TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/60s/60czech

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 8.5 KB | 176 lines

                _p                                                          Czech Uprising


  [At the same time as the upheavals in France, another sort of
revolution was taking place in Czechoslovakia, which had long
been ground under the heel of Soviet Communist orthodoxy.]


(April 5, 1968)

  During his first 100 days in power, Alexander Dubcek has
offered the 14,300,000 Czechoslovaks a bright and beckoning
vision of how to take their own special road to socialism. In
a country where for 20 years civil and personal liberties had
been mercilessly squashed, almost total freedom of expression
now reigns, the police have been put in harness and
demonstrations of every sort can take place. Dubcek, who threw
out the hardlining Antonin Novotny as party boss in January and
as President in March, has transformed Czechoslovakia into the
most liberal of Communist states.

  Censorship has been almost entirely lifted, and the press,
television and radio have exploded in an orgy of free
expression. Long-banned films, plays and books are blossoming
into production. The country's judiciary has undertaken to
review all cases heard in the 1950s in an effort to right legal
injustices, and a special commission has been established to
rehabilitate the thousands of victims of the Stalinist purge
trials of that period. Last week the Czechoslovaks even had
their first strike under Communism. Workers at an
electrical-appliance factory in Pisek walked out in complaint
against management--and did not come back until the manager
signed a resolution to reform.

  Dubcek also believes that the party should win support among
the people for its ideas; he seems genuinely to want his
countrymen to have a greater voice in their affairs. "Democracy
is not merely the right to utter opinions," he says, "it also
depends upon how these opinions are treated, whether the people
really have a feeling of taking part in solving important social
problems."

  Dubcek has no intention of breaking Czechoslovakia's links
with the Soviet Union and his socialist neighbors, but they view
the events in Czechoslovakia with considerable alarm. They are
all too aware that the success of Dubcek's reforms would almost
certainly have a spillover effect, causing their populaces to
seek more liberalization at home. When Dubcek was summoned to
Dresden two weeks ago to tell party bosses from Russia, Poland,
Hungary and East Germany just where he thought he was leading
Czechoslovakia, he reportedly told them that he planned no big
changes in foreign policy but intended to go right ahead with
his internal reforms. During the summit, some 12,000 Russian
troops were moved to Czechoslovakia's borders with East Germany
and Hungary, ostensibly on maneuvers; they were later withdrawn.


  [Dubcek and his reformers bravely resisted the increasing
pressure brought on them by the Soviets and their minions, the
East Germans and Poles, to abandon their liberalizing movement.
By mid-summer, the Czechoslovak leaders thought they had bought
some breathing room, having reached an agreement with the
Russians in a stormy session in the border town of Cierna. They
were wrong.]

(August 30, 1968)

  In the cool of a starry evening in the Czechoslovak capital
of Prague, vast Wenceslas Square was alive with couples
strolling arm in arm, tourists and Czechoslovaks bustling
homeward. Then, just before midnight, telephones began to jangle
as friends and relatives living in border towns frantically put
in calls to the capital. At 1:10 a.m., Radio Prague interrupted
a program of music to confirm the worst.

  Striking with stunning speed and surprise, some 200,000
soldiers of the five Warsaw Pact countries punched across the
Czechoslovak border to snuff out the eight month-old experiment
by Alexander Dubcek's regime in humanizing Communism. Russian
and East German units smashed southward from East Germany.
Forces thrusting from the Ukraine rolled across from the east.
Polish and Russian troops quickly seized the industrial city of
Ostrava in northern Czechoslovakia. Some 250 Soviet T-54 tanks
raced from Hungary into the Slovak capital of Bratislava. They
hit the city at an awesome tank speed of 35 m.p.h., their
smoking treads churning up the asphalt as they knocked down
lampposts, street signs, even automobiles that stood in their
way.

  Forbidden by the Dubcek government to shoot back at the
overwhelming force of invaders, the Czechoslovaks, from high
army officers down to shoeshine boys, quickly established a
principle and stuck to it through the days that followed:
anything that the Warsaw Pack intruders wanted done they must
do themselves. With few exceptions, the invaders found no
collaborators.

  It was morning before most Czechosolvaks came face to face
with the reality of the invasion, and by then tanks were
lumbering through the streets of Prague and the entire country
lay in the vise of Soviet power. The occupation force was
largely in place: twelve Russian mechanized divisions, one
division of troops from Poland and one from East Germany.

  Throughout the country, black flags of mourning appeared on
buildings, statues and monuments. On walls, barn doors, highway
signs, cars and store windows, the Czechoslovaks tacked up
posters and chalked messages demanding in all the languages of
the Warsaw Pact that the invaders go home.

  The Czechoslovaks mobilized all their resources to baffle,
stymie and frustrate their occupiers. The campaign was directed
and inspired by radio stations that continued to operate
secretly throughout the country--reportedly with transmitters
provided by the Czechoslovak army--after the Russians had shut
down the regular government transmitter. "We have no weapons,
but our contempt is stronger than tanks," proclaimed one such
station near Bratislava.

  People moved so many road signs and town markers in order to
misdirect Soviet troops that it was impossible for a stranger
to find his way without constantly consulting a map. They also
switched number and name signs on houses and apartments so that
Soviet security police could not find Czechoslovaks whom they
sought to arrest.

  So resourceful were the Czechoslovaks that they held a
conference that was one of the irritants leading to the invasion
right under the Russians' nose. With Russian troops everywhere
in and around Prague, the special party congress that had been
set for Sept. 9 convened in the CKD machine-tool factory in a
Prague suburb. More than 1,200 out of the 1,500 delegates
elected last July to attend the congress managed to reach the
secret meeting place. Many were smuggled inside dressed in blue
overalls and carrying fake identity cards; a few with familiar
faces were brought to the plant hidden in factory ambulances.
They promptly elected not only a liberalized Central Committee
but a new party Presidium--minus such hard-liners as Kolder and
Indra. Dubcek, who was in Russian custody, was again named party
chief by the delegates, who also issued a declaration demanding
that the Soviet armies leave the country.


  [The Soviets ground away at the Czechoslovak leaders and
their policies, summoning them repeatedly for tongue-lashings
in Moscow. When their humiliation was complete, Dubcek and
company were dismissed from office and a team of compliant hacks
installed.

  The invasion gave rise to what has come to be known as the
"Brezhnev Doctrine."]

(October 18, 1968)

  The Russians have a special phrase to describe their
relationship with the Eastern European Communist countries
within their sphere of influence. It is "sotsialisticheskoe
sodruzhestvo," which, translated into English, has a reassuring
and almost beneficent ring: Socialist Commonwealth. Since the
invasion of Czechoslovakia, however, the term has acquired a new
and ominous meaning. It has come to reflect a departure in
Soviet policy that some people suggest should be called the
Brezhnev Doctrine, after Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev,
whose brutal and brusque attitude toward the Czechoslovak
leaders has made him a symbol of the Soviet Union's belligerent
mood.

  In the past, of course, the Soviets have always regarded it
their duty to defend Communism against the imperialists. But
now, as enunciated by Soviet Foreign Secretary Andrei Gromyko
at the U.N. and by Pravda, the official party newspaper, the
Soviet Union asserts the right to intervene in any member
country of the Socialist Commonwealth where the purity or
supremacy of the party might be threatened.