1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  Over the weekend, when protesters were just beginning to settle into Lincoln Park and the Chicago police hadn’t yet taken their first good swing, the fate of Prague East, as they called it in Chicago, had already been decided by Brezhnev and Kosygin in Moscow. The Soviets believed that once the Czechoslovakian presidium, already in session, saw the tanks coming, they would oust Dubek and his team. According to some scenarios, Dubek and other key figures would quickly be put on trial and executed. The official East German newspaper, Neues Deutschland, believing the Soviet plan would work, ran a story the night of the invasion about the uprising and the new revolutionary government that had asked for Soviet military support.

  But no new government had been formed, and no one had asked for Soviet intervention. The presidium session, as predicted, went late into the evening. A working supper was served. Two of the members frustrated the others by presenting a proposed text that went back on the progress they had made. But it received little support. At 11:30, without any shift in power, the premier, Old=ich ›erník, called the defense minister and returned to announce, “The armies of the five countries have crossed the Republic’s borders and are occupying us.”

  Dubek, as though alone with his family, said softly, “It is a tragedy. I did not expect this to happen. I had no suspicion, not even the slightest hint that such a step could be taken against us.” Tears began to slide down his cheeks. “I have devoted my entire life to cooperation with the Soviet Union and they have done this to me. It is my personal tragedy.” In another account he was heard to say, “So they did it after all—and to me!” It was as though at that moment, for the first time in his life, he had let go of his father’s dream of the Soviet Union as the future’s great promise. The initial response of many officials, including Dubek, was to resign, but quickly Dubek and the others realized that they could make it far more difficult for the Soviets by refusing to resign and insisting that they were the sole legitimate government. After that, it took only a day for leaders in Moscow to start understanding the terrible mistake the Soviet Union had made.

  Lenin weeps in a poster taped to a window in Prague after the invasion

  (Photo by Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos)

  Three days earlier, on August 17, Dubek had had a secret meeting with Hungary’s Kádár. The Dubek generation in Prague had little regard for Ulbricht and Gomułka. Zdenk Mlyná, one of the Party Central Committee secretaries, called them “hostile, vain, and senile old men.” Bulgaria’s Todor Zhivkov was closer to Dubek in age but was considered dull and possibly stupid. János Kádár, on the other hand, was regarded as an intelligent and like-minded communist who wanted reform to succeed in Czechoslovakia for the same reason Gomułka opposed it: He thought it might spread to his own country. But he had come to realize that he was out of step with the rest of the Hungarian leadership and that he risked bringing Hungary out of step with Moscow. Hungary, having experienced invasion twelve years earlier, was not going to become a rebel state again. Kádár probably knew the decision to invade had already been made or was about to be when he met with Dubek to warn him and convince him to back away from his positions. He even cautioned Dubek that the Soviets were not the men he imagined them to be and that he did not understand with whom he was dealing. It was probably too late, but in any event, Dubek did not understand Kádár’s subtle but desperate warning.

  In the beginning of July, after the Cierna meeting had appeared to resolve the crisis, the Soviet Union had genuinely decided against invasion and it is still not completely clear what changed its mind. In 1989 Vasil Bilak, who had been one of the pro-Soviet officials in the Czechoslovakian government, revealed in his memoirs that on August 3, two days after the Cierna meeting, he and eighteen other pro-Soviet Czechoslovakian officials had given a letter to Brezhnev. The nineteen secretly renounced Dubek and asked for Soviet military assistance for a coup d’état. They wanted a decision before August 19, because on August 20 the presidium was going to meet for the last time before the Slovak Party Congress on August 23, which the pro-Soviet conspirators insisted would be “counterrevolutionary.”

  So the Soviets after all, as they had claimed, had been asked to invade by pro-Soviet elements who wanted to take over the government and then welcome the troops. But this faction was small, and the conspirators did not have enough support to act on their plan. When the troops arrived, the pro-Soviet plotters had failed to take control of anything, including the television station they had conspired to seize.

