroad freely, the press was restricted from openly criticizing the regime, etc., I realized people's lives were otherwise just about as normal as my life had been in the free West. Looking through the family photo albums of my friends and acquaintances, I saw how they lived and enjoyed life. They went to the movies, played sports in the park, took their dogs for walks, flirted with the opposite sex, ate ice cream cones, played pranks on one another, went skiing in the mountains, swam in lakes and the sea, rode their bikes, and listened to music—pretty much the same kinds of things as anyone I knew growing up in the United States had done. The sun shined in Eastern Europe, too. That was something the media seemed not to show, so that I had this notion the whole region was under perennial darkness. Women were attractive, too, not just these old, wart-faced, potato-and-cabbage-digging “babushkas” the propaganda of the West had somehow shaped me to believe was the norm. The buildings were not only the drab, grey concrete ones I’d seen in all the newsreels and black and white front page photos, but there was also a plethora of ancient castles and majestic town halls built in centuries past that had withstood time like historic buildings anywhere else. And perhaps most importantly, the people were the nicest, kindest, most thoughtful of anyone I'd met. They weren't bogged down with the materialistic troubles many of us in the West were. I remember once reading or hearing that the people behind the Iron Curtain only wanted to "kill those American imperialists". I never met with any hostility nor any suspicion at all, only curiosity and genuine warmth. I began to understand that the countries of the former East Bloc all had unique cultures and identities, much of which had existed long before the Communists took power. I never knew that Czechoslovakia had been one of the strongest free and industrialised nations in Europe prior to World War II. Only when I arrived in Poland in 1995 did I learn that Marie Curie (Maria Skłodowska) was actually Polish, and not French, as I somehow learned. I also learned that Frederic Chopin was Polish, and not French, again thanks to the spelling of his name. Nicholas Copernicus, who I believed to be Dutch or Belgian, thanks to the fact my school books had always given his Latin name instead of his Polish one, Mikołaj Kopernik. My high school biology textbook talked of Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, as being Austrian. Well, the book was half right. He was an Austrian subject, but during his time he lived in what is now the Czech Republic and was actually Czech. These are just a few of the many things I learned living in the former Communist states, and not through the Cold War-tainted education I had. Oh, and I learned that you never refer to these countries as “Eastern Europe”. The people resent it as it brings back memories of when they were sealed off behind the Iron Curtain. I prefer the term Middle Europe, myself.
Today marks thirty years since the Nežná revolúcia (Velvet Revolution) in Czechoslovakia and a lot has changed. There are still many changes waiting to happen, but I’m grateful that the world has changed in ways that have made it possible for me to call this part of the world home, and I'm glad I've been able to learn the truths about these countries that I couldn't learn in school.