Abstract
Fifty years after the Prague Spring, author and journalist
In an attempt to confuse the invading Soviets, protesters in Prague smashed road signs, 1968
CREDIT: Stefan Tyszko/Getty
As a young boy, Pavel Theiner, now 60, recalls looking out of the window of his parents’ apartment and watching a column of tanks advancing down Lenin Avenue.
Everyone was tuning into Prague Radio where they learned: “We have been occupied by Russian and East German troops.”
It was still early; about 5.30am. Soon the radio was playing solemn music and the national anthem, and appealed to the people: “Don’t try to fight. Stay calm.”
Czechs who had lived through the 1930s remembered that the news of Munich, Chamberlain’s great betrayal, also broke over the airwaves. This is a country with old and bitter experience of history’s short straw.
In August of 1968, an estimated half a million Warsaw Pact troops rolled into Czechoslovakia to suppress reforms, including freedom of expression and movement, associated with Czech reformist leader Alexander Dubcek.
The Soviets had estimated it would take four days to quell the Czechs. In the end, Prague’s innovative non-violent protests ensured nearly eight months of civil disobedience.
Robert McCrum outside the world-renowned Film and TV school of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Europe’s largest film school, autumn 2017
CREDIT: Martin Netočný
International condemnation of the Soviet action reverberated around the world, and the media kept watching. Decades later, the same techniques would lay the building blocks for the Velvet Revolution of 1989/90, which finally gave Czechs the freedoms they sought.
Fifty years on, that past has become a foreign country: a place with other languages and many half-forgotten memories. Today, the visitor to the Czech Republic – a member of Nato and the EU – lands at Vaclav Havel Airport (formerly Prague Ruzyne International). Where once those Soviet troop transports taxied with their lethal cargo, jazzy Boeings for a new age of mass tourism – Germanwings, Easyjet, Ryanair – queue up for take-off. The signs in Arrivals are in Czech, Russian – and Japanese. When you drive into Prague, your route takes you down European (formerly Lenin) Avenue. In this new, post-Soviet world, you might think that memories of 1968 have been almost obliterated. Almost, but not quite.
There’s still a generation of survivors, the older people in Prague, who can tell you about the invasion: the broken glass underfoot on every pavement, the flowers marking the sites of fatalities, the sputtering army flares in the nights that followed the occupation, the long lines for bread, and, of course, the spirited protests and the clever graffiti: “Moscow – 1,500km.” “Lenin Awake!” “Brezhnev Has Gone Mad! Even Hitler Came By Daylight.”“Ivan Go Home!”
For a few weeks, everyone played truant from their ordinary lives. Street signs were painted over to point the invading troops the wrong way; in Vaclavske Namesti [Wenceslas Square] there were crowds of students making jokes against the Rusaci (Russians), and chanting the names of their heroes: “Dubcek, Svoboda! Dubcek, Svoboda!”. (Ludvik Svoboda was president during the Prague Spring.)
Up by the museum at the top of the square, the Soviet gun barrels pointed at the huge crowds who gathered to challenge what was happening. Occasionally, a tank turret would swivel like a dalek, as if searching out a target. Students from those days remember how strange it was to stand so close to the enemy. “You could see the stubble on their chins,” said one.
If you touched the grey sides of a tank, you’d burn your hand, and it was the heat of the engines, another remarked, that made you realise that this enemy was not a bad dream but for real.
For some, like the historian and former dissident Vilem Precan, these extraordinary post-war events have become braided into the historical record that goes back to the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, which heralded 300 years of rule from Vienna.
Precan is a seasoned intellectual and ironist, with a dry wit and an encyclopedic memory for the dates of his country’s repression (1970, Moscow Protocols; 1975, the Helsinki agreement; 1977, the Charter; 1989, the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the end of the USSR; 1989, the Velvet Revolution…). When he was fired from his college post in 1970 – and then charged with crimes against the state – he found work in a hospital, and then as a waiter. In June 1976, he went into exile in Germany, before making the return home as a matter of pride. “I did not wish to emigrate in ‘68. What we did in those times was important. In the end, our opposition to the regime became focused on human rights.” Precan’s sang-froid towards the Soviet assault on his liberty is typical of a kind of Czech resilience that’s reminiscent of English stoicism.
Robert McCrum (right), Radim Prochazkam (centre) and Pavel Theiner (left) during McCrum’s interview with film students about the Prague Spring, autumn 2017
CREDIT: Martin Netočný
Jirina Siklova, similarly, is a passionate Czech, a fierce champion of her country’s freedoms and an instinctive patriot who says she dislikes “emotional outbursts in public”. When the thousands of Soviet tanks rumbled across the border in the summer of 1968, Siklova was on holiday in Yugoslavia, then the limit of Czech freedom in pre-EU Europe. The 24/7 news cycle was unknown, too, and apart from the BBC World Service, news was hard to come by.
