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even public opinion was reduced to the opinion of organs.
Howard:
The student movement was a threat because it was inde–
pendent from the Party, from the organs that control society. That
was, so to speak, its negative side. Positively, as I recall it, there
was also a kind of cultural revolution going on in Czechoslovakia
at the time, in nearly all of the arts.
Kavan:
I think that the term
cultural revolution
was not used - it re–
mained specific to the developments in the Chinese Peoples'
Republic. But there is certainly a link between cultural and politi–
cal issues in the sixties, as in the eighties.
One can summarize the issue by examining the media during
the Novotny regime. Novotny was the sort of apparatchnik who
believed that most people read newspapers and go to cinemas,
and therefore these media would have to be controlled strictly so
that new ideas would not enter people's minds. On the whole, like
most party apparatchniks, he was afraid of the people, and of the
people beginning to think in political terms. The so-called party of
the working class was always highly suspicious of the working
class - afraid of the working class - and at the same time very
patronizing toward it, believing that one thing in which they did
not want to be interested was politics. Basically, they thought that
if workers read newspapers, they read the sports page.
Novotny also believed, wrongly, that things like theater or
music are things only a few intellectuals would be interested in.
Therefore, the level of restriction on, say, theater or poetry was
very little-which is why, looking back, a lot of people now call
Novotny an ·"enlightened dictator," as compared with the present
one. Novotny overlooked the fact, which surprised some -of my
Western journalist friends, that there was a queue outside the
main bookshop of the Union of Writers every Thursday morning
when a new book appeared, and that workers came to poetry
evenings, and that the small cinemas, as they were called, were
always overcrowded and difficult to get into.
The first political ideas (in the general sense of
politicaf)
were
actually discussed through these media. The present regime
knows this only too well.
Me
Husak was one of the few present
leaders who, in the 1960s, was actually persecuted, and he knows
perfectly well that through this loophole you can influence the
system. He is determined to plug the loophole, and it is this that is
leading today in the direction that must be described as "cultural
genocide." Nevertheless, an underground culture is developing-
