CHAPTER 17

THE SORROW OF PRAGUE EAST

I think that in the long run, our non-violent approach and the moral supremacy of the Czechoslovak people over the aggressor had, and still has moral significance. In retrospect it could be said that the peaceful approach may have contributed to the breakup of the “aggressive” bloc. . . . My conviction that moral considerations have their place in politics does not follow simply from the fact that small countries must be moral because they do not have the ability to strike back at bigger powers. Without morality it is not possible to speak of international law. To disregard moral principles in the realm of politics would be a return to the law of the jungle.

—ALEXANDER DUBČEK, August 1990

ON TUESDAY, AUGUST 20, Anton Tazky, a secretary of the Slovak Communist Party Central Committee and a personal friend of Dubek’s, was driving back to Bratislava from an outlying Slovak district. He saw odd, bright lights, and as he drove closer, realizing that these were the headlights of tanks and military trucks, and that these vehicles were accompanied by soldiers in foreign uniforms, he concluded that he had driven by a movie shoot. He went to bed.

August 20 was a hazy summer day. Dubek’s wife, Anna, had been up much of the night before with intense pain from a gallbladder problem. On Tuesday morning Dubek took her to the hospital and explained to her that he had an afternoon presidium meeting that would run late and he might not be able to visit her until Wednesday morning. It was the last time the presidium would meet before the Fourteenth Party Congress three weeks later, and Dubek and his colleagues wanted to use the congress to solidify in law the achievements of the Prague Spring.

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 Timestelevision 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 argued 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.”

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.

At last the “Moscow Protocol,” forced down the throats of captive leaders while their country was occupied by tanks, was ready for the official signing. Suddenly massive double doors were swung open, and on cue every member of the Soviet Politburo rose to their feet, placed smiles on their faces, stuck out their arms, and crossed the room to embrace their exhausted and defeated Czechoslovakian prisoners.

The delegation went to the airport to return to Prague and suddenly realized that they had left Kriegel behind. Some argued that they would be better off without having him in the returning delegation, but others, including Svoboda and Dubek, insisted that the Soviet authorities turn him over. After a final two hours of negotiation, the Soviets brought him to the airport.

The delegation returned to Prague with a document offering almost nothing. The Soviets agreed to give the Czechoslovakian Party “understanding and support with the goal of perfecting the methods of directing society.” The troops would be withdrawn from their territory on a schedule that depended on progress toward “normalization.” The Czechoslovakian people were fluent in Soviet doublespeak. Normalization was a new word, but they knew what it meant—a return to the old dictatorship. The demands of the Soviets had been solidly declared in the Moscow Protocol, whereas those of the Czechoslovakians, such as withdrawal of troops, were for the future and depended on Moscow’s whim. By now, a week after the invasion, half a million foreign troops and six thousand tanks occupied the country.

On August 27, Dubek, looking as though he could barely stand, gave a speech asking the people to once more show confidence in him and asserting that these were “temporary measures.” He could barely pronounce a fluid sentence. But he and some of the other leaders believed that they would find opportunities for reform. At first the government, with Dubek back in power, showed independence. The National Assembly even passed a resolution declaring Soviet occupation illegal and a violation of the United Nations charter. The leaders were able to fire the pro-Soviet officials within their ranks.

In September measures were forced on the country to curb its free press, though by Soviet bloc standards it remained surprisingly rebellious and independent. Dubek pursued a schizophrenic rule, caving in to the Soviets at one moment, standing by his principles the next. In October, meeting with the leaders of the five invading countries, Brezhnev declared Operation Danube a great success, but everything that followed, he said, was disastrous. Gomułka was even more harsh, insisting that Czechoslovakia was still a hotbed of dangerous counterrevolutionaries. Having so efficiently taken care of counterrevolutionaries in his own country, he had little patience for Czechoslovakia, where students were still fighting with police.

Thousands fled the country, and many who were outside decided not to return. ›erník encouraged immigration. Soon the borders would be closed, and he explained that he could not guarantee even his own safety, let alone anyone else’s. A month after the invasion, fifty thousand Czechoslovaks were out of the country out of a population of about fourteen million. About ten thousand of them had already applied for refugee status in other countries. A number of Czechoslovakians were caught out of the country on their first summer vacation abroad. Many had to wait more than twenty years before they could enter or leave again.

Meanwhile the Czechoslovakian Writers Union, one of the institutions that pushed Dubek hard for reform when he first came to power in January, was urging its members not to go into exile and if they were outside of the country to come back before the borders closed. Pavel Kohout, playwright and novelist, had been shuttling back and forth between Prague and Frankfurt, where his new novel was being published, seeking out Czech writers and persuading them to return to rebuild the writers union as a dissident center. Kohout contacted several members at the Frankfurt Book Fair that was attacked by Daniel Cohn-Bendit. The book fair in 1968 had an unusually high number of Czech writers for the same reason the Lincoln Center Film Festival was suddenly packed with Czechoslovakian directors. Supporting Czech art became an act of political defiance, and many of the artists were still—no one was sure for how much longer—available for travel.

Youth were joining the Communist Party at an unprecedented rate with the intention of taking it over and directing it. In the month following the invasion, 7,199 people joined, and according to official figures, 63.8 percent, two out of three, were less than thirty years old. This seemed certain to have an impact on a Party that had been largely middle-aged and elderly.

The Soviet troops were tucked quietly out of sight, but they were there. When Czech youth staged a demonstration in late September, the Soviets had only to threaten the Czech police that if they did not break up the march, the Soviet troops would be brought out. The police stopped the march.

Youth were also forming Dubek clubs around the country, most of which attracted hundreds of members who collected and discussed his speeches.

In the fall of 1968 Dubek sent a letter to the Czechoslovakian Olympic team in Mexico City. He said that if the team was not as successful as they hoped, “don’t hang your heads: What will not succeed today, may succeed tomorrow.”