Robert Redford is Slovak, you know, and so is Paul Newman,” two sisters explain to me, shouting above the din of honking horns and chanting this brilliant afternoon on Bratislava’s main square. We are surrounded by 30,000 people protesting the ouster of the popular Slovak Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar, who was suddenly replaced by the Christian Democrat Jan Charna-gursky two days before. Placard-size petitions are passed around, and lamp posts disappear under layers of posters as one union after another joins the general strike. The crowd suddenly parts, giving way to two dozen taxis, their horns blaring, draped with the red, white, and blue Slovak flag. Everyone tells me Meciar’s fall was plotted in Prague.
Only eighteen months ago this was the site of protests that brought down forty years of communism. Today the shouts of “Dissolve the Parliament! Dissolve the Parliament!” are again accompanied by a mass shaking of keys to “ring out” the government. But the enemy is no longer the Communists; now it is the Czechs.
Slovakia is the only part of Czechoslovakia where you find people who don’t love their playwright-president. When Havel visited Bratislava recently his car was pelted with eggs. A recent opinion poll shows he has the trust of 82 percent of Czechs but only 47 percent of Slovaks. Eager to avoid the interethnic violence we’re seeing in Yugoslavia, Havel tried to appease the Slovaks by announcing that there would be a referendum on their independence, the results of which would be binding. Since then, however, the main parts of the Czech government (the federation has three legislatures, one for the Czechs, one for the Slovaks, and one national-essentially three governments) have dragged their feet, some wanting to wait until new constitutions are written, some not wanting to cede so much authority to the people at all. Few observers now think the vote will take place. And the Slovaks are accordingly peeved.
The idea of a Slovak state is tainted by the fact that its last taste of independence was from 1939 to 1945, under the fascist priest Father Josef Tiso. In the days before Munich it was Tiso who told President Eduard Benes that the Slovaks would not defend the republic against the Nazis, in exchange for which Slovakia was made a state of the Reich. Hitler personally awarded Tiso the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle for sending Slovakia’s 60,000 Jews to concentration camps, and in 1947 Tiso was hanged for war crimes. But he is not forgotten. In the middle of the Bratislava protest a tape recording of Tiso reciting the declaration of independence is played. This past April 150 people made a fifteen-kilometer pilgrimage from Bratislava to Marianka, where Tiso was hanged, and a mass was said “for all the martyrs of the Slovak nation.”
To be fair, most people here have nothing but contempt for Tiso. But in the upside-down world of politics under the Husak regime, anyone who resisted or was persecuted by the Communists was “good.” Since the Communist campaign against “clerical-fascism” in Slovakia was especially brutal, anything to do with the clergy-even the Christian Democratic Party, which is actually Christian-has an honored place.
The country, pieced together out of the rubble of World War I, has never really developed a Czechoslovak national identity, and the Czech/Slovak split now cuts through every issue from domestic reform to foreign policy. Last March there was the “Hyphen War” over what to call the country after “socialist” was removed from its name. After much wrangling they agreed on the ungraceful “Czech and Slovak Federal Republic.” Then there was the so-called “competencies war” in which Slovakia tried to claim as many government functions as possible for itself-even to the point of creating a “Ministry of Foreign Relations.”
Last October Slovak nationalism reached an ugly crescendo around a law making Slovak the official language. The law was amended (by a coalition of Jews and Hungarians, I am told over and over again) so that any ethnic group that constitutes 20 percent of a town’s population can use its language in eastern and southern Slovakia (who have lived there for more than 100 years), and the compromise amendment infuriated Slovak nationalists. For much of the last 1,000 years Slovakia was under Hungarian rule, a history that teeds the resentment against Hungarians today. Slovaks, when pressed, describe Hungarians as pushy and commercially minded (sound familiar?) and resent their unwillingness to assimilate. “They make demands, demands, demands, and don’t appreciate what they have,” complains Ivan Puskac, a protessor of foreign languages at Comenius University. *They have closed themselves off to the Slovak reality.
The rise of bigotry is related to the economic crunch being felt more keenly in Slovakia than anywhere else in the country. Worse is to come. For much of the past forty years the Leninist “National policy” favored Slovakia in economic issues, and the result is that it now has petrochemical factories in the middle of cities and mammoth, inefficient steel works and armaments plants near the Soviet border in the east. It is Finance Minister Vaclav Klaus’s job to turn much of this moribund industry around. (There is a popular song in Czechoslovakia at the moment whose refrain is “Mr. Klaus, Mr. Klaus, what have you shut down today?”)
Klaus, a disciple of the free market guru Milton Friedman, wants to break up Slovakia’s huge agricultural collectives and privatize (or liquidate) its factories. Unlike Hungary or Poland, Czechoslovakia nationalized 100 percent of its industry, so privatizing it is that much more difficult. Klaus is now drawing up a list of viable companies to receive new loans and be restructured. The others will go under, the plan being that those who lose their jobs will soon find new ones thanks to the stimulated free market. Officially, unemployment projections in Slovakia are around 10 percent, but some economists-quietly and off the record-believe it will be closer to 30 percent. Unemployment here has already gone from 0.5 percent to 5 percent in three months, twice the level in the Czech lands, and numbers like these are terrifying for people who have never known anything other than guaranteed full employment.
Two groups of Slovak economists are formulating alternatives to Klaus’s plan that they claim are more appropriate for the Slovak situation. When I ask to interview one of them, I am ushered into the offices of Marian Tkac, Slovakia’s vice minister of finance, who, before he hands me his card, crosses out the section that indicates responsibility for control of “prices and wages.” Old card, I guess. “Klaus doesn’t understand that we are a separate entity,” the red-faced bureaucrat explains as we sip the sickly sweet Turkish coffee I am offered, decline, and am served at every meeting. Tkac lists the points of agreement with Klaus (privatization, liberalization, and price decontrol) and outlines the Slovak vision of the future (a sovereign state, like Belgium, controlling economic policy, currency, tariffs, and trade agreements and subsidies for some industries). “Klaus is following the lessons of the capitalists of the last century. He doesn’t seem to understand that if he takes too much blood from the patient he will kill him.”
Short of complete independence (which would be economic suicide, the most ardent Slovak nationalists want a federation of two “sovereign” states. Alzbeta Moravcikova, a translator whose husband is a journalist with the newspaper Pravda, explains that by “sovereign” they mean Slovakia would have the right to leave the federation anytime it wants. “But first the present Czechoslovak republic must be dissolved so the two states can come together as true equals,” she says. Jarislov Weis, editorial editor for Lidovy Novny, likens the Slovak demand to a “couple who before they get married set out all the conditions for divorce.