Eastern Europe's new upper class

Tim Garton Ash

Prague The traveller is encouraged to try the waters at Karlsbad', Karl Baedeker admonishes. The names of the sanatoria are not encouraging: 'Albanie', 'Dimitrov', 'Marx', 'Pavlov'. I tried not to imagine what kind of cures 'Pavlov' offered. Then I came upon the 'Hotel Thermal', The name, at least, was unthreatening; and above all it offered baths, baths of all shapes and colours, baths in ten, languages. I asked the receptionist if I might try a Karlsbaderthermaldarnpfspezialbad. Sorry, all closed', she replied. It was a Saturday in high season; the spa was pullulating with German visitors crying out for the waters; why were the Baeder closed in Karlsbad, 1 enquired. 'No hot water'.

I laughed, The receptionist was offended. I'm sorry, I said, I thought you were joking. I really did. There are so many Soviet bloc jokes about shortages. What happened when the communists took over the Sahara? In five years there was a shortage of sand. What happens when the communists build a 'Hotel Thermal' in Karlsbad? In five years there is no hot water. That sort of joke.

Karlsbad and Marienbad (or Kalovy Vary and Marianske Lazne, to give them their unfamiliar Czech names) are two of the most agreeable towns in Bohemia, and Bohemia is the most beautiful part of Czechoslovakia. The road from Prague passes through a rolling, thickly wooded landscape dotted with squat, rounded hills like the dumplings on a plate of Bohemian stew. The inhabitants of Bohemia are the least Bohemian people I have met. They are respectable, homely and — there is no other word for it — getnuetlich. Gernuedichkeit is an indefinable German amalgam of snugness and chummyness and beeriness.

The German connection is as old as the spas themselves. Karlsbad is named not after Karl Baedeker but after Karl IV, Emperor of the Germans, who founded it in 1358. Goethe was Marienbad's most famous guest. He is commemorated by the plinth of a statue, crawling with ants. Beneath the ants are inscriptions in three languages: Czech, Latin and French, The French inscription reads: J. W. Goethe poete et ecrivain se joumait ici pour in cure dans les annees 1820,21,22 et 1823 et affermissait les relations amicales avec les hommes de science et ecrivains tcheques,' This is rather absurd. Goethe's important 'relations amicales' in Marienbad were overwhelming affairs of the heart with young girls bearing such unmistakably Czech names as Ulrike von Levetzow and Minna Herzlleb. It is like erecting a statue of Byron in Lady Caroline Lamb's garden with the inscription (in Gaelic, Latin and French): 'Lord Byron dallied here in the years — and —, and struck up a warm relationship with an Irish gardener.'

The point we are to note is that Goethe was a Friend of The Czechs, The poet will survive such silliness, although his monument has not. 'Son monument', the inscription concludes, 'fut enleve par les autorites d'occupation allemandes.' Can any reader tell me if this is true? It seems much more likely that the Friend of The Czechs was removed by the Czechs, along with the German population of Bohemia and Moravia (the so-called 'Sudeten' Germans): over three million people expelled in the aftermath of the second world war, Now the Germans are back, as tourists. Who knows, even Goethe may one day be restored to his plinth, and granted an inscription in the German language. Today the coaches of West German tourists are welcomed as were the coaches of the German aristocracy 150 years ago.

Tourists from the West have altered the face of the Soviet bloc over the last ten years. 'We have a new upper class,' a Prague publican accusingly remarked, 'you — the Westerners.' I offered him another beer. Perhaps that was why he said it, with Schweikian cunning. He was right nonetheless, For the Westerner every service is provided. For him new luxury hotels are thrown up and old ones restored. The new 'Interhotels' apeing the West in their concrete enormity and nylon-covered tastelessness, are apt symbols of the prostitution of the governments which order them — selling their principles for foreign currency. Nor is prostitution just a metaphor for the business conducted in the Interhotel bars. (Go to the discotheque of the grandly decaying 'Hotel Bristol' in Warsaw for a blatant and uproarious example.) The visible corruption is farcical. A friend asked to see the new swimming pool of the 'Metropol' hotel in East Berlin, 'That is not allowed,' the liveried footman informed her, 'the King of Greece is in there.'

From East Berlin to Sofia the hotel restaurants present the same spectacle; uniformed, courteous servants wait with exaggerated deference upon ill-dressed, loutish Western guests. (When I say 'Western' I include the Westernised Arabs, of whom there are a striking number in the Soviet bloc capitals.) It isa general rule that the waiters behave better than the guests. They maintain old European standards which the businessman from Frankfurt or the oil sheikh from Abu Dhabi has long forgotten or never learned, I found myself wondering, as the waiter in the 'Restaurace Pariz' in Prague shot his immaculate cuff past the ear of a Libyan who was plastering spaghetti over his face with grubby fingers, what the waiters think.

