Miroslav Kusy laudation
Let me start this laudation by taking you back to a very different time and place: Czechoslovakia,
as it then was, in the middle of the 1970s. This period was, in the history of both communism and anticommunism, a very dark moment. Stalin was dead, but Khrushchev’s attempt to reform Stalinism had
collapsed as well. The Prague Spring was over, crushed with the fraternal assistance of Soviet tanks. The
leaders and followers of that peaceful movement to reform communism from within – to obtain a sliver
of independence from the Soviet Union, and a modicum of democracy – were in prison, under house
arrest, or abroad. Many worked as menial laborers, stoking boilers or sitting on factory assembly lines.
Miroslav Kusy was one of these outcasts. He had been an advocate of radical reforms within the
communist party in 1968. But after the 1968 invasion, he lost his job, his role in public life. He was
arrested and imprisoned. He became a librarian, then a physical laborer. He was excluded from the
national conversation. Worse, he had no reason, in the middle of the 1970s, to suppose that anything
about his country would ever change. In the West, most political scientists and theorists of
totalitarianism at that time believed that Soviet communism would last forever. In the Soviet Union, the
Politburo also believed its power was guaranteed forever. Over the course of that decade and the next,
its members rewarded themselves with privileges, apartements and medals. Eventually, Leonid
Brezhnev awarded himself more medals than had been awarded to Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev put
together.
Yet even at this incredibly dark moment, when the Prague Spring seemed to have given way to
eternal winter, when the Solidarity movement had not yet arisen in Poland and the communist regimes
of Eastern Europe were living well off borrowed foreign money, a few people still believed change was
possible. Kusy was one of them. In the dark winter of 1976, he and a group of like-minded men and
women, composed and signed a document which eventually came to be called Charter 77. Along with
242 other people, Kusy called on the Czechoslovak communist regime simply to abide by the
international treaties on human rights which it had signed, and to respect the international norms which
it professed to uphold.
The regime’s reaction was harsh: the press described the document as an “anti-state, antisocialist, demagogic abusive piece of writing.” The signatories were called “traitors”” and “agents of
imperialism.” A further wave of repression, arrests and job dismissals followed.
What persuaded the original signers to act? In order to understand, it helps to know something
about the nature of totalitarianism itself. As so many people in this room know, that system did have a
fatal flaw: by trying to control every aspect of society, the Soviet bloc regimes eventually turned every
aspect of society into a potential source of dissent. The state had dictated high daily quotas for the
workers – and so an East German workers’ strike against bad working conditions in 1953 mushroomed
quickly into a protest against the state. The state had dictated what singers could sing or writers could
write – and so when, as in Czechoslovakia in 1976, a pop band sang differently – its member
automatically became political dissidents. The state had dictated that no one could form independent
organizations – and so anybody who founded one, however anodyne, became an opponent of the
regime. And when large numbers of people joined an independent organization – when some 10 million
Poles joined the Solidarity trade union in 1981, for example – the regime’s very existence was suddenly
at stake.
Over time, some political opponents of the communist regimes came to understand these
inherent weaknesses of Soviet-style totalitarianism. Nowhere was this more true than in Czechoslovakia.
In his brilliant 1978 essay, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, the Czech dissident and later president Vaclav
Havel called upon his countrymen to take advantage of their rulers’ obsession with total control. If the
state wanted to monopolize every sphere of human activity, he wrote, then every thinking citizen should
work to preserve the ‘independent life of society’, which he defined as including ‘everything from selfeducation and thinking about the world, through free creative activity and its communication to others,
to the most varied, free, civic attitudes, including instances of independent social self-organization’. He
also urged them to discard false and meaningless jargon and to ‘live in truth’ – to speak and act, in other
words, as if the regime did not exist.
In due course, some version of this ‘independent life of society’ – ‘civil society’ – began to
flourish in many unusual ways. Hungarians joined academic discussion clubs, the East Germans created
an ‘unofficial’ peace movement. The Czechs created jazz bands. Everywhere, people played rock music,
organized poetry readings, set up clandestine businesses, held underground philosophy seminars, sold
black market meat, told jokes and went to church.
In a different kind of society, these activities would have been considered apolitical, and even in
Eastern Europe they did not necessarily constitute ‘opposition’ as such. But they gave people what they
felt were spheres of freedom, they allowed them to control some aspects of their own lives. And they
gave them back the dignity which the totalitarian regimes had taken away.
Miroslav Kusy was a part of that movement, the only Slovak signer of Charter 77. And this is a
part of why we are honoring him today. The civic courage it took to sign a document of that kind, in that
period, was enormous: there was no way to know that communism would, eventually, come to an end,
and that the signatories of Charter 77 would, eventually, be rewarded for that courage. It’s very easy, in
retrospect, to say that communism was an evil system. It was much more difficult, at the time, when so
much of daily life – where you lived, where you worked, where your children studied – depended on
communist officials.
But we are rewarding Kusy today for more than just that. For even after the system did crumble,
even after Havel became president and the previously obscure dissidents were lifted at least for a time
into positions of power, Kusy continued to display the same kind of civic courage. He did not rest on his
laurels or retire and make speeches. He has continued, in Havel’s words, to “live in truth”: to think and
act as an independent person, not swayed by the moods of the mob or by the fashions of the political
moment. And he has continued to champion unpopular causes which have often seemed impossible.
As you will hear more in a moment, more eloquently expressed in your own language, one of
those impossible causes has long been the fate of Hungarians who, thanks to the many border changes
of the 20th century, found themselves, in the 1990s, living in Slovakia. As he himself has written, the
Slovakia which came into existence after the breakup of Czechoslovakia in 1992 was not accustomed to
thinking of itself as a majority nation. Slovaks had been a minority in Austro-Hungary, and they had been
a minority in Czechoslovakia. They were not used to thinking of the Hungarians still living within their
borders as a special culture, in need of protection and care. They were not accustomed to thinking of
themselves as the rulers of a multicultural territory at all.
Miroslav Kusy was one of the first Slovaks to advocate this new way of thinking. Indeed, he
began to advocate it back in the 1980s, before Slovak independence was even imagined. As he wrote in
one of his essays, “we should not think of minorities as a source of complexity and tension, but rather as
a factory which contributes to the diversity and the enrichment of the society.” The Hungarians within
Slovakia make an important contribution to Slovak political and cultural life, he has said: they help
insure that the Slovak state remains decentralized; that regional and local governments play a role in
politics; that the central government does not dominate political life. And the same, of course, is true of
the Slovaks in Hungary.
During the past twenty years, there have been moments when these ideas seemed ridiculously
idealistic. Even today they sometimes still do. Tensions between Hungary and Slovakia rise and fall like
waves, depending on the mood of the moment. And just as the human rights rhetoric of the Charter 77
movement sometimes seemed naïve, so do Kusy’s ideas now. The notionthat national minorities are a
source of strength, not of tension; that they can help the development of democracy and not harm it –
can that really be right?
In recent decades, Kusy was not imprisoned or fired for having unpopular ideas, but he was
heavily criticized, and sometimes he seems far out of the mainstream. Someone with his moral authority
did not need, in his lifetime, to launch yet another controversial intellectual campaign. Someone with his
background and his accomplishments does not need to be the champion for a difficult cause.
Today we honor Miroslav Kusy’s commitment to civic freedom, to the independent life of the
mind. We honor his desire to “live in truth.” To argue an unpopular case; to work for it through
international organizations, a national press, through universities and through writings; and to win the
argument, eventually, as society comes around to that view - this is not easy. Yet in his lifetime, Miroslav
Kusy has done this not once, but twice. For that, he very much deserves this wonderful prize.