Remembrance of August 21, 1968

Remembrance of August 21, 1968

The Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia

I remember it so vividly though it was fifty years ago. I was Moscow. Not Moscow, Idaho Moscow, Russia, USSR. I was there with a group of American Russian language students from a summer intensive Russian program at Indiana University, one of America's leading centers of Russia studies. We were on an Intourist bus going somewhere or other. I don't remember where, but it doesn't matter. I was sitting toward the front of the bus. One of our number sitting toward the back was reading a Moscow morning newspaper. All of a sudden I heard him cry out, in English though we were supposed to be speaking only Russian: "Holy shit! They invaded Czechoslovakia!" In deed they had, "they" being mostly the USSR's military forces with some participation by the East Germans, Poles, and some (but not all) other members of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union's military alliance with its captive client states in Central and Eastern Europe. We were shocked. There had been speculation for some time that the Soviets might do such a thing. After all, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia had for some time undertaken a series of reforms known collectively as "the Prague Spring." The Party boss Alexander Dubcek and the head of the government Ludvik Svoboda (whose name in both Russian and Czech means "freedom," though it is pronounced slightly differently in those two Slavic languages) had undertaken liberalization of censorship laws and loosened the Party's control of the economy in an effort to create what they called "socialism with a human face" We knew the Soviets hated the Prague Spring, in large part at least because they feared that if those reforms worked in Czechoslovakia then people would start demanding similar reforms in the Soviet Union. On the night of August 20 to 21, 1968, they sent in the Red Army. They put an end to the Prague Spring and reintroduced strict Soviet style communism in Czechoslovakia, a country whose people were mostly Slavic like the Russians but whose cultures were considerably more western than was Russia's.

Of course, my fellow American Russian language student didn't read in the Moscow newspaper "last night the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia." He read something like: "Last night, at the request of the Czechoslovak Party and government, the armed forces of the fraternal Warsaw Pact nations entered Czechoslovakia to put down the CIA instigated counterrevolution that was undoing all of the advances of the Czechoslovak peoples under the leadership of their Marxist-Leninist Party. They were welcomed with joy by the people of Czechoslovakia." To get "Holy shit! They invaded Czechoslovakia!" out of that you had to know what was really going on in Czechoslovakia, how the USSR had been reacting to it, and how to read the Soviet press. In that quote I just gave, which I made up but which very much expresses what the Soviet press was saying, everything is false except Last night...the armed forces of the Warsaw Pact entered Czechoslovakia." That "entering" was a full scale military invasion that was met with resistance by a great many Czechoslovak people but which that small country had no hope of repelling. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 crushed the spirit of that country for at least a couple of decades. It was unwanted, violent, and repressive. It was nothing short of a sin against humanity.

And some very interesting things were going on Moscow over the next couple of days. Apparently there was a small demonstration against the invasion that was quickly broken up with the people involved arrested. We didn't see that. We did see what I take to have been a common Soviet practice when a foreign head of state was in town. The Soviets had arrested Dubcek and Svoboda and hauled them off to Moscow as their prisoners, but their presence in Moscow was treated like a routine state visit by a foreign head of state. When a foreign head of state was in town the Soviets would place sets of crossed flags of the USSR and the visiting head of state's country along the bridges that cross the Moskva River at either end of the Kremlin. They did that after they took the Czechoslovak leaders prisoner and took them to Moscow. The propaganda machine was hard at work covering up what the Soviets had really done and making it look and sound like something very different from what it actually was. Thus it ever was in the USSR. The Soviet Communists used language not to inform but to mislead and control. They were doing that with full force after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. 

We very liberal progressive American students who were in Moscow that day were furious. It's not that we thought that our country would start a war with the USSR over what that country had done. We pretty well knew it wouldn't. But we had thought that the Prague Spring offered real hope for the creation of a third way between totalitarian Soviet communism and the mostly unbridled capitalism of our own country. The Prague Spring emphasized individual freedoms and economic activity that worked for the benefit of the people. Not that we were experts on what had been happening in Czechoslovakia, but what we knew sounded really good to us. We also knew that to the extent the American government and people knew what was happening there they supported it but hardly had instigated it. It was a spontaneous movement of the Czechoslovak people. So we experienced the Soviet crushing of what was happening there appalling and maddening.