Do they feel, like the public, that they are subjected to a new upper class? Do they resent this? For us there are no shortages (apart from hot water in Karlsbad), provided you can afford the often exorbitant prices. For them shortages are a daily burden. Last year there was an acute shortage of washers. Half the taps in Prague dripped. Eventually the government decided to build a special washer factory. Now Prague is overflowing with washers; but potatoes are not to be had. This month it may be vegetables which are in short supply, next month paraffin lamps. As for prices: it used to he the boast of all the communist regimes that their prices, unlike those in the capitalist West, were stable. It used to be true that basic commodities were relatively cheap, when available. These boasts are no longer credible. In July a round of price rises was announced in Prague which included 30 per cent on petrol and up to 50 per cent on some staple items in a family budget (e.g, children's clothes). My taxi-driver, who was most directly hit by the petrol increases, could talk of nothing else, What was he going to do, I asked. Well, he was going to take his car off the road until the new taxi fares, covering the higher fuel costs, came into force. This in a city already short of taxis.

So the people of Prague have to bear with shortages and high prices. The contrast with the lot of the visitor has become more acute. Furthermore, the privileges enjoyed by the tourist are visible to all. The functionaries, Djilas's 'new class', may enjoy all the traditional assets of a governing class, power, privilege and luxury, But the luxury is generally hidden from the public eye if not from the public's imagining. I offer the theory that the functions of the upper class have been split in the communist countries. he functions of the leisure class, chief among them conspicuous expenditure, have been assigned to the Westerners, The effect on the local populations is hard to judge. The experience of recent years suggests that it is not the people who want to get rid of the Interhotels and the Intershops (shops selling imported goods for foreign currency, which are called by a different name in each country, but which for convenience I will refer to throughout as 'Intershops). They want to get inside them. It is their communist masters who spasmodically try to cut back these malignant growths, fearing the cancer of Western con-. sumerism. Have they cause to fear? I suggested last week that Western influences might in the long term raise consumer expectations which the state cannot fulfil. But in the short term they do not gravely threaten the stability of a Stalinist regime like that in Czechoslovakia. Indeed they may work to its advantage.

One must remember that there can be no 'Politics of envy' in the sense in which that Phrase has been used in British politics in the Seventies, because there are no 'politics' In our sense. In an undemocratic and rep ressive state, with a secret police (the STB) as its unacknowledged legislators, the reaction which Trevor-Roper once described as the 'despair of politics' is very widespread. The pursuit of consumer-goods takes the Place of political activity. I have nowhere encountered such fanatical 'consumerism', such single-minded materialism. More even than the thoroughly apolitical and consumer-minded West German worker, many Czech workers live for the day when , they will bring home the new car or the new sA'ashing-machine. I visited a family who had succeeded in buying a plot of land and were building their own semi-detached house. This project absorbed every particle of their attention and every ounce of their energy. -1"ley had no time for politics, far less for dissent. They were a model of private enterprise and self-help. Now it is true that such enterprise does not directly benefit the state. Self-help often means helping yourself to the property of the state. Thieving from your workplace is °lie norm which is generally accepted. (Recent show trials of flagrant offenders have admitted this by implication.) It was evident that many of the materials used to build the house I visited had fallen off the hacks of lorries. Indeed I saw some of the lollies. Nor could my host have financed the work from his official pay packet. Many Workers earn half as much again from jobs done privately 'on the side'. Plumbers, car penters, glaziers and the like do particularly ywell. They can often demand payment in ,reign currency, which they then spend in the Intershops. Yet even this is not to the state's disadvantage. Specialists believe that the centrally planned economies could not function without these black or 'grey' markets. The second or `parallel' economy lub ncates the wheels of the first, planned economy. In the bars of the Interhotels you Meet the local profiteers, glabrous °Perators in the twilight world of the second economy. They are big spenders, leatherJacketed racketeers, a glittering scum Infecting the bars and expensive restaurants w_ith the atmosphere of a Gold Rush town. I. hese characters want to work the system, not to challenge it. The challenge comes from those who do not. accept consumption as a substitute for Politics. Foremost among them are the courageous intellectuals in the 'Charter 77' aknd VONS groups. Their activities have ueen given much publicity in the West. How "re they regarded in their own country? Is it lust a movement of the intelligentsia? How ,IllanY workers would put individual liberty oefore the possession of a Mercedes? The answers I received were heartening. There have been a large number of small anonymous contributions to a fund set up to support the Charterists. The Czechs I talked to had all heard of the movement. They generally expressed admiration for the 'foolhardy' courage of Havel and his fellows. And after thirty years of communist rule the concepts of liberal democracy are still familiar on their lips as household words.

