Topic Three - Reading One
THIRTY YEARS LATER, CZECHS STILL DEBATE LEGACY OF 1968
by Jeremy Bransten
It has been 30 years since Soviet troops rolled down Wenceslas Square and the Prague Spring was crushed under the metallic tread of tanks on cobblestones. But this year, there will be no big anniversaries, no national outpouring of emotion such as in February, when the hockey team won the gold medal at Nagano and half of Prague spilled out onto the streets.
A decade ago, with public opinion muzzled, and Soviet troops still occupying Czechoslovakia, the 20th anniversary of the 1968 invasion had deep resonance. But today, even the 1989 Velvet Revolution seems an increasingly distant memory. And those who remember are asking: Does the Prague Spring have any meaning for Czechs today, 30 years after its premature death?
Political scientist Bohumil Pecinka doesn't think so. He says that most people prefer to look to the period before the Communist takeover in 1948, rather than to the 1968 interlude. "After 1989, and the Velvet Revolution," he says, "there wasn't a return to 1968, but a return to 1948, or more accurately, to before 1948, when democracy was destroyed in our country. And the majority of people now look at 1968 as an attempt by the Communist elite to humanize the then Communist regime--not to change it." Yet 1968 was much more than that. Although it was originally devised as a modest reform program within the Czechoslovak Communist Party, the Prague Spring quickly mushroomed into a grassroots movement. And when it was crushed, for a brief few day newspapers splashed photos across their front pages of a sad, defiant people meeting tanks with clenched fists. Prague became synonymous with the dashed hopes of a generation. But the world's attention soon shifted, until another revolution came, whose velvet embrace swept those humiliating memories away.
The cobblestones are the same, but these days, wandering down Wenceslas Square, where the American Express and McDonald's outlets disgorge flocks of admiring backpackers, it's hard to conjure up the tanks, or the heady atmosphere of 1968. The only Russians you'll see today are nouveau rich "biznemeni" who cruise by in their BMWs. A small wooden cross and a plaque dedicated "in memory of the victims of Communism" mark the spot where in 1969, Jan Palach, a 20-year-old student, immolated himself to protest the Soviet invasion. Tourists take photos, and move on to the T-shirt stands.
Remembering hurts in this country, says Pecinka. "The Communist system was so well perfected that anyone who wanted to live here and not just exist had to somehow conform...to make lots of small compromises. And people don't want to recall that," he explains.
Ludvik Vaculik, a leading Czech writer, is one local who didn't compromise and who likes to remember. Vaculik published the "2,000 Words" declaration in the summer of 1968. The manifesto called for true democratic change in Czechoslovakia, from the ground up, directly challenging the regime's role in leading reform. Moscow branded the document counter-revolutionary and used its publication, in part, to justify the invasion.
Vaculik says the Prague Spring still has great significance, but many people prefer to ignore it. "The legacy of 1968 is that people, at that time, stepped away from their personal interests and careers and understood that there was a common task. It was an ability to rise above things and act as a human whole--and this, with our new freedom, is now being whittled away." Vaculik notes that the lessons of the Prague Spring are more appreciated in the West than in the East, and he adds that without wanting to, Czechoslovakia became the sacrificial lamb that helped dispel any myths about Eastern European Communism.
"This whole process and all of 1968 had greater significance for Europe than for us. The leftist intelligentsia in Europe learned what the USSR was all about--what kind of power it was--and that socialism in the Soviet mold was unreformable.
Although he spent the next 20 years shuttling from one interrogation cell to another, for Vaculik the Prague Spring was worth the personal cost." It really can't be measured by the standard of was it worth it or not," he says. "No, that's not important. It was necessary. Some people stood the test, and some simply did not."
Historian Pavel Zacek explains the Sisyphean struggle he faces. Zacek, a one-time student activist, is now deputy director of the Office for the Documentation and Investigation of Communist Crimes. The office is a part of the Interior Ministry. Its task is to investigate the activities of the former State Security apparatus and compile evidence against individuals who committed specific crimes on behalf of repressive institutions.
On paper, the office enjoys broad powers - more power in fact, than any other such body in Eastern Europe. Its staff-members, as Interior Ministry employees, have broad access to classified files and have prepared indictments against scores of individuals, including some of the main actors in the post-1968 "normalization" period. But the indictments must then proceed to the courts, where they are often thrown out.
But Zacek says he is not after punishment. He just wants Czech society to honestly assess its past so that it can move on to a secure democratic future. "We have to bear in mind that some of these perpetrators are 70- to 80-year-old pensioners. The point is not to lock them up, but to decide that what they did was a crime and for society to acknowledge that among it are criminals. Without this assignation of blame, society cannot come to terms with its past, accept a democratic order, and move forward."
The author is an RFE/RL editor based in Prague.
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