First Published in Scottish Socialist Voice, No. 303 (13th April 2007), p. 10

 

Charter 77 was founded in Czechoslovakia 30 years ago as a campaign for democracy and human rights. People involved gathered in Prague at the end of March to consider their experiences and the impact of their campaign. Thomas Swann reports.

In 1976, the arrest and prosecution of the psychedelic band The Plastic People of the Universe inspired clamours for greater freedom in Czechoslovakia, a country at that point in the grip of a hardline Stalinist government. A group of intellectuals drafted and signed a document that began a movement that was perhaps the most influential move against the Soviet-style regime in the country. Charter 77 formed 30 years ago, not as an anti-communist resistance group, but as a human rights body. The aim was to pressure the ‘neo-Stalinist’ government into complying with the Helsinki accord, signed by the ruling Communist Party in 1968. The Helsinki accord was supposed to guarantee the civil liberties of the people, and while the Party had enshrined these in law in 1976, it was evident that its commitment was lacking.

Sculptor and musician, Jiri Pliestih, remembers the absurd restrictions on personal freedom that were a normal part of life in Czechoslovakia. “(To perform as a musician) you had to go through the examination of the ideological board where you should prove that you are able to play music, you should prove you are able to sing folk songs, and you should prove you are able to know something about the communist movement.”
If one accepted these limitations then one could live a claustrophobic life, within the enclosed space defined by Soviet ideology. “We couldn’t do that, and we sent other musicians to prove in our names that we were able. We got this permission to play, but very soon we were not allowed to play everywhere.” It was in the face of such Kafkaesque repression that Charter 77 came to life.

The declaration the Charter dissidents produced in January 1977 stated the signatories’ will to live a life not dictated by the Party. The choice of the three original spokespersons manifested this opposition.

Jiri Hajek was an ex-government minister and one of the ‘reform-communists’ of 1968. At this time the government had sought to democratise the Soviet system. This ‘socialism with a human face’ was crushed by the Soviet Warsaw-Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Vaclav Havel was to become the most recognisable of the spokespersons. His work as a playwright and essayist, criticising what he called ‘post-totalitarianism’, and subsequent terms as president of the Czechoslovak and Czech Republics, gained him international notice.

Philosopher Jan Patocka was arrested and interrogated by the State Security service following the publication of Charter 77. He died of a heart attack in the days following. It was Patocka’s phenomenological philosophy that provided the foundation for Charter 77.

 

“In a nutshell,” writes philosopher Aviezer Tucker, “Patocka held that human authenticity is ‘life in truth’, the uniquely human potential to witness the grand presence of truth.” What this means is that for an individual to live a genuinely human life, they must reject any lies and actively seek truth and knowledge. For one to be able to undertake this philosophical task, one must have access to freedom of speech and thought. In Czechoslovakia, as in other Soviet Bloc countries, where divergence from the party line could be punished with imprisonment and interrogation, this meant that the authorities had to uphold their obligation to adhere to the Helsinki accord. The Charter 77 dissidents aimed at ‘helping’ the Party achieve this goal, by engaging in a “constructive dialogue with political and state power”.

A diverse collection of individuals from various spheres of society, Charter 77 defined itself as being passionately apolitical. Havel emphasised this character at last week’s conference on the movement, held in Prague. The people involved were not interested in ideology or politics. It was composed of people who wanted to live in freedom; a meeting of reform-communists and non-communists in complete equality. When Pliestih decided to sign Charter 77 in 1988, his motivation was similar. “To try to publish your work as an artist was impossible almost. I wasn’t that politically motivated but I was just pissed off at the situation and the regime.” The then spokesperson of the group told him he shouldn’t sign, but that he should “live in the intention of Charter 77”. This ‘living in truth’ was the most important thing for the dissidents. As Havel stresses, they didn’t want to represent the people or act as a moral authority.

There were those, however, who saw a potential in Charter 77 for something greater and more concrete.
Petr Uhl, a journalist and Czech Commissioner for Human Rights from 1998 to 2001, describes himself as a “Trotskyist and revolutionary Marxist”. As one of the founding signatories of Charter 77, he recognised it as “a step in the direction of political revolution”. The human rights orientation of the movement provided a base for this.

Patocka’s and Havel’s philosophical writings cut a path through Soviet ideology towards “the emancipation of the individual, the transformation of object into subject, not just on the economic but also on the political level”. However, the Charter 77 dissidents’ strict apolitical attitude led to this potential being wasted. Following the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in November 1989 that brought about the collapse of the Soviet system, no group existed to show the way. The ‘civil society’ that Charter 77 sought, where human rights are respected and the moral character of the individuals ensures the moral character of the state, failed to materialise. This lack of direction allowed the Communist Party elite to retain influence and profit from the plunge into neo-Liberalism at the hands of the one of the first post-Communist Prime Ministers, Vaclav Klaus.

Charter 77’s greatest success was, perhaps, when foreign diplomats, beginning with Dutch Foreign Minister Max van der Stoel, opened relations with the dissidents rather than the Soviet governments. The emphasis on gaining political freedom was now put squarely on the people, and not the state. Charter 77 showed that human rights, and socialism, as Uhl argues, can only be achieved from below, from the self-organisation of the people.

 

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