1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  But when a pro-Soviet group visited the president in Hrad^any Castle, where he was being held under armed Soviet guard, and asked him to sign a document endorsing the Soviet presence, the seventy-two-year-old soldier shouted, “Get out!”

  Nothing seemed to be going according to Soviet plans. Normally an invading army or even coup plotters would have seized radio and television stations as a first order of business. But this had not been part of the Soviet plan because they had expected to be in control of the country by the time they arrived in Prague. When they finally did shut down Radio Prague, underground radio stations in secret locations began broadcasting news of the Soviet repression and the Czechoslovakian resistance. These stations also undercut Soviet propaganda. When the Soviets announced that Slovakia had defected, underground radio stations were broadcasting that it was a lie. They also reported on Soviet movements, whom the Soviets were trying to arrest, whom they had arrested. And as long as the Czechoslovakians were broadcasting, there was a sense that the Soviets did not completely control the country. The underground radio’s slogan was, “We are with you. Be with us.” Jan Zaruba, an official in the Czechoslovakian Ministry of the Interior, killed himself rather than reveal the location of the radio transmitters. Soviet efforts to counter underground radio were disastrous. They started their own radio station but could not find an announcer who spoke fluent Czech and Slovak. They tried dropping leaflets, but the leaflets scattered over the Czech lands turned out to be the ones written in Slovak.

  The static-covered voice of playwright Václav Havel seemingly miraculously was heard on the radio saying, “I happened to be one of the few Czech citizens who can still use a free transmitter in this country. Therefore I presume to address you in the name of the Czech and Slovak writers in an urgent plea for support.” He asked Western writers to speak up condemning the Soviet invasion.

  Yugoslavia’s Tito and Romania’s Ceauπescu openly denounced the invasion, and the streets of Belgrade and Bucharest filled with protesters. Ceau•escu called the invasion “a great mistake.” Poland’s Gomułka, on the other hand, declared Czechoslovakia a counterrevolutionary state, outside the Warsaw bloc, that was plotting to overthrow Poland. And of course it was only a matter of days before the Poles and East Germans discovered that the “Zionists” were behind the counterrevolutionary plotting in Czechoslovakia.

  The Italian and French Communist Parties denounced the Soviet action, as did the Japanese Communist Party. In Tokyo, where the university was immobilized in its third month of occupation, students for the first time ever marched on the Soviet embassy. Fidel Castro approved of the invasion, saying it was painful but necessary. The Cubans, North Vietnamese, and North Koreans were the only Communist Parties not in Eastern Europe to support the invasion. Of the eighty-eight Communist Parties in the world, only ten approved of the invasion. Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse called the invasion “the most tragic event of the post-war era.”

  A few young people in East Germany passed out leaflets of protest. And many hundreds of East German workers refused to sign a petition supporting the invasion. The few Polish dissidents who were not in prison wrote letters protesting the invasion. Jerzy Andrzejewski, a leading Polish novelist, wrote a letter to the Czechoslovakian Writers Union denouncing the Polish part in the invasion and asserting that “Polish colleagues are with you, although deprived of free speech in our country.” He added, “I realize that my voice of political and moral protest does not and cannot counterbalance the discredit with which Poland has been covered in the opinion of progressives of the entire world.” Worse still, there were reports of gunfire exchanged in Czechoslovakia between Russian and Bulgarian units, and between Hungarian and Russian units.

  Even in Russia seven protesters sat in Red Square with a banner that said “Hands Off the CSSR”—the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. The group included Pavel Litvinov, grandson of a deceased Soviet foreign minister, the wife of Yuli Daniel, an imprisoned poet, and Natalya Gorbanevskaya, a well-known poet. They were arrested briefly, and according to a letter Gorbanevskaya wrote to foreign correspondents, some were beaten, but “my comrades and I were happy that we were able, even briefly, to break the sludge of unbridled lies and cowardly silence and thereby demonstrate that not all the citizens of our country are in agreement with the violence carried out in the name of the Soviet people.” The day after the invasion, poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko sent a telegram to Premier Kosygin and Party chief Brezhnev and distributed it to the Western press:

  I don’t know how to sleep. I don’t know how to continue living. All I know is that I have a moral duty to express to you the feelings that overpower me.