  Also contributing to the Soviet decision to invade, possibly, were extravagant KGB reports about counterrevolutionary plots in Czechoslovakia. Soviet sources in Washington reported that contrary to what some in Moscow believed, the CIA was not involved in events in Prague and, in fact, had been caught completely by surprise by the Prague Spring. But these reports were destroyed by KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who reportedly said, “We cannot show such things to our leadership.”

  At 11:00 P.M. central European time, August 20, the summer night air was suddenly filled with sound, the earth rumbled, and the invasion code-named Operation Danube had begun. This was not a film shoot. That night 4,600 tanks and 165,000 soldiers of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia across twenty crossing points, rolling west from East Germany, south from Poland, west from the Soviet Union, and north from Hungary into the undefended nation of Czechoslovakia. Five countries participated in the invasion, including token forces from Hungary and Bulgaria. East Germany and Poland sent a division each; the Soviets sent thirteen divisions. In seven hours 250 aircraft delivered an entire airborne division, including small armored vehicles, fuel, and supplies. The operation was the largest airlift ever carried out by the Soviet military outside of its borders. Militarily it was magnificent, except that no army was fighting back.

  Dubek and the other leaders waited in the Central Committee building. Dubek kept staring at the telephone, half expecting the call that would explain it had all been a misunderstanding. At 4:00 A.M., a black limousine led a tank column toward the Central Committee building. Faced with an angry crowd, the Soviet column opened fire with machine guns and one young man was shot to death while Dubek and the other leaders, angry but helpless, watched from their window.

  Though Czechoslovakia was thought to have the best-trained and best-equipped fighting force in the Warsaw Pact, it was under orders from Dubek not to resist. Dubek and his government had quickly discussed and rejected the possibility of armed resistance. The Czechoslovakian army, like all the Warsaw Pact armies, had no independent chain of command and would function poorly without Soviet leadership. They all agreed without argument that armed resistance was impossible and would not only cost too many lives but would aid the Soviet claim that it was putting down a counterrevolution, as it did in Hungary in 1956. Better to have the world see peaceful Czechoslovakia crushed by a brutish foreign military. As far as is known, not a single border guard fired a shot or in any way tried to impede the armored columns. Nor was there an effort to stop troops and equipment arriving at Czechoslovakian airports. But by the end of the first day, twenty-three Czechoslovaks were dead.

  Paratroopers surrounded the Central Committee building, and all the phones inside went dead. It was not until 9:00 in the morning that paratroopers burst into Dubek’s office. They blocked the windows and doors, and when Dubek reached to pick up a phone, forgetting that they no longer functioned, one of the soldiers menaced him with an automatic weapon as he tore the phone out of the wall. Half a dozen high officials were with Dubek watching this when a very short KGB colonel festooned with decorations burst into the office, accompanied by several other KGB officers and an interpreter. After listing the members of government present, he announced that they were all being taken “under his protection.” They were then all seated at a long table, and behind each of them was a soldier pointing a weapon. Then Dubek was taken away. As he passed his office manager, he whispered for him to secure his briefcase, which contained papers he hoped to keep from the Soviets. A
week later, when he got back to Prague and found his briefcase empty, Dubek finally understood that his office manager had been a Soviet agent.

  The Warsaw Pact soldiers had orders not to respond to provocations and to fire their weapons only if fired upon. But the invading soldiers did not always have the prerequisite discipline for the sensitive work of invading an ally. For the most part, these heavily armed troops were facing unarmed teenagers. At first, young people tried to block the oncoming tank columns by sitting in front of them—a sit-in. Like good ’68 students, they threw up barricades of cars, buses, and anything else they could scrape together. But they quickly discovered that the Soviet tanks would not stop—not for them or anything else put in their path. These tanks could run over people, cars, walls. Occasionally a tank was stopped. A legless World War II veteran stopped a tank in Prague by daring it to run over him. On Wednesday morning, the same day that many hours later the Chicago police would be filmed in a violent rampage, angry young people had filled the streets of Prague, ready to resist, though not exactly sure how. Reasoning that the Radio Center, home of Radio Prague, was a critical target, many had gone there to defend it. They got there ahead of the tanks and blocked off the street with their bodies. The tanks stopped, uncertain what to do, and watched the young Czechs build a roadblock with cars and overturned buses. Radio Prague was covering the confrontation on the air. Through loudspeakers they were giving the young resisters the same instructions the invaders had received: Don’t use weapons, don’t be provoked.

