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Home / News - Czechoslovakia's Season of Hope and Despair
Czechoslovakia's Season of Hope and Despair My wife Sally andI lived through the 1968 Prague Spring and Warsaw Pact invasion andwer e fortunate to be back in Czechoslovakia during the 1989 Velvet Revolution. From 1993 to 1996 we were in independent Slovakia, where I served as the first U.S. Ambassador. Following are impressions of the dramatic events we experiencedd uring our first assignment in Czechoslovakia 40 years ago. Sally, our sons Douglas, age four, andRic hard, age two, and I arrivedin Prague June 20 during the euphoria of the Prague Spring to begin my three-year assignment as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer. Our apartment, complete with listening devices installed by the Czechoslovak secret police, was in the Embassy complex across a courtyardf rom the more secure office areas. The day after we movedin we receiveda phone call. When I answered, the person on the other endo f the line whistledt he tune being played on our phonograph in the adjoining room. I startedmy work as headof the Visa Section. This was a typical "junior officer" rotation in Prague, followedthe next year with a move up to head the Consular Section anda final year as Political Officer. The euphoria Sally andI founda mong the Czech and Slovak population was basedon the overwhelming public support for First Secretary of the Communist Party Alexander Dubc?ek andthe reforms he had unleashedin Czechoslovakia beginning in January of that year. In fact this public support for change was so strong that the reform movement was escaping Communist Party control. Yearning for a new direction The reform movement sprang from many roots. The backwardness of Czechoslovakia's commandeco nomy was striking. There was a severe housing shortage, consumer goods were scarce and shoddy and the whole infrastructure of the country was in disrepair. Slovaks disliked Party First Secretary and Czechoslovak President Antonín Novotný for his anti-Slovak attitudes and opposition to the long-standing Slovak demands for greater autonomy. The intelligentsia, notably writers like Václav Havel, despised Novotn´y for his hardline policies. Anduniversity students were angry at the police brutality exhibited in putting down a peaceful student demonstration in the fall of 1967. In reaction to popular dissatisfaction with the status quo, in January 1968 Dubc?ek assumedthe role of First Secretary of the Communist Party and set out to make socialism in Czechoslovakia more efficient andto give it a "human face." Like Gorbachev 20 years later, Dubc?ek was a true believer in communism and the possibility of reforming it. In April a Communist Party Action Program was introducedwhic h stressed the need for the Party to mobilize popular support. Censorship was abolishedand Slovaks were promised greater parity with the Czechs in a new federal system. The reforms and Dubcek's personal charisma generatedpub lic enthusiasm. Czechs began to react with wry humor to endless regime propaganda about the superiority of all things Soviet. Students in a demonstration I observed in Old Town Square danced around the statue of Jan Hus chanting, "Soviet watches are the biggest andf astest in the whole world." Soviet confrontation Soviet Bloc Party chiefs Leonid Brezhnev, Walter Ulbricht, Wladyslaw Gomulka andJáno s Kádár were not amused. It appeared to them that Dubc?ek hadunle ashed popular expectations that he couldn ot control. They soon began expressing grave concerns with Dubcek's leadership. Their concerns intensified as the Czechoslovak media began addressing sensitive topics including the suspected murder of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk after the 1948 communist coup andthe slaughter of thousands of Polish officers in Katyn forest. They were further concernedby the scheduling of the Extraordinary Communist Party Congress for September 9 to ratify and expandthe reforms andchange s already made. In a series of meetings with the Czechoslovak Party leadership, Brezhnev and his allies demanded with increasing vehemence that Dubc?ek put a brake on the reform process, muzzle the press andr eplace leading reformers. Warsaw Pact military exercises in andar oundCzechoslova kia gave the Soviets the capability to intervene at any time. Warsaw Pact forces movedinto Czechoslovakia beginning at about 11 p.m. the evening of August 20. Czechoslovak Radio broadcast a message from the Presidium of the Central Committee stating that the intervention was without warning and against international law, but urging citizens not to resist the invasion forces. The 14th Extraordinary Party Conference took place secretly in a Prague factory soon after the invasion. Delegates electedby secret ballot approved a number of reform measures. However, Dubc?ek andhi s top supporters were in the meantime hauledof f to Moscow. They were forcedto sign a Protocol declaring the results of the 14th Congress invalid andag reeing to try to reign in the media and" normalize" the situation. The Prague Spring reform movement was doomed, although it took seven months for Dubc?ek to be removed. Embassy response After the invasion, the U.S. Embassy under Ambassador Jacob Beam worked to evacuate the thousands of Americans in Prague, organizing auto convoys to the West German border. A special train to Vienna was procured by our Embassy Economic Counselor Ken Skoug through a contact at the Transport Ministry. On August 20 I hadd riven Sally and our ailing son Douglas to a helicopter pick-up point at the West German border to be evacuated to the U.S. military hospital in Nuremberg for what had been diagnosed at the Prague Children's Hospital as acute appendicitis. He actually had severe gastroenteritis. I drove back with several other Embassy officers on August 22. I was immediately involved in the evacuation effort, including the registration of departing American citizens for our special train. A few days after the invasion two Soviet soldiers occupied the Embassy Pavilion at the top of our garden. The head of our Political & Economic Section, Mark Garrison, marchedup with two Embassy Marine guards, hoisteda U.S. flag and ordered them out. Not knowing what the Soviets intended, Embassy officers had been burning sensitive documents in our incinerator. The flue overheated and caught the roof on fire. Later an intruder came through the burned hole in the roof into attic space above our classifiedoffice area. He was chasedaw ay by Marine guards, but the Embassy then mobilizedthe junior officers including me and had us patrol the attic with flashlights and. 45s. A dream deferred As key elements of the reform movement were suppressed, the popular mood became increasingly pessimistic. In a protest against the Soviet occupation, Charles University philosophy student Jan Palach set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square on January 16, 1969, dying several days later. In all, 26 protest suicides were attemptedd uring the next three months, with seven resulting deaths. The crackdown intensified. In late March, Czechoslovakia twice defeated the USSR hockey team in the WorldChampio nship finals in Stockholm. The second victory by 4-3 on March 28 provokedmassive public celebrations that evening. A likely police provocation resultedin stones being thrown through the Aeroflot office windows in Wenceslas Square. This event was used to force the resignation of Dubcek; he was replacedas Party Secretary by a hard-line Slovak, Gustáv Husák, on April 17. I monitoreda demonstration in Wenceslas Square in August 1969 — the anniversary of the invasion — which was harshly put down. There followed a massive purge of the Czechoslovak Communist Party anda return to a repressive regime which lastedfo r the next 20 years. I left Prague with my wife and family in June 1971, deeply saddened by the bleak situation faced by Czechs and Slovaks. Reprinted with permission from Slovo, the biannual journal of the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Volume 8, Number 2, Winter 2007-08. |