[DEBATE] : Prague Student Protest 1956

[Peter Waterman]

Extract, Prague, 1956,   Words:   1,428   Update: 171106

 

 

The Wind Before the Storm Before the Tsunami:

The Forgotten Student Protest, Prague, 1956

 

Peter Waterman

waterman at inter.nl.net

 

 

[In 1956 I was 20 years old and working for the (Communist) International Union of Students in Prague as English (effectively chief sub-editor) of its monthly, World Student News. Czechoslovakia is supposed to have been an exception to the wave of popular protest that shook Poland and rocked Hungary in that year. This was not actually the case. The student protests in Czechoslovakia even reached the international Communist magazine I was working for. And impacted on me. It was a wind that became a storm  in 1968 and a tsunami in 1989. This is an extract from a work in progress. I have added notes in square brackets and removed footnotes and references. PW]

 

 

The isolation of the International Union of Students [IUS] from student life and discontent within the Communist world was shown by a national wave of student protest, from Bratislava to Prague, involving demonstrations and mass meetings, the latter sometimes coordinated by (or through) the faculty-level CSM [official union of youth] organisations themselves. One of these, took place April 27, in the presence of [the Czechoslovak Jiri] Pelikán himself - and in his capacity as leader of the IUS. Within the IUS we were hearing faint echoes of student discontent through cautiously-worded reports in the state-controlled press. Or from faint copies of student resolutions. These were translated for us interested foreigners by Joy Moss-Kohoutova [an American Communist at the IUS] and others. Some were typed out in English by my good self. There was certainly no report on such to the IUS either by our Czech member organisation, the CSM, or by Pelikán. 

 

There then followed the first student street protest in Prague since the Communist takeover in 1948. This took place May 20, 1956. What had happened was that the CSM, or Party, had been emboldened by the 20th Congress of the CPSU, in February 1956, to give way to student pressure for the restoration of the traditional student carnival, the Majáles. Or perhaps the appropriate word here would be not so much 'emboldened' as 'disoriented'. In any case, I went along, with my Czech girlfriend, Zuzana, as interpreter, to report and photograph the event. The official concession went dramatically wrong as the students used the carnival to express more discontent than they had previously dared. And this in front of laughing and cheering crowds of bystanders. Two days later Mlada Fronta, the CSM daily, 'reported' it under the innocuous title, 'Fun as well as Bread is Necessary for the Life of Man'. What the paper was trying to do was to reduce the demonstration to the kind of 'student-as-such' politics that the IUS condemned.

 

            With either the explicit or implicit approval of Pelikán, I did a report on the Majáles for WSN, leading to the most prolonged and bitter dispute in my time there. Not only was Igor [Biriukov, the Soviet editor] resistant to any suggestion that this was a protest against the regime rather than a light-hearted complaint about student conditions. My draft went through two or three revisions as I threw words overboard in the hope of saving the ship. Hana, our Czech technical editor, and certainly no Communist, afterwards said to me that she thought it should never have been published. She must have felt that it was inappropriate or dangerous for the IUS, WSN or even her, to be rocking the boat of established power. I went off on holiday to the UK as WSN was being put to bed (for the customary sleep at the printers) with the conviction that even what had survived the censorship would have been further adjusted, or excluded from the (East) German and Soviet editions. I failed to establish that this was the case and was afraid to hunt too hard. My report might have been the most revealing published anywhere by the Communist press at that time. But if this was a victory, it was only one and it was obviously compromised by its confinement to a publication and organisation that was otherwise unchanged. 

 

The most striking images of what actually happened, I think, were two of the photos I made, one of academic freedom in chains, the other of Libri Prohibiti (banned books in Latin). The procession started in Vinohrady, or maybe just off the top of Václavské Námestí (Wenceslas Square), both within walking distance of the IUS office. But it clearly never occurred to the students to appeal, either before or after the event, for the support of the IUS. Indeed, it seems to have not even occurred to me that the students might have done this! Had they done so, either before or after the consequent repression, it would have been a considerable embarrassment to the IUS. But the fact is that neither Jiri Pelikán nor Denis Hill [an English Communist colleague] both of whom write critically about this period, even mentions the Majáles.But the students of Slovakia and the Czech lands had demonstrated that the natives were restive. In a wide-ranging and radically-democratic document that foreshadowed the Prague Spring of 1968, the CSM organisation at the Faculty of Maths and Physics at Charles University addressed itself directly to the matter of international student relations:

 

We ask that appropriate central organs support an effort to intensify international student contacts - the exchange of publications and reciprocal visits of our students and Western students. We consider it necessary to put an end to the notion and the practice that international contacts are conducted only by officials from the regional level and higher. We ask that the number of student exchanges with the USSR be increased and that study in Western countries be made possible. 

 

There were, in the May 28 meeting at FAMU [the Film and Drama School] which I attended, other issues raised which had directly to do with international student exchanges - if only with Communist Poland - in which the existence of the IUS was ignored except in so far as access to its International Student Card might be used in reducing travel costs. The FAMU meeting revealed many of the tensions of student and academic life in Czechoslovakia at that time. But, curiously, the main sources of student protest in Prague appeared to have been the faculties of science and technology rather than the social sciences and arts. I can only speculate that the former were less politically controlled than the latter.




            Whilst the peak of the early Cold War had passed, and WSN made considerable efforts to publish material on and from the West, we were confronted either by hostility to Communism, or by the a-politicism espoused by many Western student unions, or by general student integration into liberal-democratic polities and a burgeoning consumer capitalism.  And, then, any rapprochement between West and East, between Communist student organisations and social-democratic or liberal ones, was shattered by the Hungarian Uprising (October-November 1956). This overlapped with the Suez War (November 1956) in which the British, French and Israelis attempted to reverse the Egyptian nationalisation of the Suez Canal, and to destroy the radical-nationalist militarist regime of Abdel Gamal Nasser. This late, if not last, British attempt to exercise its old imperial power provoked dramatic protests in the UK, not least from students. But this was also the case for the more-successful Soviet attempt to hold on to its newer empire in Hungary. The IUS wanted to publish the anti-imperialist protest in the UK but not the anti-Soviet one. My feeling was that we could not publicise the first without the second. The British group at the IUS agreed. The result was that WSN had no report of any British student protest at this time. I had not foreseen this possible and, indeed, predictable outcome. For me it was a victory rather more Pyrrhic than the one of Greek mythology. 

 

 

The Hague

 

17 November 2006

(International Student Day)



[Version with jpeg photos available from author]

 

 



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