The Anarchic Interlude
“SHHHHH!!!” I SLURRED to the Amsterdam-based American jazz pianist who was at that moment bellowing out a profane interpretation of the “Star-Spangled Banner” while swigging from a bottle of cheap Moravian wine at around 3 a.m. on a weeknight in Prague’s Old Town Square. It was August 1990, nine months after Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, and I had just spotted two armed men in red-accented military fatigues veering in our direction with sudden interest. My lubricated 22-year-old brain, facing the prospect of confrontation with the Red Army, lapsed into a panicky pop culture tailspin—War Games, Red Dawn, Amerika…run!
The expat ivory-tickler, seasoned enough to have dodged the Vietnam draft, did not share my apprehension. “WEEEeeeeLLLL,” he offered, in leery adaptation of Steve Martin’s 1970s catchphrase, middle fingers beginning to jab defiantly upward, “FfffffUUUuuuUCCCKKK… YOUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!” I blinked dumbly in shock, too paralyzed to thwart the ensuing (and in retrospect inevitable) soldier-directed Heil Hitlers.
You never know while living through history how things will turn out in the end. Prague felt free (if poor and polluted) that summer, but the same had seemed true in the summer of 1968, until very suddenly and violently it was not. Warsaw Pact troops had brutally extinguished similar liberatory flickers in 1981 Poland and 1956 Hungary. Mikhail Gorbachev had just been elected to a five-year term as president of the Soviet Union, was vowing to give communism “the kiss of life,” and in five months’ time would dispatch tanks to crush protesters in Vilnius, Lithuania.
So I clutched my passport and steeled myself for the gulag. Instead, one of the soldiers smiled, made the universal tilted-head-on-two-hands people are sleeping gesture, and pointed toward the bedroom windows overlooking the magnificent plaza. The piano player threw a friendly arm around the grunt’s shoulder and planted a sloppy kiss on his cheek, then we stumbled off cackling into the night.
BREAKING THE SPELL, EXPLORING THE WRECKAGE
WEIRD AND WONDERFUL things spring up in the untended spaces between an old system collapsing and a new one taking its place. Totalitarian structures don’t just vanish overnight—laws, bureaucrats, cops, and even politicians can remain the same for months and years on end. But the spell of their power is broken, and everyone knows it. When authorities no longer have authority, the resulting atmosphere can be dislocating—and euphoric.
Prague had many claims to being the life of the post-Party party. Czechoslovakia’s fairy-tale revolution, more than the others in what was still called the East bloc, had been spearheaded by high school and college students, who now streamed into the big city to gorge on previously forbidden cultural fruits. Their president, a chain-smoking playwright/dissident who had spent much of the 1980s in jail, delighted in welcoming international icons into the Mitteleuropa mosh pit: Lou Reed, the Rolling Stones, the Dalai Lama, etc. The capital of Bohemia, after an unnatural, four-decade attempt to stifle the same culture that helped produce Antonín Dvořák, Franz
