Ludvík Vaculík - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Ludvík Vaculík is a Czech writer

Writer

A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

and journalist

Journalist

A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...

. A prominent samizdat

Samizdat

Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...

writer, he is most famous as the author of the "Two Thousand Words

The Two Thousand Words

"The Two Thousand Words" is a manifesto written by Czech reformist writer Ludvík Vaculík in the midst of the Prague Spring, a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia that began in January 1968 with the election of Alexander Dubček and ended with a Soviet invasion in August.- History...

" manifesto

Manifesto

A manifesto is a public declaration of principles and intentions, often political in nature. Manifestos relating to religious belief are generally referred to as creeds. Manifestos may also be life stance-related.-Etymology:...

of June 1968.

Pre-1968

President of Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...

and Communist Party

Communist Party of Czechoslovakia

The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, in Czech and in Slovak: Komunistická strana Československa was a Communist and Marxist-Leninist political party in Czechoslovakia that existed between 1921 and 1992....

leader Antonín Novotný

Antonín Novotný

Antonín Novotný was General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from 1953 to 1968, and also held the post of President of Czechoslovakia from 1957 to 1968. He was born in Letňany, now part of Prague....

and his fellow conservatives had begun taking a more repressive approach toward intellectuals and writers after the Six Day War of May 1967. The following month, Vaculík, then still a member of the Communist Party, attended the Fourth Congress of the Union of Writers. Others in attendance included communists Pavel Kohout

Pavel Kohout

Pavel Kohout is a Czech and Austrian novelist, playwright, and poet. He was a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, a Prague Spring exponent and dissident in 1970s until he was expelled to Austria...

, Ivan Klíma

Ivan Klíma

Ivan Klíma is a Czech novelist and playwright.- Biography :Klíma's early childhood in Prague was happy and uneventful, but this all changed with the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, after the Munich Agreement...

, and Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera , born 1 April 1929, is a writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke. Kundera has written in...

, as well as non-Party member Václav Havel

Václav Havel

Václav Havel is a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia and the first President of the Czech Republic . He has written over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally...

. Vaculík made an inflammatory speech in which he rejected the leading role of the party as unnecessary and criticized it for its restrictive cultural policies and failure to address social issues. Havel recalled the mixed response of the fellow writers to Vaculík's remarks: on the one hand, they were “delighted that someone had spoken the truth… but [their] delight was tempered by doubts about whether direct confrontation on the political level would lead anywhere, and by fears that it could stimulate a counterattack by the power center.” Novotný and his supporters did indeed try to bring the writers' union under their control after the congress, but failed. Vaculík's and other writers' speeches at the conference, with their anti-Novotný sentiments, increased the gap between the conservative Novotný supporters and more moderate members of the party leadership, a division that would contribute to Novotný's eventual fall.

The Prague Spring and the "Two Thousand Words"

Vaculík was among the most progressive members of the Communist Party and thereby more radical than Alexander Dubček

Alexander Dubcek

Alexander Dubček , also known as Dikita, was a Slovak politician and briefly leader of Czechoslovakia , famous for his attempt to reform the communist regime during the Prague Spring...

, who had become Party leader in January 1968. Hence, Vaculík and others generally felt that the reforms of the April Action Programme

Action Programme (1968)

The Action Programme is a political plan, devised by Alexander Dubček and his associates in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia , that was published on April 5, 1968. The program suggested that the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic find its own path towards mature socialism rather than follow the...

were the minimum necessary and that they should be quickly and firmly enforced. In hopes of influencing voters in upcoming party congress elections, Vaculík released the manifesto "Two Thousand Words to Workers, Farmers, Scientists, Artists, and Everyone" in several major Prague

Prague

Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...

newspapers, complete with signatures of other public figures. The date was 27 June 1968, the day after preliminary censorship was abolished by the national assembly.

In the "Two Thousand Words," Vaculík asked that the public “demand the resignation of people who have misused their power” by criticism, demonstrations

Demonstration (people)

A demonstration or street protest is action by a mass group or collection of groups of people in favor of a political or other cause; it normally consists of walking in a mass march formation and either beginning with or meeting at a designated endpoint, or rally, to hear speakers.Actions such as...

, and strikes

Strike action

Strike action, also called labour strike, on strike, greve , or simply strike, is a work stoppage caused by the mass refusal of employees to work. A strike usually takes place in response to employee grievances. Strikes became important during the industrial revolution, when mass labour became...

. He also expressed concern over the "recent apprehension" regarding the reforms due to "the possibility that foreign forces"-those of the Warsaw Treaty Organization-"may intervene in Czechoslovakia's internal development." If this were to happen, Vaculík argued:

…the only thing we can do is to hold our own and not indulge in any provocation. We can assure our government-with weapons if need be-as long as it does what we give it a mandate to do.

In case of invasion, Vaculík felt that the people of Czechoslovakia should defend themselves and their government (so long as it remained acceptably reformist) with force.