  The Czechs started speaking Russian to the tank crews, asking them why they were there, why they didn’t leave. The young tank crews became flustered and, against their orders, opened fire over the heads of the crowd and then directly at the Czechs. Rather than flee, the Czechs produced Molotov cocktails and threw them at the tanks while the people around them were falling dead or wounded. Some of the tanks caught fire, producing black smoke, and a few of the tank crews were wounded. Some may even have been killed. But a huge T-55 tank moved into firing position, and Radio Prague broadcast the message, “Sad brothers, when you hear the national anthem you will know that it is over.” Then the first bars of the national anthem were heard as the tank opened fire and Radio Prague went silent.

  In Bratislava young girls in miniskirts hiked them up, and while the Russian farm boys on the Soviet tank crews stopped to admire their young thighs, boys ran up and smashed their headlights with rocks and even managed to set some oil drums on fire. A tank column from Hungary noisily rumbled and creaked across the Danube bridge in Bratislava while university students threw bricks and shouted obscenities at them. A Soviet soldier dropped to firing position on the back of a tank and shot into the crowd, killing a fifteen-year-old nursing student. This further enraged the students, but the Soviets responded with more gunfire, killing another four students while their shower of stones and bricks clanked dully off the Soviet armor. Throughout the country, students threw Molotov cocktails. If they didn’t know how to make them, they threw burning rags. Sometimes a tank would catch fire. Young men wrapped themselves in Czech flags and charged at the tanks armed only with cans to stuff in gun barrels.

  August 21, 1968, outside the radio station in Prague

  (Photo by Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos)

  Soon the tanks controlled the country, but defiant graffiti such as “Ivan Go Home!” still appeared on the walls. Direction signs throughout the country were twisted north and replaced with “Moscow—2,000 km.” The walls were covered with posters denouncing the invasion and graffiti with messages such as “Socialism, Yes; Occupation, No,” “The Russian National State Circus has arrived, complete with performing gorillas,” “This is not Vietnam!,” “Lenin awake! Brezhnev has gone mad!”—or simply huge letters spelling out Dubek’s and Svoboda’s names or the initials USSR with the two Ss in lightning bolts like the Nazi SS insignia.

  The angry people of Czechoslovakia would walk up to the invaders on their tanks and try to persuade them that they were wrong and should leave, a dialogue as futile as the one demonstrators in Chicago were attempting by shouting at young National Guardsmen, “Join us!” The Czechs, at last using the book-primer Russian they had been required to learn in school, would ask the men on the tanks why they were in this country where they didn’t belong. The men of the Soviet tank crews, typically uneducated eighteen-year-old peasants, would look at them hopelessly and explain that they had received orders to come. Tanks surrounded by such citizen interrogators were a common sight. Nor were foreigners an unusual sight in Prague, which until that summer night had been “the place to be.” Within days they all left without incident, including five thousand American tourists.

  Before Czechoslovakian Television was put off the air, it managed to smuggle film of the invasion out of the country. One particularly striking scene showed youths sitting, refusing to move, in front of a Soviet tank whose gun turret seemed to be swiveling furiously. A BBC executive had arranged for the European Broadcast Union, a network of Western European stations, to have its Vienna station, just across the Danube from Bratislava, record everything it could pick up from across the river. Ironically, Czechoslovakia was set up for this because it was the communist bloc’s broadcast center for sending transmissions to the West. In the past it had been used primarily for transmitting sports events. The Czechoslovakians managed to get out about forty-five minutes of film showing resistance, along with a plea to UN secretary-general U Thant. In just a few minutes of pictures, the film completely refuted all Soviet claims about being welcomed in Czechoslovakia. Parts of the film were broadcast on the evening news in the United States, in Western Europe, and around the world.