So we took about the only actions we could. First, we told our Soviet guide that we would not do what we were scheduled to do the next day. That was to go to a place called VDNKh, letters that stand for the Russian words that translate as "Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy." We told that pleasant young woman, who worked of Intourist, the Soviet foreign tourism management agency, that after what her country had just done there was no way we were going to go listen to a day's worth of propaganda about what a great place the Soviet Union was. She just shrugged her shoulders and accepted our decision. Then we went to hard currency store in the Hotel Rossiya just off Red Square and bought a good amount of really cheap Stolichnaya vodka. We took it to our hotel, the Hotel Bucharest as I recall, that was just across the river from the east end of the Kremlin and Red Square. Many of us gathered in one of our rooms there. We drank toasts to Dubcek and Svoboda, speaking to the light fixture in the ceiling because that's where we assumed the bug was. That may sound risky, but it really wasn't. We knew that the Soviets didn't care what we said or thought as long as there were no Soviet people with us. There weren't. So we let the Soviet Union have it and expressed our enthusiastic support for the Prague Spring and the people of Czechoslovakia.

We still had a few days in Moscow before we left the country and headed home. I don't remember what we did on those days. Mostly what we did in Moscow as see the sights of the city and its environs. I suppose that's what we did with those days. After those days were up we boarded our bus with all our gear and headed to Sheremetyevo, Moscow's  international airport, to begin our trip home. As we rode through Soviet Moscow we all sang the hit rock song "We've Got to Get Out of This Place: "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." It's not that I don't love Russia. I do. Its history and culture are truly impressive, and the Russian people can be among the warmest, friendliest people you'll ever meet, at least if you can meet them in private. Still, the USSR was very foreign to us young Americans, and its invasion of Czechoslovakia really put us off the place. We were glad to be going home.

In October, 1968, I returned to Europe, this time to Stuttgart, Germany, to participate in a year abroad program that the Oregon State System of Higher Education has just started with the University of Stuttgart. In March, 1969, I joined a group of German students from that university going to spend a few days in Prague. It was seven months after the Soviet invasion. I had heard that Prague was wonderful. It was one of the few cities in Central Europe that hadn't been extensively bombed during World Was II, so all of its old buildings were still original. Yet the Prague that I saw in March, 1969, was about as depressive a place as you could imagine. The buildings were poorly kept up. The city seemed dirty. The people seemed cheerless. It was clear what communism and the the Soviet invasion had done to them. They were crushed. It was sad to say the least.

Then one day we were sitting in a Prague beer hall drinking good Czech beer. I'd had Czech beer in Russia. It was awful. The beer we got in Prague was really good. I think the Czechs sent the swill to the Russians and kept the good stuff for themselves. As we sat there speaking German a group of young Czechs who appeared to be college students like us approached. One of them asked us:  "Ost oder west?" East or west, in German. Someone answered west. "Well", they said, "welcome to Prague! We'll sit and have a beer with you." Which they did. I hate to think what would have happened if we'd said east, because East Germany participated in the Soviet invasion seven months earlier. These Czechs might have come to blows with East Germans, but they were happy to have West Germans (and a stray American) in their country. I got talking to one of these Czech students, in German of course. He asked me about myself and what my plans were. I said I intended to pursue a PhD in Russian history. Wrong thing to say! He and others who overheard us became furious. "Why would you want to do that? Nothing good ever came out of Russia!" He might as well have said "to hell with the whole lot of them." I had never seen hatred like that before, and I've never seen it since. I think I more or less understand it. The Russians had occupied Czechoslovakia after World War II and had imposed an oppressive communist system based on the one in the Soviet Union upon that country and her people. They had stifled the development of the country under a dictatorial regime accountable to the Soviets but not to its own people. I'd likely have hated them too. Still, the depth and the power of the hatred I saw that day was and remains frightening. Not that the Czechs could ever really successfully fight a war against the Russians. Czechoslovakia is (was) too small, and Russia is too big. But hatred like that leads to violence. Moreover yes, the Soviet government had done terrible things to the Czechs, but the Russian people hadn't. They had no say over what their government did. And it surely isn't true that nothing good ever came out of Russia. None of that mattered to these young Czechs. Russia was evil. Russian culture was evil. Russian people were evil. For these Czechs that's all there was to it. If they could have killed Russians I fear they might have. Thank God they couldn't.

So there are my recollections of my experience with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968. There are surely lessons to be learned here, but I'll leave it to you to discern what they are. I of course played no role in the big events I recount here, but I did have a different experience of them than most Americans. May we learn what history like this has to teach us so that we don't repeat its mistakes.