1968 (52 page)
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 Dub
ek, ›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.