Once, back in 1968 and 1969, I encountered, if only in a superficial way, a significant event in world affairs I think there is a lesson in that encounter that I want to share. In the summer of 1968 I was a participant in Indiana University’s Russian language study tour program. We spent five weeks at the IU campus in Bloomington, Indiana, intensively studying the Russian language. We then flew to the Soviet Union, where we spent the next five weeks touring the country and continuing our Russian language studies in the place where people actually spoke the language. It was an invaluable experience. The tour group of which I was a part spent a week in Leningrad, ten days at the Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages in Piatgosk (now Piatigosk Foreign Languages University, a few days in Tbilisi, Georgia and a few days in Kiev, Ukraine. Then we flew to Moscow. We were there for one full week, but there is, one memory of that week in Moscow that overshadows all the others. It is that memory that I want to share here, as it may be of some historical interest to people other than myself. It is at least an unusual and, I hope, an interesting story.
In 1968 Czechoslovakia, as the country was then called before its more recent split into The Czech Republic and Slovakia, was experiencing what was known as the Prague Spring. Czechoslovakia was part of the Soviet bloc, a member of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet's counterpart to NATO, and was ruled by its Communist Party that the Soviets had installed in power after World War II. The Prague Spring was a period of political and economic liberalization. It was led by Alexander Dubček, the head of the Communist Party, and Ludvik Svoboda, the President of the country. (Coincidentally, the word svoboda means freedom in many Slavic languages, including Czech and Russian.) Dubček said that he wanted to create “socialism with a human face.” The reforms of the Prague Spring included loosening restrictions on speech, travel, and the media as well as administrative decentralization. The Soviets were, to say the least, not pleased.
On the morning of Wednesday, August 21, 1968, a few days before we were scheduled to leave the Soviet Union for home, we were on our Intourist bus going somewhere or other. One of our number was sitting in the back of the bus reading the morning newspaper, either Pravda or Izvestia, I can't remember which came out in the morning. All of a sudden we heard him cry out, in English: “Holy shit! They invaded Czechoslovakia!” Indeed they had, they being the Soviet Union and every member of the Warsaw Pact except Romania. The Soviets had sent in the Red Army to put an end to the reform movement in Czechoslovakia, a movement that the Russian Communist leadership apparently feared threatened even their own tight control in the Soviet Union. After all, if people got the idea that Soviet-style Communism could be reformed into something that worked better for the people but that threatened the control of the Party bosses, there's no telling what might happen! So they sent in the tanks. They sent in the soldiers. They put a forced end to the Prague Spring.
Of course, the Soviet press didn't say that the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact underlings had “invaded” Czechoslovakia. They said that the armies of the fraternal socialist nations had responded to a request from the people of Czechoslovakia to put down the counterrevolution that was being fomented and financed by the CIA. We knew we were in the middle of what could become a pretty tense situation. I don't think we ever thought that the United States would really use military force to defend the Czechoslovak reformers, but that seemed at least a remote possibility. We knew we'd never get the straight story from the Soviet press, so each morning for our remaining few days in Moscow one of our members went to the British Embassy, which was not far from our hotel, and got the news release the British were putting out each day with accurate information about what was happening.
The next day we were supposed to go to something called VDNKh, the Russian initials for something called the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy. It was a sort of permanent Soviet Union wide exhibition center that was a propaganda piece for the Communists. I've never been there, but I've seen pictures. It touted the Russian space program. It glorified the huge industrial projects that the Soviets were so proud of but that did so little to improve the life of the average Russian. We agreed that we wouldn't go, and we told our Intourist guide and monitor that because of what her country had just done we refused to go listen to a day's worth of propaganda about what a great place her country was. We didn't blame her. She was a very pleasant and helpful young woman. I don't know if she understood what we were doing, but she didn't try to talk us out of it. Instead of going to VDNKh we bought Stolichnaya Vodka at the hard currency store of the Hotel Rossia just across the Moscow River from our hotel and sat in our rooms shouting toasts to Dubček and Sbovoda into the hanging light fixture in the center of the room, where we assumed the bug was planted. That may sound a bit risky, but in those days the Soviets really didn't care what people like us thought. They cared what their own people were doing. If any Soviet citizen had been caught with us drinking toasts to the Czechs that person would have gotten into a lot of trouble, but the Soviets really didn't care about us. So we drank their good vodka and let them have it verbally, assuming but not really knowing that some low level KGB operative would hear us through the hidden microphone that we assumed was planted in the room.
