Confessions, Russian Style

While reading Milan Kundera’s wonderful novel, the “Unbearable Lightness of Being”, I found a few passages that are strikingly reminiscent of the “confession show” currently going on in Iran.

This part of the novel is set in the late 1960’s Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring, when Alexander Dubcek started introducing reforms in the communist regime. Being unhappy with these reforms, Russia invaded Czechoslovakia and arrested Dubcek and took him to Moscow. A few days later Dubcek was brought back to Czechoslovakia and was given a time on the radio to read his statements in which he “confessed” he was wrong in pursuing reforms in the communist regime.

“He returned, humiliated, to address his humiliated nation. He was so humiliated he could not even speak. Tereza would never forget those awful pauses in the middle of his sentences. Was he that exhausted? Ill? Had they drugged him? Or was it only despair? If nothing was to remain of Dubcek, then at least those awful long pauses when he seemed unable to breathe, when he gasped for air before a whole nation glued to its radios, at least those pauses would remain. Those pauses contained all the horror that had befallen their country.”

Then it explains the disappointment of the people of Czechoslovakia:

“It was the seventh day of the invasion. She heard the speech in the editorial offices of a newspaper that had been transformed overnight into an organ of the resistance. Everyone present hated Dubcek at that moment. They reproached him for compromising; they felt humiliated by his humiliation; his weakness offended them.”

But those who reproached Dubcek at the time, felt differently a few years later when they were older and more experienced:

“Thinking in Zurich of those days, she [Tereza] no longer felt any aversion to the man. The word weak no longer sounded like a verdict. Any man confronted with superior strength is weak, even if he has an athletic body like Dubcek’s. The very weakness that at the time had seemed unbearable and repulsive, the weakness that had driven Tereza and Tomas from the country, suddenly attracted her. She realized that she belonged among the weak, in the camp of the weak, in the country of the weak, and she had to be faithful to them precisely because they were weak and gasped for breath in the middle of sentences.

…. She felt attracted by it because she felt weak herself…. Tomas … took her hands in his and tried to calm them by pressing hard. She tore them away from him.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“What do you want me to do for you?”

“I want you to be old. Ten years older. Twenty years older!”

What she meant was: I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.”