TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/60s/60czech

Text File | 1990-12-01 | 9KB | 162 lines

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                                                    M««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.