1968 by Mark Kurlansky Page A

in Slovakia and later on the rehabilitation of victims of the 1950s repressions.” But as a second-rung figure, Dubek could do little to change government, and he said and did very little. He was a Communist Party careerist.
    In the early 1960s, Dubek served on the Kolder Commission, which looked into redressing government abuse in the 1950s. This work made a lasting impression on him. “I was dumbfounded,” he later wrote, “by the revelations of what had been going on in Czechoslovak Party circles in Prague in the early 1950s.” It is still not certain if he really had not known of these abuses before. But he did seem deeply shaken by the revelations of the Kolder Commission, and so did many other officials. Novotny´ came under tremendous pressure to reorganize his government. In 1963, when because of the commission’s findings the Slovak Central Committee was able to remove the first secretary they regarded as a Novotny´ quisling, it was the quiet Alexander Dubek they chose to replace him. This was done over the shouting of Novotny´, who stormed out of the session and never again attended a meeting of the Slovak Central Committee.
    In the mid-sixties, life became more difficult for Novotny´. His friend Khrushchev was replaced in 1964 by his plotting protégé Brezhnev at the same time that the Czechoslovakian economy had taken disastrous turns. The economy had been catastrophic for years, but the Czech lands had started out at a level so far above those of everyone else in the Soviet bloc that it took years before the consequences of mismanagement became devastating. Slovakia, lacking the Czechs’ starting advantage, had been suffering for a long time. But now even the Czechs were experiencing food shortages, and the government had ordered “meatless Thursday.” With the combination of uncertain support in Moscow and unhappy people at home, Novotny´ eased up on the police state. Censorship became less severe, artists, writers, and filmmakers were allowed more freedom, and some travel to the West was allowed.
    It was still a very repressive state. The literary magazine
Tvar
was shut down. There were limits to what could be written, spoken, or done. But Czechoslovakians flourished with the small margin of freedom they had been finally allowed. With the West no longer completely cut off, Czech youth immediately tapped into the vibrant Western youth culture wearing
Texasskis—
blue jeans—and going to clubs to hear the big beat, as rock and roll was called. Prague had more young people with long hair, beards, and sandals than anywhere else in central Europe. Yes, in the heart of Novotny´’s Czechoslovakia, there were the unshorn rebel youth of the sixties—hippies—or were they the rebel youth of the fifties, beatniks? On May 1, 1965, May Day, when the rest of the communist world was celebrating the revolution, the youth of Prague had crowned the longhaired, bearded beatnik, visiting poet Allen Ginsberg,
Kraj Majales,
King of May. “Ommm,” chanted Ginsberg, the Jew turned Buddhist, who even while embracing Eastern religion was to many young Prague residents the embodiment of the exciting new world in the West. For his coronation speech he clanked tiny cymbals while chanting a Buddhist hymn. After a few days of following him through the dark, ornate back streets of the center city, the secret police had him deported. Or, as he wrote it in a poem,
    And I was sent from Prague by plane by detectives in Czechoslovakian business suits
    And I am the King of May, which is the power of sexual youth,
    And I am the King of May, which is industry in eloquence and action in amour,
    And I am the King of May, which is old Human poesy, and 100,000 people chose my name,
    And I am the King of May, and in a few minutes I will land at London Airport. . . .
    But as Stefan Dubek would have readily pointed out, one is not completely free in America, either. When Ginsberg returned to the United States, the FBI placed his name on