Eventually, she and her husband decided to return home to Prague with their two children, to the apartment where she has lived her whole life.
The Prague to which Siklova returned was becoming an anonymous city, without names or places, as every form of identification was torn down in a disfiguring act of collective obliteration. The people were displaying a sort of heroic passivity and using humour as their protest against what was happening.
There were the jokes: “Ivan. Come home quickly! Natasha is going out with Kolya. Love Mum.” “The Soviet Union is our model. Let’s invade Moscow.”
Those days have disappeared into the slipstream of history. Now blue and white motorway signs point the way to the West (Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna). En route, today’s slogans are about investment, fashion and the internet.
We sit in Siklova’s apartment, drinking black coffee amid heaps of books and newspaper cuttings. She is a sprightly 80-something who can recall the Nazis in the streets outside as vividly as she can the Russians.”I remember the fear in my parents’ voices, when they realised what the Gestapo was doing to our Jewish neighbours,” she said.
Siklova’s career has been dedicated to Czech freedom and, more recently, to pioneering gender studies at Prague’s Charles University. She was a founding member of Charter 77, and a close friend of Vaclav Havel, whose family she knew from childhood. She likes to say that “optimism is my orientation” and recalls that she did not anticipate the events of 1968.
“I never thought [the Soviets] would do it,” she said. “The idea of invasion seemed absurd. But once it had happened, I wanted to participate. I felt I could do more for socialism at home than abroad.”
On 6 May 1981, she was one of eight arrested and kept in custody for almost a year. She eventually confessed to the “crime” of helping banned Czech writers send their books abroad for publication. Her ironical defence of her actions was published in Index in the spring of 1983 (see facing page).
Looking back on her life as a dissident, she observed that “at the time, you never know what is, or is not, really important. I followed my instincts”.
Siklova admits, almost laughing, that she misread Vaclav Havel’s role in the Velvet Revolution. “I never thought he would become our leader. He was a playwright and an intellectual, and not really prepared for it,” she said.
In a characteristically Czech summary of politics, she added: “At the time, it was like a joke, but not a joke.”
For younger Czechs, it’s the Velvet Revolution more than the trauma of 1968 that has become the touchstone of the country’s liberty. Dana Kalinova, who was barely 13 when the invasion took place, nurtures fragments from the past – the sound of Russian voices under her window, her grandmother in tears at the kitchen table, and country people singing “Ivan go home”.
Subsequently, she pursued a distinguished career as the managing director of the Prague Book Fair. On one visit to the Moscow Book Fair, she was startled to find Russians coming up to the Czech booth “to apologise for the invasion”. Later, she recalls “crying with happiness” during the heady moments of the Velvet Revolution, and urging her family to pay attention to the radio with the instruction: “Havel is speaking.”
Jirina Saklova’s article in Index on Censorship, published in 1983
For Kalinova, the Velvet Revolution defines her maturity. For the latest intake of students at Prague’s world famous Film and TV School, Academy of Performing Arts, it’s an event they learned about from their parents.
Veronika Lengalova, Frantisek Milec and Daniel Vondra were born in 1992-93. For them, the Soviet tanks in Prague are as remote as the Hungarian Uprising of 1956.
Even their tutor, the documentary-maker Radim Prochazka, born in 1975, has to see the Czech story more through the lens of history than experience. His students represent a new kind of Czech society. They come, respectively, from Moravia, Slovakia and Bohemia, and – significantly – conduct our conversation in English, with plenty of idiomatic joking. In their company, the tarnished ideals of the European movement, refracted through global English, seem momentarily brighter and more inspiring.
Once upon a time, Dvorak emigrated to the New World. In 1968, some young Czechs looked to the USA, but that dream is over.
Milec, who has spent time in New York and Los Angeles, boasts a US accent but has no desire to emigrate. Both he and Vondra see themselves as more European than Czech. Referring sarcastically to the recent election, Vondra said: “We Czechs get very easily bored by our governments.”
He is contemptuous of Babis’ populist programme. With no reference to the events of the 1960s and 1970s, he summarises the past 30 years as decades of, first, “Change and possibility” (1990s); next, freedom and opportunity (2000s); and, finally, “corruption and bureaucracy” (2010s).
For Lengalova, the Soviet days are something she can access only in conversation with her grandparents. For her, Russian stereotypes predominate. She hates Putin and finds the Rusaci “arrogant, imperialist, with no respect for rules”. Neither she nor her fellows want to see the Czech Republic fall under Russian influence. In the Europe into which she was born, she can “say and do what I want, and go where I please”. After some debate, this group agrees that the problems of their society are now corruption, authoritarianism, populism and – that old bogeyman – xenophobia.