Our hotel was right across the Moscow River from Red Square and the Kremlin. From that vantage point we saw a remarkable thing. The Soviets had, and I suppose the Russians still have, a practice they followed when a foreign head of state was visiting Moscow. They would put crossed flags of the Soviet Union and of the nation of the visiting dignitary on the bridges that cross the Moscow River at either end of the Kremlin. They had essentially kidnapped Dubček and Svoboda and hauled them off to Moscow; but of course they hadn't invaded Czechoslovakia, they had rescued their socialist brothers from a CIA sponsored counterrevolution. So they billed Dubček and Svoboda coming to Moscow as a state visit by the President and the head of the Communist Party of a fraternal socialist nation. They put Soviet and Czechoslovakian flags along both sides of both bridges, just like they would for a legitimate state visit. It was a show incredible chutzpah and dissembling, an act of propaganda designed to mislead their own people, something the Soviets were pretty good at. We heard later than when Soviet soldiers returned from Czechoslovakia they were all sent to Siberia for extended periods because they knew the truth. The people of Czechoslovakia had not welcomed them as liberators as the Soviet propaganda machine claimed. They hadn't fought back because they knew that fighting back was useless, but they cursed the soldiers and did everything they could do to make it clear that the Soviets had invaded against the will of the people and had in no way come as the liberators they claimed to be.
My whole experience of Moscow that week in August, 1968, was colored by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The invasion was on a Wednesday, and we were scheduled to leave Moscow on either the following Friday or Saturday as I recall, so we weren't there long after the invasion. Our feelings about the Soviet Union in light of their brutal suppression of a true people's liberation movement in Czechoslovakia was summed up when, as our bus drove out to Sheremetyevo, Moscow's international airport, for our flight to Helsinki, Finland, we all spontaneously started singing the hit song of the time by the Animals:
We've got to get out of this place,
If it's the last thing we ever do.
We've got to get out of this place.
Girl, there's a better life for me and you.
Leaving Moscow in August, 1968, wasn’t the end of my personal experience of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The following academic year, 1968-69, I participated in a study abroad program of the Oregon State System of Higher Education at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, West Germany at the time. In March, 1969, I signed up for a short trip to Prague, Czechoslovakia, sponsored by the university's student association. With a group of German students I rode the train from Stuttgart to Prague. I remember Prague as a gray, dirty, lifeless city. People tell me it is one of the most charming cities of central Europe because, unlike so many others, it had not been heavily damaged in World War II. I don't doubt it, but the recent Soviet invasion had cast a pall over the city in early 1969 that was nearly palpable. I have one really powerful memory from that trip. Our group had gone to a beer hall in Prague. (The Germans claim to make the world's best beer. They make really good beer, but the Czechs make better beer. The beer we had in Prague was world class. Interestingly, the previous summer I had had Czech been in Russia. It was swill. I think the Czechs intentionally kept the good stuff for themselves and for export to the west and send the slop to Russia. Not that I blame them.) We were sitting there drinking great Czech beer, speaking German of course, when a small group of student-age Czechs walked up to us. They scowled at us and said, in German: “Ost, oder West?” East or West, meaning East or West Germany. When we answered West they immediately relaxed, welcomed us to Prague, and sat down to have a beer with us. I don't like to think what would have happened if we had said East, since the East Germans had participated in the Soviet invasion the previous summer.
I got to talking with a couple of these Czech folk. I explained that I intended to pursue graduate studies in Russian history. They were appalled and dumbfounded. They said that absolutely nothing good had ever come out of Russia, and nothing ever would. They said it with an intensity that betrayed a hatred of the Russians that ran deep and strong. I had never experienced hatred like that before. I think I understand it. The Czechs in 1969 had every reason to hate the Russians. The Russians had imposed an oppressive, Soviet-style dictatorship on them after World War II and just seven months earlier had sent in the tanks when the Czechs and Slovaks had tried to soften the oppression just a little bit. The Czechs are the most western of the Slavic peoples; but they had lived for a couple of decades under the boot heel of their Slavic cousins to the east, and they resented it mightily. The strength of the hatred that humans are capable of feeling is truly scary. I saw it that day in Prague. I hope I never see it again.
There is an important lesson here. Oppressive regimes can lie to their own people, claiming to be the champions of freedom rather than the oppressors that they truly are, as the Soviets did to their citizens at the time of their invasion of Czechoslovakia and essentially continually throughout the Soviet period. In the end, however, they cannot conceal the reality of their oppression. The oppressed people will hate them for the oppression. Eventually the people will throw off the oppression. The yearning in the human heart for liberty is universal, and in the long run it cannot be denied. Different cultures define freedom in somewhat different ways, and the freedom that the people will establish won’t look exactly the same in every nation. Yet people know oppression when they experience it, and they will eventually overthrow it.
The Soviets couldn’t deny the oppressive nature of their regime, and Soviet Communism collapsed a mere twenty-three years after the invasion of 1968. The Czech Republic and Slovakia are now independent, democratic nations. Today we see the people of many Arab nations throwing off their oppressive governments, or at least trying to do so. They will not all succeed today or even tomorrow, but eventually they will succeed. Eventually the people of those nations will be free, free of home-grown oppressors and free of foreign exploitation by the United States and other western powers. All who wish to be on the side of history are well advised to learn this truth, a truth a saw lived out, if only as an outside observer, in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.
No comments:
Post a Comment