Havel Recalls a Wave From an Old Foe

MOSCOW —  Seated next to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev amid the splendor and formality of an official Kremlin dinner, Czechoslovakia’s puckish new president Vaclav Havel could not help recalling Monday that they had encountered one another nearly three years ago under very different circumstances--when Gorbachev was visiting the Communist regime in Prague and Havel was a dissident playwright.

“One evening when I was walking along the embankment (of the Charles River) where we live in Prague, I saw a crowd of people walking past the National Theater, and I went over to see what was happening,” Havel recounted at a press conference later.

“President Gorbachev had just attended a performance of the ‘Bartered Bride’ or something else, and I saw him leaving the theater. I stood a few steps away from him, and all of a sudden I found myself waving my hand at him. And, you know, at that time, I was a dissident.”

Not aware that Havel was, as the Soviet press described him as recently as six months ago, an enemy of socialism and a troublemaker, Gorbachev waved back just as spontaneously. The encounter so amused Havel that he wrote an essay on “meeting” Gorbachev.

Gorbachev laughed at his story, Havel said, then recalled the 1987 trip in a more serious vein.

“At that time, he did not feel good in Prague,” Havel quoted Gorbachev as telling him. “He felt the atmosphere was suffocating. He felt the tension manifested to him and the hopes that were pinned on him. And he was aware that this signaled a deep dissatisfaction of society with the regime then in the country.

“I answered that, at that time, I was not too happy with the thrill (that) people showed toward him. I believed this was in the Czech tradition of expecting a savior to come from outside to protect us. I told him that, first of all, we must save ourselves through our own efforts, and he fully agreed.”

That trip--bolstered by the advice of one of Gorbachev’s most trusted aides, Ivan T. Frolov, who had lived in Prague for a number of years--contributed significantly to the Kremlin’s decision last autumn to withdraw its support publicly from the Czechoslovak Communist Party leadership under former President Gustav Husak, knowing that could bring its collapse.

Gorbachev, speaking with reporters Monday after agreements were signed laying the basis for a “new relationship” between Moscow and Prague, described Havel as “a man open to dialogue about all problems, a realist with a sense of the future.”