History Man
Protesters gather in Wenceslas Square calling for Cestmir Cisar, a reformist communist, to become president, 1968
CREDIT: Barbara Pflaum/Akg/Imagno
Milan Kundera was right: the history of the land once known as Bohemia and Moravia is all to do with laughter and forgetting. Everything I found in Prague in the autumn of 2017, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Soviet invasion, conspired to obliterate the memory of the past.
Once upon a time, when I was younger, the magnetism of the Iron Curtain, snaking through mittelEuropa, exercised an extraordinary spell as a scene of icy superpower confrontation. Today, with the watchtowers gone, there’s only corporate advertising and EU flags.
Before the wall came down there were guards with dogs and sub-machine guns at Prague airport.
Now there’s a digital smart-scanner processing EU passports and bored young men in uniforms watching from behind glass. No potential transgression, and not a scintilla of jeopardy.
When I tried to recall the empty clanging of the trams in semi-deserted cobbled streets, I found myself in a white Prius taxi stuck in a traffic jam on the elevated highway that connects the streets of old Prague with the restored facades of Wenceslas Square.
More poignant still, the Asiatic faces of young Soviet conscripts have morphed into the innocent smiles of Japanese girls taking selfies on the Charles Bridge.
Meanwhile, the furtive movements of men in donkey jackets – disgraced communists; former university professors – hurrying to their jobs as hospital porters or road-sweepers have become the gaudy indolence of tourists queueing to visit the castle.
And what of Kafka or Masaryk? The Prague that they knew, or that Mozart dawdled through en route to rehearsals for Don Giovanni – the provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, steeped in German language and culture – has become anglicised and modernised from the top of Vaclavske Namesti (Burger King, KFC and Starbucks) down to the cobbled streets leading to the Jewish cemetery (Moneycorp, Avis and Gap).
And what about the jokes? In the former Soviet days, you could spend hours in a bar exchanging a succession of jokes about the Rusaci.
My favourite concerns Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, crossing Russia together by train. When the engine breaks down, Lenin tries to rally the workers to cooperate on fixing the locomotive. No luck. Next, Stalin shoots the driver. When terror fails, Khrushchev tries to reform the train company. Finally, Brezhnev closes the curtains in the wagon-lit. “Let’s just pretend the train is moving,” suggests the general secretary.
On the eve of 2018, with no tangible enemy or threat, such subversive laughter has fallen silent. Instead, there’s history’s joke against the Czech people: the rise of a xenophobic, Eurosceptic populist billionaire like Andrej Babis – a mini-Trump, or perhaps a pocket Berlusconi.
I have written before in Index about the thrill of crossing to Europe’s dark side, especially by train, and particularly at night. Thanks to my friendship with a long-standing editor of Index, George Theiner, a gentle, modest expat Czech, I had learned that free words were one thing, fresh fruit something else. And so, together with jiffy-bags of banned literature, on my first trip for Index, I carried bananas to Prague.
Today, there are bananas in abundance (and mangoes, kiwi fruit and tangerines). What’s missing is the excitement that once came with a first reading of Milan Kundera, whose juxtaposition of high-spirited sexual intrigue with Cold War politics and the frozen, grey repressive world of 1960s Czechoslovakia was one of the intoxicating thrills of the 1980s.
The works of Kundera, Ivan Klima, Bohumil Hrabal and Josef Skvorecky are no longer banned here.
Sadly, they seem to be only half-remembered – and virtually unknown to a new generation of 21st-century Czechs.
That’s not a joke.
When the Tanks Rolled In
What do I remember from 1968? Finding a secret bug in our flat in the spring; watching the tanks roll down Lenin Avenue from the airport on the night of 21-22 August 1968; being followed 24 hours a day by the secret police in the weeks after the invasion (and me scared shitless as a spoilt 11-yearold); going with my dad to Old Town Square (25 August, I think) and seeing the Russian soldiers and watching them chase a Czech youth and then seeing their armoured vehicles “embedded” around the Jan Hus statue. I remember going to a funeral of a shot student buried at a small cemetery (around 27 August) at the top of Prague 6, with a helicopter above trying to drown out any speeches with its noise and seeing a secret police car outside the cemetery following us even there (I remember the make – a Volha car). I think humour and complete resistance was important, but the end result was (hindsight helps, of course) clear from the beginning – the Soviets weren’t going to let Czechs and Slovaks go their own way. Military resistance was a non-starter.
I think [my father] was somewhat perplexed. Like the vast majority of people, he was quite optimistic about the developments leading up to August, even though he was pretty realistic otherwise, and peeved long-term at being a second-class citizen in his own country (as a non-communist who made his views plainer than 95% of his fellow citizens).
Footnotes
Additional research: Danyaal Yasin