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living-room theater, pop music , concerts, novels, poetry, some
journals, and various other forms of cultural expression, including
forms of parallel university .
Similar forms could be seen during the seventies in Poland.
It
is what, in Czechoslovakia, contributed to the emergence of
Charter
'77 (to which we shall return). Interestingly, when the
human rights movements from Czechoslovakia and Poland began
to cooperate and collaborate more, one of the first themes they
discussed was the role of the alternative culture, or alternative
communities, within society. How do these affect the political
structures? How could the alternative communities be enhanced?
In both countries you now have almost all the ingredients of an
alternative society . Of course, once they get expressed in terms of
alternative trade union movements and the like , then the whole
structure of the system shakes .
One final point on the continuities in the history of the strug–
gle. Kuron and Modzelewsky, the authors of the
Open Letter
to the
Polish party in the sixties, after being jailed, have returned as acti–
vists in the KOR and Solidarity movements . Jiri Miller, one of
the leaders of the activist movement in Czechoslovakia, was
persecuted in 1966, which is about the year that Kuron was im–
prisoned. In March 1968, another student leader, Lubos Holocek,
expressed the first clear dissatisfaction with the policies of the
Dubcek group . He and Miller were among the first to reject the
capitulation in Moscow at the end of 1968, and to reject the
Dubcek compromise policy between August 1968 and April 1969,
and they were the first to start an opposition movement against
the Husak regime. Miller was one of the first arrested in 1971 and
sentenced to five years for taking part in that opposition, and one
of the first to sign the
Charter
'77 statement in January 1977.
Today, both are active in the Charter and other political move–
ments inside the country.
Howard:
This brings us up to the present. What is the opposition
today?
Kavan:
Since 1977, the most well-known group - although they
refuse the term
opposition
for a number of reasons - is the human
rights movement,
Charter
'77.
Charter
'77, to a certain extent, was
born out of things which, on the surface, seemed nonpolitical. At
the end of 1976, there were a number of different political groups.
The most well-known in the West was the Euro-Communist
group, based on the Prague Spring ideas of Alexander Dubcek