  I am deeply convinced that our action in Czechoslovakia is a tragic mistake and a bitter blow to Soviet-Czechoslovak friendship and the world Communist movement.

  It lowers our prestige in the world and in our own eyes.

  It is a setback for all progressive forces, for peace in the world and for humanity’s dreams of future brotherhood.

  Also it is a personal tragedy for me because I have many personal friends in Czechoslovakia and I don’t know how I will be able to look into their eyes if I should ever meet them again.

  And it seems to me that it is a great gift for all reactionary forces in the world and we cannot foresee the consequences of this action.

  I love my country and my people and I am a modest inheritor of the traditions of Russian literature of such writers as Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Solzhenitsyn. These traditions have taught me that silence is sometimes a disgrace.

  Please place on record my opinion about this action as the opinion of an honest son of his country and the poet who once wrote the song “Do the Russians Want War?”

  De Gaulle and Britain’s Harold Wilson were among the first of many world leaders to condemn the invasion—one of the first times all year when the two were in complete agreement. De Gaulle went on to liken the Soviet invasion to the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in April 1965. The General was trying once again to assert his policy between the two superpowers. It was an idea that would be widely rejected as a direct result of the Soviet invasion, which made many Europeans feel that Moscow was a far more imminent danger than Washington. But on August 24 de Gaulle had a good day—he announced that France had exploded a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific. De Gaulle called the blast “a magnificent scientific, technical, and industrial success, which has been achieved for the independence and security of France, by an elite of her children.”

  Senators Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern both, like de Gaulle politically damaged by the Soviet invasion, also compared it to the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic and Vietnam. The invasion was also proving awkward for Richard Nixon, who only a few weeks before had softened his career-long anticommunist posture to say that the Soviets were not the menace they had once been and now was the time to be open and negotiate. The problem for many Western politicians was that the invasion had come at a time when it was thought that the Soviet Union didn’t do things like that anymore.

  Oddly, one of the mildest condemnations came from Washington. The Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly F. Dobrynin, met with President Johnson shortly after the invasion had begun. Johnson called an emergency meeting of the National Security Council, for which Eugene McCarthy, trying to play down the invasion, criticized him. In Chicago, it seemed what little chance was left for a peace plank in the party platform had vanished with the invasion. The cold war was back. But Johnson clearly was not willing to take any measures other than a strong denunciation in the UN. He said that the progress that was being made in U.S.-Soviet negotiations was too important to be abandoned. In fact, while the tanks were still crossing the borders, Secretary of State Dean Rusk was giving a speech to the Democratic Party platform committee on the progress being made in negotiations with the Soviets.

  The UN did condemn the Soviet action, but the Soviets simply used their veto to override the condemnation.

/>   Moscow was focused on Czech president Svoboda, who they had never imagined would be much of a problem. If Svoboda did not agree to the Soviets changing the regime, there was no possibility of a claim of legitimacy for the Soviet invasion. But Svoboda, who had always shown his first loyalty to the Soviet Union, still refused to sign anything. The Soviets threatened him and he countered by threatening suicide, which would have been a disaster for the Soviets. The stick having failed, the carrot came, in the form of promises of unprecedented Soviet aid to Czechoslovakia. The septuagenarian was unmoved by this and by offers of a high position for himself and a hand in choosing other high-level Czech leaders. Nothing the Soviets tried worked with Svoboda. To the aging general, the only acceptable course for Moscow was to release Dubek, ›erník, Smrkovsky, and the other constitutionally installed Czechoslovakian leaders from imprisonment in KGB barracks in the Ukraine and bring them to Moscow for a negotiated settlement. Once the Soviets had worked out an agreement with these leaders, in Svoboda’s view, whatever the terms of that agreement were, it could be considered a legitimate resolution. He believed that once he had everyone sitting around the same table, he could resolve the problem. “And when the Soviet soldiers finally do leave here,” he stated calmly, “you’ll see, the people will throw flowers at them again just as they did in 1945.”

