The Student of Prague
BY ANTHONY HARTLEY ][..., IKE Rome, Prague is built upon seven hills. Like Rome it is a city of the baroque. But there the resemblance ends. In this central European metropolis there are no classical reminiscences. The general effect is of the rather creepy Romanticism associated with towns in the old German style—towns of cellars and crooked arches and jutting gables with, here and there, a dome in green copper for good measure. Up on the hill over the Vltava the Hragany Palace and its outbuildings enclosing the cathedral of St. Vitus throw a singularly threatening silhouette against the sky—rather like a beast crouching to spring. Alongside it is the street where the Emperor Rudolf housed his alchemists. Shades of Doctor Caligari! Shades of the Student of Prague whose doppelglinger stepped out of the mirror one evening!
Indeed, the doppelglinger is an apt enough symbol for Czechoslovakia at the moment. The very bourgeois qualities that make the Czechs the most Western of the Slav peoples make them also the most disciplined of the Soviet satellite States. I was in Prague at the time of the Poznan riots, but there will never be a Poznan there. The crowds keeping care- fully to the right on the Charles bridge are too docile. Perhaps it is only real want that can drive people to such desperation, and this does not exist in Czechoslovakia as it does in Poland or East Germany. The present regime seems firmly estab- lished and has some achievements to its credit. It is also a more national regime than one imagines those existing in, say, either Poland or Hungary to be. The Russian alliance is the natural one for Czechoslovakia, and even today holds none of the overtones of historical hegemony that it would in Poland. Moreover, there is a deeply rooted fear of an eventual German revanche for 1945. One of the more curious sights of Europe has recently been crowds of Sudeten German tourists from Western Germany going round their old homes, and, however masochistic this type of holiday may seem, no Czech seeing them can fail to recall 1938 and the German occupation or the undeniable fact that it was the West which let the First Republic down at Munich. This fear of Germany and consequent reliance on Russia must account for a good part of the 40 per cent. Communist vote at the last free elections.
* Economically speaking, Czechoslovakia is by far the best off among the States of Eastern Europe. This, I think, is agreed. Here, for the first time Communism conquered a fully industrialised country, and its present rulers had only to continue and expand what they found in existence while making good the damage done to industry and agriculture by the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans. If they at first found difficulty in doing this, it was because of the sudden reorienta- tion of an economy based on exports towards the Soviet Union instead of the West. Four years ago there was a shortage of food and consumer goods. Things are different now. The shops are full of goods at prices which, if more expensive by com- parison to wages than those in this country, are well within the reach of the average monthly wage of 1,300 crowns, especially as there are usually several members of one family working. People in the streets are well fed and solidly, if unfashionably, dressed. The only queues I saw were for television• sets, while cafés and restaurants were full. the picture is changing rapidly. All along the road that runs beside the railway line parallel to the Polish frontier there are, new factories in every town. This industrialisation of Slovakia is one of the big achievements of the present govern- ment and has abolished the rural unemployment which was the curse of the country before the war. In Bratislava itself—a cheerful, bright town beside the broad, quietly flowing Danube —big housing projects were under way. Much more than in Prague one has the impression of things stirring, of plans being carried out rather than just made.
As in most Communist countries much of this effort to raise the standard of living has been angled to the advantage of the heavy industrial worker. In Ostrava, a steel town in Moravian Silesia, where a thoroughly nineteenth-century pat- tern of industry has created a small hell of rattling light rail- ways, factory chimneys, and grime, an effort is being made to move some of the population out from the sulphurous and undermined city centre into pleasant blocks of flats only marred by Stalinesque pinnacles. and Oriental decora- tion. In one of these blocks I talked to a number of people about their wages, and it became apparent that a manual worker was likely to do better than a technician, a chemist, or engineer. This state of affairs is a symptom of a young Communist society. The technocrats are on top in the USSR, and it is probable that they will soon be so in Czechoslovakia.
Of course, there must be many cases of hardship under the present Czechoslovak regime. Old people, middle-class people, the politically tainted—all these find life hard—and the fact that the allocation of jobs has in the past been used as a weapon against 'unreliable' elements emphasises the dark side of the picture. Yet, the case against the People's Federal Republic is not there. The cheerful pink and white flats at Ostrava, the palatial amusement park beside the Danube at Bratislava. the new student hostel there—so like those of the Cite Universitaire in Paris—all this is creditable, and one cannot necessarily assume that it would have been carried out by any Czechoslovak government. The question mark is, as usual. over agriculture—there were not very many combine- harvesters or tractors to be seen on the Bohemian plateau or in the Slovakian valleys—but there is no sign of any food shortage. The real reverse of the medal comes when we ask whether a sound economy is enough. It is at this point that the mirror image of the Czech and Slovak peoples makes a grimace not to be seen in the smooth lineaments of official utterances or even in an accurate statistical account of the country's economic situation. It is the grimace of freedom, and it fits the legend that it was the students who were the first to express it publicly before the astonished eyes of the orthodox other half,
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