Impact of the "Two Thousand Words"

Despite the overall moderate tone and Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, the "Two Thousand Words" called for action on the part of the public in case of military intervention and therefore denied the leading role of the party, as Vaculík's 1967 speech had. It was popular throughout Czechoslovakia with both intellectuals and workers, and its popularity only increased after the party officially condemned it. It also significantly increased the concerns of the Soviet Union. Following the “Two Thousand Words,” Leonid Brezhnev

Leonid Brezhnev

Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev – 10 November 1982) was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , presiding over the country from 1964 until his death in 1982. His eighteen-year term as General Secretary was second only to that of Joseph Stalin in...

's party leadership, seeing a situation similar to that in 1956 Hungary developing, used the term "counterrevolution" to describe the Prague Spring

Prague Spring

The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War II...

for the first time. If a counterrevolution was taking place (and the Soviet Union was increasingly disposed to categorising the events in Czechoslovakia as such, as other radicals continued to act and Dubček failed to gain their confidence), socialism

Socialism

Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...

as the Soviet Union saw it was threatened and invasion by Warsaw Treaty Organisation troops, as occurred 20–21 August 1968, was deemed justified. This policy of the acceptability of using force wherever socialism was thought to be threatened would become known as the Brezhnev doctrine

Brezhnev Doctrine

The Brezhnev Doctrine was a Soviet Union foreign policy, first and most clearly outlined by S. Kovalev in a September 26, 1968 Pravda article, entitled “Sovereignty and the International Obligations of Socialist Countries.” Leonid Brezhnev reiterated it in a speech at the Fifth Congress of the...

, and Vaculík's "Two Thousand Words" was an integral step toward this early application of it.

Vaculík as a Dissident

After Gustáv Husák

Gustáv Husák

Gustáv Husák was a Slovak politician, president of Czechoslovakia and a long-term Communist leader of Czechoslovakia and of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia...

came to power in 1969 and censorship increased, Vaculík (now no longer a party member) was part of the circle of dissident

Dissident

A dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....

writers in Czechoslovakia. In 1973, he started Edice Petlice (Edition Padlock), a samizdat series that he ran until 1979. Others followed with their own series, despite harassment from the party's secret police. Some samizdat authors, including Vaculík, were also published in the west.

The core of the samizdat authors eventually developed and signed the foundation document of Charter 77

Charter 77

Charter 77 was an informal civic initiative in communist Czechoslovakia from 1976 to 1992, named after the document Charter 77 from January 1977. Founding members and architects were Václav Havel, Jan Patočka, Zdeněk Mlynář, Jiří Hájek, and Pavel Kohout. Spreading the text of the document was...

; Vaculík attended the second of the planning meetings in December 1976. On 6 January 1977, Vaculík, along with Havel and Pavel Landovský

Pavel Landovský

Pavel Landovský is a Czech actor, playwright and director.Landovský studied at the Faculty of Theatre in Prague and then played in regional theaters in Teplice, Šumperk, Klatovy and Pardubice. He wrote his first play Hodinový hoteliér premiered at the Činoherní theater on 11 May 1969.In 1971 he...

, an actor, attempted to take a copy of the charter to the post office to mail to the Czechoslovak government. Their car was pulled over by the Party secret police, and all three were taken in for interrogation. Other signatories were subsequently subjected to interrogations and searches of their homes, as well.

In late 1978, however, Vaculík published the article "Remarks on Courage," a piece that helped set the tone for criticism of charterists. Of the original signatories, most were from the intelligentsia in Prague and Brno

Brno

Brno by population and area is the second largest city in the Czech Republic, the largest Moravian city, and the historical capital city of the Margraviate of Moravia. Brno is the administrative centre of the South Moravian Region where it forms a separate district Brno-City District...

, and Vaculík and others warned against them becoming so isolated that average citizens could no longer relate to Charter 77. His criticism worked against a mythologisation of the Charter and ensured a continued discussion of its position and role.

After communism

Vaculík continues to write; the official ban on his works was lifted in late 1989. He has a weekly column in Lidové Noviny
Lidové noviny
Lidové noviny is a daily newspaper published in the Czech Republic. It is the oldest Czech daily. Its profile is nowadays a national news daily covering political, economic, cultural and scientific affairs, mostly with a centre-right, conservative view...

that features feuilleton

Feuilleton

Feuilleton was originally a kind of supplement attached to the political portion of French newspapers, consisting chiefly of non-political news and gossip, literature and art criticism, a chronicle of the latest fashions, and epigrams, charades and other literary trifles...

s addressing various Czech political and cultural issues, just as much of his underground work during Communism had.

Selected works

The Axe (1966)
The Guinea Pigs (1970)
Český snář (The Czech Dreambook) (1980)
A Cup of Coffee With My Interrogator: The Prague Chronicles of Ludvík Vaculík (1987)

External links

Website about Vaculík and his work
Two Thousand Words
How to Make a Boy - an example
Our Succes Story columne, , October 2008

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