Jaroslav Hutka stepped off a plane at Prague’s Ruzyně International Airport on Nov. 26th, 1989, expecting to be arrested. The popular folk singer had spent eleven years in exile because of his association with Charter 77, the dissident group led by playwright Vaclav Havel, and had returned to play his protest songs for a crowd incensed by police attacks on protestors during a recent march in opposition to the communist regime.
At that demonstration, the first of what would soon become known as the Velvet Revolution, the police had brutally beaten student protesters with batons, and while they did the students had chanted, "Mame hole ruce! - Mame hole ruce!" “We have just bare hands!”
It was a moment that not only roused the conscience of many in the country who liked to think of themselves as “apolitical,” but one that perfectly crystallized the guiding philosophy of the movement led by Havel and is fellow artist dissidents.
Havel, a self deprecating, ambivalent, gentle ironist, had years before seceded from what he called the “post totalitarian panorama of pseudo history and pseudo truth,” the spider web of faceless flunkies, anonymous informers and secret police that had ensnared Soviet Era Czechoslovakia in its dreary grip.
Charter 77 was an arts collective and political community guided by Havel’s simple, radical idea that, rather than directly confront the unfree and false reality of the Czech state, they would simply behave as if they were free, by, in the playwright’s famous formulation, “living within the truth.”
Living in truth, Havel said, could mean taking actions as small as singing a folk song in public or refusing to display a government slogan in your shop, or as big as staging a worker’s strike or student demonstration. It didn’t matter what you did. The important thing was the doing. The important thing was to act. By doing so, by behaving as if they were free, Czech citizens would reanimate dormant, cherished values like trust, openness, civic responsibility, solidarity, and love.
They would renew relations to a world where categories like justice, friendship, courage and empathy have a tangible, personal content. For Havel, personal experience was the initial and most essential measure of things. Living in truth meant not merely a rejection of untruth but also of the false sense of security provided by a retreat into the “small pleasures of everyday life.” He warned repeatedly of the “moral sickness” brought on by placid comfort and the avoidance of civic responsibility. He urged citizens to “be bound to something higher, and capable of sacrificing something, in extreme cases even everything, of their banal, prosperous private life.”
By making precisely those sacrifices, by holding fast to his principles, his creativity and his humanity, by living in the truth, Havel helped generate a revolution of free thought and alternative values that undermined the Czech police state — the world of appearances, of rituals, facades and excuses that had imprisoned the country for nearly half a century.
Early on in his career as a dissident his plays had been banned, and he was forced to find whatever menial work he could. Havel’s plays continued to be performed in underground theaters, however, and he was eventually sent to prison for four years. (Even so, he never gave a thought to leaving Czechoslovakia, although he didn’t hold it against anyone who chose to emigrate. “What kind of human rights activists would we be,” he asked, “if we were to deny people the right every swallow has?”)
When Jaroslav Hutka stepped off the plane at Ruzyně Airport in1989, it was with both gratitude for his friend Vaclav’s forgiving attitude about his choices, and a wary sense of possibility for his beloved country.
He’d watched the television news reports at his home in the Netherlands about what was happening in the Czech capital, and immediately
understood that something had changed that week. There seemed to be posters of all kinds everywhere in town — homemade drawings and scrawled inscriptions on large placards. It seemed like hundreds of them were on the shop windows, pillars, bus stops.
He’d noticed, too, the way the eyes of the student protesters shone, the way their bodies seemed animated by a life force he’d been afraid had been purged from the capital decades before. They seemed to be alive and grounded in a way he hadn’t seen for a long time. Like they were living in truth.
Still, as the police approached him in the airport terminal, he recognized an old feeling of dread rising in his throat. He was practiced at the kind of compliance instilled by an authoritarian state, and mentally prepared himself to follow whatever orders he was given.
None came. The police instead shook his hand, greeted him by name, and told him he was free to attend the rally. He asked them why. Why was someone like him, a known dissident there to specifically engage in anti-government activities, not being arrested?
The policeman told him simply that there were a million people — literally a million people — waiting to hear him.
The implication was clear. If there were a million people waiting to hear Hutka, there were a million poised to oppose the police. What else could they do but let him go?
None of those million people were armed. None were anything but peaceful as they awaited the appearance of a popular singer at a rally for democracy. It was their presence only that had, in a moment, turned the tide of history. It was just showing up.
Only a month later, on December 29th 1989, the 45 year-old Communist regime came to a wholly unexpected and improbably peaceful end, when Vaclav Havel was sworn in as President of Czechoslovakia.
It happened because people had shown up in sufficient numbers to make the regime’s continuing existence untenable. The false reality conjured by the regime was simply no match for the simple, undeniable truth represented by a million people gathered peacefully in a town square to make their voices heard.
In the following weeks official posters and plaques of all kinds were removed from public buildings, offices and shops. Many of the featured the old regime’s dystopian motto, an inscription rendered invisible by decades of oppressive ubiquity, but that had suddenly regained its’ old, pre-communist sense of meaning, in a twist that seemed like the punch line to an absurdist play about the inversion of language in dictatorships. The kind of wistfully ironic, rueful plays typically written by Vaclav Havel.
It read: “Truth Prevails.”