Czechoslovakia-A Special Section The View from Prague
SHANOR, DONALD R.
Czechoslovakia—A Special Section The View from Prague By Donald R. Shanor Prague he occupation," the | young Czech scientist said, "is just beginning." We were talking over coffee in the...
...Brezhnev saw no danger in the change...
...Often a few strokes of chalk made the message clear—a swastika inside a Soviet star...
...Certainly the bullet-pocked buildings of Prague, the frightened and resentful people, the bland newspapers, and the purges of politicians and intellectuals contain no hint of victory...
...It sounded like Hearst Sunday supplement stuff, but it was true...
...I saved five years for that car, and I stayed on a waiting list three more to get it...
...To the Czechs and Slovaks, friendship meant trust and the right to conduct their affairs with as little interference as possible...
...They will be here a lot longer this time...
...Young soldiers, their heads shaved, looking by turns hostile and bored, clustered around the tanks and trucks...
...It has been reported that during the Moscow negotiations he was charged with being a "Zionist...
...Nevertheless, it went on to charge that this was "tantamount to the betrayal of this Republic...
...That, at least, seems to be what the men in the Kremlin are counting on...
...The system has two advantages: The Czechs appear to be regulating themselves, and they are bound to go further than the Soviets would just to make sure of acceptance...
...or USSR with the middle initials written like two bolts of lightning, the symbol of the SS...
...Accounts of those trials were frequent in the Prague press this spring...
...The positions of the other Moscow negotiators...
...The first time was during Brezhnev's hurried visit here last December, when the Party was about to remove Antonin Nov-otny and put the 46-year old Slovak Party Secretary in his place...
...But who could have imagined a month ago that tanks would command St...
...when Italian or French voters go to the polls, when East Germany attempts to denounce Bonn aggression and militarism, and when the Soviet Union tries to fill the seats at the November Communist summit meeting in Moscow...
...The Soviet commander left it to the Czech authorities to define what was still objectionable, and this tactic will be used increasingly in other areas of advice and control, especially in the press, broadcasting, and political parties...
...Yet as these talks bring about more and more unpopular laws and restrictions, this reserve will begin to be used up...
...Already the national unity behind Dubcek is beginning to waver a little, particularly among the students who spend their days in little discussion groups around the flag and flower draped statue of St...
...His reputation may then reach the point where it would be easy for the Soviets to cast him aside without fear of too much clamor...
...Because of the occupation at home, we had almost no information to guide us...
...Sober, intelligent men like Evgen Loebl, economic theorist and president of the state bank in Slovakia, described experiences of torture, drugging, and confessions written to please the Soviet security man in charge...
...On the other hand, he is admired —even adored—for his courage in the Moscow negotiations, for avoiding a military government or the installation of a collaborationist team headed by such pro-Soviet Presidium members as Vasil Bilak...
...This is, after all, 1968...
...How the system works was demonstrated on the second weekend of the occupation, when the Soviet military commander let it be known that the troops would stay in the central part of the city until all the signs the Soviets consider "objectionable" were scraped and washed off buildings...
...Dubcek's was the most moving: People listening on transistor radios cried as he spoke...
...These men speak Czech fluently—they were here long enough before...
...The last time was at Cierna and Bratislava, when Dubcek won the reluctant acquiescence of the five Communist states to continue reform, albeit only at the expense of a secret agreement to tone down the press and political parties...
...For example, Frantisek Kriegel, until last week a Presidium and Central Committee member, has been dropped from both bodies...
...As this is being written, it is permissible to post the names of Dubhe is far too popular to risk dismissing now...
...We were talking over coffee in the darkened lobby of one of Prague's magnificent turn-of-the-century hotels...
...The repercussions will be heard for years...
...The brutal action, the use of naked force, is nothing," he had said then...
...There is a cek and President Ludvik Svoboda on buildings...
...But the very force of the intervention showed the power of Dubcek's ideas, of his attempts to create a Communist state without censors, secret policemen, and Soviet advisers...
...But they have underestimated Dubcek in the past...
...The advisers are arriving already," the scientist said...
...Smrkovsky, however, supplied the best explanations: "It was very difficult to take any decision...
...Now, the Czechs and Slovaks know, it will be back...
...The interference was huge, of course, in the first 10 years following the 1948 coup that put the Communists in power...
...Down the block, Soviet tanks squatted in the foliage of the big city park between the business district and the railroad station...
...In the weeks and months ahead, as Dubcek must submit to the terrible pressures of continuing talks with the Russians and their allies, he can draw on the enormous reserve of trust and credit he still has with the people...
...While Dubcek clearly does not have the confidence of the Russians, tremendous personal sympathy for and identification with the Czech Party chief...
...We could have refused any compromise, but we felt we could not leave the last possibility untested...
...But I worked longer than that for what we used to call Czechoslovak-Soviet friendship...
...But time may help the Soviets do the job...
...Soviet advisers sat next to Czech bureaucrats in every important institution of government and economy...
...Every ministry, every office of any consequence will have them...
...The scientist was not referring to this aspect of the occupation, although we had met a few days earlier near the wreckage of his car after it had been sideswiped by a Soviet convoy...
...It seems incredible to imagine Stalinist prison treatment for this nation's jailed politicians and intellectuals...
...The fact that a quarter million Soviet, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Polish, and East German Troops reversed the decisions of Cierna might suggest that Dubcek really won nothing there...
...Several days earlier, after Dubcek's return from Moscow, the really provocative slogans had been removed: those demanding Czechoslovak neutrality, or proclaiming "We Are Moscow's Vietnam," or comparing Leonid Brezhnev and particularly East Germany's Walter Ulbricht to Hitler...
...A student manifesto circulated after Dubcek's return also conceded that the Party leadership had to "surrender to the brutal force of occupation...
...But a slogan writer cannot go much further into the ranks of the reformers without running the risk of offense...
...Josef Smrkovsky and Premier Old-rich Cernik...
...Their most notorious function was to stage-manage the purge trials that accompanied Stalin's last paranoiac years...
...are weak...
...Finally, even in the absence of a Czechoslovak victory, Moscow has unquestionably suffered a defeat of enormous dimensions...
...Except for those few student radicals who genuinely wanted to lay down their lives for Czechoslovakia, the nation understands that Dubcek had no choice but to reach the Moscow compromise, although this involved jeopardizing the entire reform program in exchange for a vague promise of eventual troop withdrawal...
...Each negotiator replied to the student and other criticisms in radio broadcasts following publication of the Moscow agreement...
...This is the real occupation...
...Wenceslas...
...Wenceslas Square, that Alexander Dubcek would be marched out of Central Committee headquarters by a Soviet colonel, and that flickering candles and banks of flowers in every section of the city would mark the places where 25 Czechs were killed by Russian soldiers...
Vol. 51 • September 1968 • No. 17
