Needed: More Collaborators

For the first time in memory, Czechoslovakia has experienced a very strange labor shortage this year: a shortage of prestigious collaborators. The Husak government is looking for anyone with any kind of reputation in the arts, the sciences or the professions to lend it prestige, but with absolutely no success. The government indirectly advertises fellowships, bonuses and awards for works that take a “correct approach” to the present “reality” and enhance the Soviet-backed regime; it stresses its willingness to work with anyone, regardless of party affiliation and past political mistakes. It offers the intelligentsia a truce. But the offer is being ignored, not only by those who once constituted the country’s cultural elite but also by the lesser lights. The Institute of Socialist History in Prague has been closed for lack of reliable socialist historians.

When the Czechoslovak Communist Party celebrated its fiftieth anniversary last spring, not a single movie scenario or book manuscript could be coaxed out of anyone to commemorate the event. On the same occasion, of course, the Party circulated a long list of authors not to be mentioned in connection with the anniversary (i.e., the present index of prohibited authors), a list which reads like a Who’s Who in Czechoslovak literature.

BJ

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B. Jicinski

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For the first time in memory, Czechoslovakia has experienced a very strange labor shortage this year: a shortage of prestigious collaborators. The Husak government is looking for anyone with any kind of reputation in the arts, the sciences or the professions to lend it prestige, but with absolutely no success. The government indirectly advertises fellowships, bonuses and awards for works that take a “correct approach” to the present “reality” and enhance the Soviet-backed regime; it stresses its willingness to work with anyone, regardless of party affiliation and past political mistakes. It offers the intelligentsia a truce. But the offer is being ignored, not only by those who once constituted the country’s cultural elite but also by the lesser lights. The Institute of Socialist History in Prague has been closed for lack of reliable socialist historians.

When the Czechoslovak Communist Party celebrated its fiftieth anniversary last spring, not a single movie scenario or book manuscript could be coaxed out of anyone to commemorate the event. On the same occasion, of course, the Party circulated a long list of authors not to be mentioned in connection with the anniversary (i.e., the present index of prohibited authors), a list which reads like a Who’s Who in Czechoslovak literature.