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New book explores Russian view of Warsaw Pact invasion of ‘68

  14:37

‘Invasion 1968. The Russian View’ features the emotional reflections of Russian soliders, dissidents and journalists on the seminal event

Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968; the last Soviet soldier left the country in 1991, and the Pact was dissolved on July 1 that year foto: © ČTKČeská pozice

For the 43-year anniversary of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia on 21 August 1968, a recently released book maps the thinly explored Russian side of the traumatic event in Czech history. Compiled and edited by Czech Television’s former Moscow anchor, Josef Pazderka, “Invasion 1968. The Russian View,” looks at the moods and emotions — a psychogram, as Pazderka calls it— of Russian soldiers, dissidents and journalists involved in the August invasion.

The publication that builds on previously published works, like Adam Hradil’s “For Your Freedom and Ours” (Za vaší a naší svobodu, 2010), and draws on Pazderka’s research during his stay in Moscow, is the first comprehensive look at the Russian sentiments in the wake of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia.

“I felt that the issue of ’68 was repeatedly creeping in on a much larger scale and that it was important to record and analyze it” Pazderka said. “The book doesn’t defend anyone, it doesn’t try to justify anything — we’re just trying to outline the context and remove all those emotional barriers that have accumulated around 1968 on the Czech and Slovak end, and look at the other side through the eyes of specific individuals, specific experiences and specific emotions.”

The Soviet-led invasion that was supposed to stifle the liberal reforms of the Communist Party’s First Secretary Alexander Dubček — who famously called for “Socialism with a human face” — is still an emotionally charged topic for Czechs and Slovaks. As STEM’s 2008 poll for Hospodářské noviny shows, 64 percent of Czechs feel that the time hasn’t come to forgive Russia. In fact, 59 percent expressed fear of Russia 40 years after the invasion.

Crushed hopes

Pazderka notes, though, that Soviet public’s empathy for Czechs and Slovaks in ‘68 was actually more common than Czechs assume. The distaste for the invasion permeated all social classes, not just liberal intelligentsia, Russian dissident and historian Alexander Daniel said.

“I feel like in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, people like to be reminded of the eight brave ones who protested on the Red Square, but, in real life, there were many more people like them,” Daniel said. ‘August 1968 isn’t only a tremendous trauma for the Czech and Slovak society but also a crossroads and trauma for the Soviet society.’

“August 21, 1968, isn’t only a tremendous trauma for the Czech and Slovak society but also a crossroads and trauma for the Soviet society — especially for the liberals. It was the downfall, the end and the death of a giant web of hopes that were resurfacing in the Russian society in the 1960s.”

That the movement behind  the eight who protested at Moscow’s Red Square against the invasion was much bigger is apparent from some of the testimonies featured in the book that show the hopes that parts of the Russian society invested in Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring.

“We knew what was happening in Czechoslovakia and we were watching it closely,” a veteran of the Soviet dissident movement, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, is quoted saying. “It wasn’t just about Czechs and Slovaks, but also about us. We were hoping that the politburo would think this through enough and let Czechoslovakia carry through with its experiment.”

As Pazderka writes in the introduction, Czechoslovakia wasn’t the only country to claim Prague Spring. The Khrushchev Thaw that set in during the first half of the 60s in the eastern bloc and later spilled over into Soviet satellites incited hope for reform in Russia. The Prague events encouraged younger and more open-minded Russians to believe that changes that weren’t possible at home, might take root in Czechoslovakia, and boomerang back to Russia.

The August invasion crushed all those hopes. “It was a day when all hope for a better political future of the Soviet Union withered,” Daniel said.

Phantom counter-revolution

Although information about the developments in Czechoslovakia leaked into the Soviet Union via publications like Rudé právo, Literární noviny and Otázky míru a socializmu, the Soviet soldiers who would partake in the invasion were kept isolated and well-fed with Soviet propaganda.

General Eduard Vorobyov, who headed a unit that occupied the Domažlice region, said his only sources of information were official military media that dubbed the invasion as a necessity, a “soldier’s duty” to save Czechoslovakia from a counter-revolution.

“My colleagues and I were convinced that there was someone trying to steer Czechoslovakia off its rightful socialist path and turn the country against the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries,” he said.

When the Soviet army rolled in, Vorobyov and others were taken back by the mass protests of civilians—civilians whom they were supposed to save from an alleged counter revolution. To retain morale, communication between Czechoslovak public and military personnel was cut, and, as Vorobyov noted, the army was strictly isolated.

While Vorobyov, who was the general of the last Soviet army to withdraw from Czechoslovakia, now looks back at the invasion as a mistake he was unfortunately a part of, not all accounts featured are as clear-cut. For instance, General Pavel Koshenko, who headed a division that invaded the center of Prague, remains convinced that counterrevolution existed, that crowds had been manipulated and that the Soviet army prevented the Third World War from breaking out.

Rather than laying out a black-and-white analysis, Pazderka’s book colors in fragments of a day that, according to Daniel, the Russian society still remembers  in as much detail as the invasion of Russia by Germany, Victory Day and Stalin’s death.

Martina Čermáková is a Prague-based freelance writer

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