Marta Haiduchok (Central European University, Vienna)
On 16 January 1969, a young student of the philosophy faculty of Charles University in Prague, Jan Palach, stood at the base of the National Museum, poured gasoline over his body, and struck a match. After sustaining burns to 85% of his body, Palach died at a hospital three days later. Even though Palach’s death is frequently linked to the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia months before, the letter in his pocket was addressed to Czechoslovak society, calling on authorities to end the censorship and people to awaken their consciousness and rise up. This paradox of self-inflicted violence in service of nonviolent ideals illuminates the fraught landscape of political contestation under late socialism. The act of self-immolation, which was rare but not unheard of in the Eastern Bloc, presents a case of self-inflicted violence that performs a visual embodiment of violence conducted by an “other,” i.e., the state. It also presents a biased dichotomy between violent and nonviolent acts, between directly political and simultaneously very personal action, between weaponizing the body and escaping the system by death entirely. By examining the self-immolations of Jan Palach (Czechoslovakia, 1969), Vasyl Makukh (Soviet Ukraine, 1968), Ryszard Siwiec (Poland, 1968), and Romas Kalanta (Lithuania, 1972), I argue these acts reveal the limits of civic resistance amid the context of the societal defeat after the Prague Spring and the failed attempt to revise socialism. I also aim to show the alternative form of the citizens’ solidarity – the one, that involves sacrifice and violence.