  This in turn led to an American experiment. The evening television news now had half an hour to air several minutes of commercials plus coverage of the Chicago convention in the hall and on the street, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the UN debate on the invasion, the worst week in Vietnam, and a few other stories. Ever since the autumn of 1963, when the networks successfully expanded from fifteen minutes to a half-hour news program, which gave them more space for civil rights footage, Walter Cronkite had been pushing CBS to go to one hour. The argument against it was the same one that had been used against the half-hour format: The affiliates would not want to buy it. After the Czech invasion story broke on August 21 in mid-convention/riot, New York Times television critic Jack Gould wrote congratulating public television on its flexibility, which allowed it to expand its news time for the day’s extraordinary glut of breaking stories. He contrasted this with the networks, locked in their half-hour format and unable to air sufficient coverage. Finally Walter Cronkite got his wish, and on the evening of August 22 CBS expanded his show to an hour. Gould hailed the “experiment” and particularly complimented the time given to film footage smuggled out of Czechoslovakia. But the television industry argued that most people were unwilling to sit through an entire hour of news and, more important, the affiliates—using the same argument that had blocked the expansion to a half hour for a number of years—did not want to lose a half hour of valuable programming in which their own highly profitable local ads aired. The experiment was over. Cronkite had won the battle, but he lost the war. In September, however, CBS launched a one-hour news “magazine” program twice monthly—60 Minutes.

  A popular Czech singer, Karel Cernoch, recorded a new song: “I Hope This Is Just a Bad Dream.”

  But for Moscow, too, this was a bad dream. Images had been instantly relayed around the world to every television station, the front page of every newspaper, and the cover of every magazine, and instead of being pictures of the new pro-Soviet government greeting the liberating forces, as had been planned, they were of unarmed young Czechoslovakians waving bloody Czech flags, defiantly running in front of huge Soviet tanks, throwing stones and lighted gas-soaked rags, sometimes just engaging in debate—longhaired, bearded Prague students and thickset, blond, frightened Russian country boys.

  When in the past some had ar
gued in Moscow against invasion, this must have been what their worst fears looked like. Their official story, that they had come to the aid of Czechoslovakia, was demonstrably untrue. Dubek had put out a radio broadcast saying that the country had been invaded without the knowledge of the president, the chairman of the National Assembly, or himself. The Soviets quickly learned that the Czechoslovakian people trusted their government and believed what their leaders said, especially Dubek, ›erník, and Smrkovsky. It was useless for the Soviets to contradict them. A brief moment of intrigue ensued when a Soviet agent in the government tried to sideline the broadcast, but he was caught. That Soviet plan A had failed and the presidium had not overthrown Dubek surprised no one, but that pro-Soviet elements were not able to take control even after the troops arrived was more of a surprise. That an unarmed population was not complying with the heavily armed might of five nations was infuriating. That it was being recorded and had already been broadcast and printed around the world was an unimagined calamity.

  The Soviets had one card left to play: Ludvik Svoboda, the septuagenarian military officer who had, to the disappointment of the youth, been placed in the presidency. Party secretary Zdenek Mlynár said of Svoboda, “Not only was he not a part of the political reform, he was not a politician at all. He was a soldier. Already an officer in the army of the first Czechoslovakian Republic between the two world wars, by a quirk of fate, he became commander in chief of the Czechoslovakian forces that fought in World War II in the USSR alongside the Soviet army. It was clear that from this moment during the war, he embraced the notion that Czechoslovakia should unconditionally support the Soviet Union.”