The following incident may serve as a small illustration. I had parked on a pavement to change a tyre. A young Czech, whom I shall call Jan, came spontaneously to my assistance. An ox-like policeman appeared and fined me 100 crowns (about £5) for parking on the pavement. Twenty minutes later we were still carrying out repairs. The bovine officei returned and fined me a further 100 crowns. Jan was outraged. He rose in heat and began a furious argument with the policeman, finally threatening to file a complaint against him on my beholf. I had to beg him not to. There was no p6ssible self-interest in his behaviour. He acted from a sense of right and wrong, for the honour of his country. It was a one-man answer to Munich. During the discussion I had picked out the word 'Bobby' being thrown to and fro. Apparently the policeman advanced the view that an English 'Bobby' (who features large in the standard primary school English textbook) would have acted no differently. 'I told him', Jan explained, 'that an English Bobby exercises his authority with discretion and by consent; not by arbitrariness and brute force. Also there is democratic control. And he is answerable to justice.'

Now this man was not an intellectual. He was simply a salesman with an unusuallyt good command of English, a language he needed for his job. Yet the words for these basic notions —consent, democratic control, answerability, justice — were on the tip of his tongue. I don't know if this encounter was at all 'representative' of popular attitudes. Maybe it was quite atypical. Such pontification is best left to the research armies of Radio Free Europe with their impressive surveys of 'public opinion' in Eastern Europe. I do know that his counterpart in East Germany would never have behaved like this. Nor, more's the pity, would a worker in West Germany, not in a hundred years.

'You know', Jan said, with a sharp glance, `we have a lot of jokes about policemen. Do you have jokes about Bobbies in England?' At that moment I could only think of Gilbert and Sullivan's 'The policeman's lot is not a happy one', which seemed rather inappropriate. So instead I told him we were also concerned that our police were sometimes corrupt, and occasionally brutal, and that a periodical called the New Statesman had published many angry articles about this, but its deputy editor had not —so far as I knew — been attacked by a man with a stocking over his head (as happened to the Charterist Zdena Tominova) nor was its editor yet obliged to work in a zoo (as is the philosopher Julius Tomin). He grinned, taking the point. 'Do come and see me, when you're next in central Europe'. He handed me his card. I invited him to London, but this seemed like another bad joke. It had taken him ten years to obtain one visa — for eight days in Rome. When would he get another?

This kind of contact may be marginally worrying to the authorities. Western visitors are one additional source of political information for those who seek it. One or two copies of the Western newspapers which sporadically appear in the big hotels, as a pro forma concession to the 'spirit of Helsinki,' might reach Czech hands. But the masses will scarcely be inflamed by these chance encounters. The danger presented to such regimes by mass tourism is small. The tourist is very effectively insulated from real life. If he ventures out of his luxury bubble it is to see something old, or to peep into the night spot indicated on an illuminated sign in the hotel foyer next to the poster advertising Glenda Jacksonova's latest film. Indeed the authorities don't need to worry much about the insulation. Tourists are self-insulating. As Isherwood has written, they carry their own conversation along with them, like their sandwiches, and can only spare a few moments for the surroundings between mouthfuls.

It is all very depressing. Far from the Western visitors undermining the governments, I suspect it is the governments who hoodwink the visitors. Any thinking observer Must conclude, for example, on the evidence of the Interhotels and Intershops alone, that the choice we are offered between freedom in the West and social justice in the East is a falsely stated alternative. There is here a minimum of social security which is superior to that prevailing in the West (i.e. you are less likely to lose your job). That is not the same as social justice. But I see no evidence that the majority of Western visitors either observe or think. Instead they enjoy being temporary kings, and come away reflecting, as a gentleman from Clapham expressed it to me, that Prague was 'very noice' and that 'we could do with a bit more of this at 'ome.' When I muttered something about freedom he asked darkly: 'but freedom for whom?' — or ratheefor ''000m?' A good question, but hadn't I heard it somewhere before? I took him to imply that a Durham miner has less freedom than he or I. This is true. In Czechoslovakia freedom for some has been replaced by freedom for none. Has the loss in freedom been compensated by a gain in equality and social justice? Some at least have not ceased to hunger for freedom and dignity. It is difficult to ask the others because they cannot say what they want, unlike my friend from Clapham.

I asked him darkly in return: I know Prague is 'very nice', but very nice for whom?

This is the third in a series of six articles following a journey through the Soviet bloc countries.