  Student silk-screen poster in Czechoslovakia after the invasion, contrasting the reception of Soviet troops in 1945 with 1968

  Svoboda was not a supporter of Prague Spring and in fact following the invasion gave his backing to years of repression. But at that critical moment he stopped the Soviets from completely plowing his country under their tanks. He denied their invasion legitimacy. But he was also concerned about the strong feelings of the Czechoslovakian people and thought their devotion dangerous. An unknown woman had somehow gotten through to his telephone and suggested that the general shoot himself in protest. He explained to her that this was not a useful approach, that it was up to him to resolve the crisis. The woman insisted, “Ah, Mr. President, but how beautiful it would be if you were to shoot yourself.”

  When the imprisoned leaders arrived in Moscow, their appearance made clear that they had been through an ordeal. They were pale and sick-looking, their nerves on edge. Dubek seemed to be completely exhausted and had a wound on his forehead said to have been caused by slipping in a bathroom. Throughout the Moscow negotiations, Dubek, sometimes stammering, was on medication for his unsettled nerves.

  In Havel’s play The Memorandum, written more than a year before the invasion, there is a scene in which the men who drove Kraus from his position as director with a scheme to impose an artificial language realize that the entire scheme, language included, is an unmitigated disaster. They dust off Kraus, ask him to come back, and for the first time start calling him Jo, as though they are old friends. That is exactly what Brezhnev did to Dubek.

  Brezhnev referred to Dubek as “our Sacha” and spoke to him in the Russian familiar -ty form, which struck Dubek as peculiar since they had never been familiar before. Dubek continued to address Brezhnev in the more formal -vy form.

  For four days the Czechoslovak leadership met with the Soviets, sometimes with Brezhnev, sometimes with ranking Politburo members, sometimes with the entire Politburo, at a long table, with Czechs and Slovaks on one side and Soviets on the other. There was no discussion of table shape here. They fought across the table and with their own sides. Svoboda was eager to get an accord, believing that the longer they went without one, the more irrevocable would be the damage in relations. He also feared that the tension would be too great for the Soviet troops and discipline might break down. By September 2, 72 Czechoslovakians had been killed and 702 wounded. Increasingly, the deaths and injuries were caused by drunken Soviet troops, sometimes on shooting sprees and sometimes just in vehicle accidents. Loggers were afraid to go to work because of camps of drunken troops in the woods. While the meeting was going on in Moscow, on Jan Opletal Street in Prague, a street named for a student executed by the Nazis, a young apprentice named Miroslav Baranek was shot at close range by a drunken Soviet soldier.

  Svoboda angrily pushed his government to quickly come to almost any settlement. He exploded at Dubek, “You don’t do anything but babble and more babble. Isn’t it enough that you have provoked the occupation of your country with your babble? Learn from the lessons of the past and act on them!”

  But Dubek was not in the same hurry. He seemed more uncertain and more careful, and as always, it was difficult to understand his position. According to Mlyná, most of them besides Dubek felt that they did not have much time or leeway “because the Soviet Politburo was acting like a bunch of gangsters.” As an exasperated Kádár had warned Dubek in that last meeting before the invasion, “Do you really not know the kind of people with whom you are dealing?”

  Even while the Soviets were pushing from their side of the table, there was a wide range of viewpoints from the Czechoslovakian side, reflecting the nature of the Dubek regime. Svoboda was a dominant voice, rarely silenced, always urging resolution. Franti†ek Kriegel, the sixty-year-old doctor elected by the Central Committee to the presidium as one of three liberals in a compromise government, was more volatile. He was a Jew from the Galicia region of southern Poland. Kriegel had been arrested and imprisoned with Dubek, and when he arrived in Moscow with Dubek an angry Brezhnev said, “What is this Jew from Galicia doing here?” The Soviets banned him from the negotiating table, and the Czechoslovakians got him back only by refusing to negotiate without him. Kriegel had always been one of the radicals of the regime, pushing for relations with China as an alternative to the Soviet Union. Now the Soviets tried to keep Kriegel, a diabetic, reined in at negotiations by cutting back on his insulin supply. One of the few times Svoboda was silenced was when Kriegel turned to him and said, “What can they make me do? I have two choices, either they are going to send me to Siberia or they will shoot me.” Kriegel was the only member of the delegation who never signed the accord, saying in the end, “No! Kill me if you want.”

