Dick Howard and John Mason
DISSIDENCE IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA:
AN INTERVIEW
Dick Howard:
I think we should begin by discussing the student
movement in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s .
Jan Kavan :
Yes, to understand what happened in the seventies,
and therefore to predict what will take place in the eighties, it is
important to examine the sixties . That is because the opposition
movement, as I perceive it, has never at any point ceased to exist.
It was an uninterrupted, continuous opposition, and I am happy
to say that I have been part of it since the very early sixties .
The student movement was the only organized group outside
the Party structure which, in some sort of programmatic sense,
was trying to put forward reform ideas, to suggest a type of
program for change. Its general objective, to build a socialist
society, was identical with the aim of the Party, but its perception
of the way to achieve this goal differed from the Party's. The stu–
dents wanted a political organization of their own, one created by
the youth and for the youth, which would express the interests of
the youth and their ideas about society.
Throughout the sixties, the students represented the most
politicized section of society, and played the role of catalyst to the
events of late 1967 which toppled the Novotny regime . At the
same time, it is necessary to stress that at no point during the
sixties was there any explicit political cooperation between the
student movement and the reformists in the Party. These move–
ments remained parallel to each other as they developed. There
was a certain cooperation between the intellectuals, especially the
writers, and the reformists in the Party, but despite the common
areas of interest , the methods again differed. Other intellectuals ,
even some Party members, preferred to exercise pressure on the
Party from outside it because this gave them greater scope to
express more radical views and behavior than was possible for the
reformists within the Party. But even those groups outside the
Party still believed in a formal, institutionalized opposition based
on the perception of society as a sort of pyramid of organs in which