  The Soviets made numerous anti-Semitic references to not only Kriegel but Deputy Prime Minister Ota Δik and Prague first secretary Bohumil Δimon. Actually Δimon was not Jewish, but his name sounded Jewish to Slavic ears.

  When the meeting was opened by Brezhnev, Dubek seemed so depressed, so heavily sedated, that ›erník had to make the opening remarks for the Czechoslovakian side. He spoke very directly and frankly, not emphasizing the standard line about friendship with the Soviet Union, but instead defending the Prague Spring and the actions of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party and insisting that a military intervention by the Soviets was not a good thing for socialism. He was interrupted and contradicted several times by Brezhnev. When he had finished, Dubek asked for the floor. This was contrary to the rules of procedure, but he insisted, at first awkwardly, then after a few minutes in fluent Russian. Mlyná described his speech as “a moving and enthusiastic defense” of the Czechoslovakian reforms and a denunciation of the intervention. It was an improvised speech and Brezhnev gave an improvised response, insisting that the Prague Spring was damaging to Moscow and explaining his views on sovereignty and the Soviet bloc. Turning to Dubek, he said, “I tried to help you against Novotny´ in the beginning.” He seemed personally hurt that Dubek never took him into his confidence. “I believed in you and I defended you against others,” he told Dubek. “I said our Sacha is nevertheless a good comrade, but you let us down.”

  Brezhnev made it clear that Dubek’s greatest sin was in not consulting Moscow—his failure to send his speeches to Moscow for approval, his failure to consult on personnel changes. “Here, even I myself give my speeches to all the members of the Politburo in advance for their comments. Isn’t that right, comrades?” He turned to the entire Politburo sitting in a row behind him, and they all eagerly and dutifully nodded agreement. But there were other sins: “Underlying antisocialist tendencies, letting the press write whatever they wanted, a constant
pressure from counterrevolutionary organizations . . .” And, eventually, as always happened when conferring with Soviet officialdom at any level, Brezhnev brought up the Soviet Union’s “sacrifices of World War II.” Neither side ever forgot the 145,000 Soviet lives lost in the liberation of Czechoslovakia.

  Dubek never hesitated to point out his disagreements with Brezhnev. Finally, Brezhnev’s face reddened and he shouted that it was useless to negotiate with such people. He walked slowly out of the room, obediently followed at a ceremoniously slow pace by the entire Politburo.

  It was a threat. When Dubek was first taken away, he was told that he would face a tribunal. While the Soviets thought they had a quisling Czechoslovakian government to replace him and his colleagues, the possibility of executions was real. But when Svoboda held out and events turned more and more unfavorable for the Soviets, the imprisoned leaders were treated with increasing politeness. Both sides needed an agreement. Without it the Soviets would have no legitimacy, but the Prague Spring reformers would have no possibility of influencing the future of their country, and their lives might be in danger. By storming out, Brezhnev reminded them of the fate of their country as well as themselves if no agreement occurred.

  Eventually the two sides hammered out a document that both sides could sign. The document represented almost nothing of the Prague point of view. It recognized neither the legality nor the value of anything the Dubek government had accomplished. But in truth the Czechoslovakians were holding a very weak hand. The Soviets could be ruthless enough to rule even without legitimacy if they had to. When the document was almost ready to be signed, Dubek appeared to sink so deeply into despondency, his body shaking, that it was feared he would not be able to participate in the final ceremony. More shots were ordered for him. The nature of these sedatives is not clear from the accounts, but he suddenly horrified all the negotiators by refusing to have any more shots “or else I won’t sign. They can do what they will, I won’t sign.” During a long night of negotiation he finally did get a shot.