Two thousand years ago, Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem. And two hundred years ago to the day, to celebrate that birth, the song “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht” (“Silent Night, Holy Night”) was first performed in a small church near Salzburg, Austria. So important is this hymn in the Western Christian world that UNESCO declared it an “intangible cultural heritage” in 2011.

So I'm proud to present my video below, singing all three of the original German verses.

Back in 1993, when “Silent Night” turned 175, I had the privilege of leading a group of my Slovak secondary-school students in a rendition. Since they had a language-focused curriculum, they were quite capable of pulling off the quadrilingual version: the original German text, followed by verses in English and French, and finally Slovak, the home language.

As far as travel goes, I’ve been in the Salzburg region several times, but I’ve still never made it to the Silent Night Chapel. It's not the original building where it was performed – that St. Nicholas Church was demolished due to severe flood damage in the late 1800s. The new chapel was completed in 1924, spurred in part by the desire to honor the 100th anniversary of the song in 1918 – but that came at a very difficult time at the end of World War I.

This fact fits in with my numerous writings on anniversaries this year, many having to do with the tumult of a century ago, but also with subjects like the 50th anniversary of the Prague Spring and subsequent Soviet invasion.

I’ll post an essay on that subject later in the week. Till then, keep safe, and enjoy your holidays!

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
 
That’s my favorite quote from Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. Although I could choose many others, I think this one reflects his understanding of both human fallibility and the misguided attempts of totalitarian systems to “cure” society.
 
The Russian writer and Nobel laureate was born on this day in 1918 in Kislovodsk, a spa town of the North Caucasus. Although a decorated officer in World War II, he was arrested near the end of the conflict on spurious charges of anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation, and spent eight years in prisons and labor camps, followed by internal exile, before being exonerated under Khrushchev. His fictional work One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, about the struggles of prisoners in penal colonies to merely survive, was published in 1962. It received official approval, as the new regime sought to expose the horrific abuses of Stalinism.
 
But after Brezhnev removed Khrushchev in 1964, conditions again became repressive, and Solzhenitsyn not only was unable to publish, he also had to hide manuscripts from the KGB. He was kicked out of the Writers’ Union in 1969, meaning he could no longer publish (except by samizdat or “self-publication,” which was illegal). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 but could not receive it in Stockholm. In 1973, his three-volume Gulag Archipelago was published in France. The work documented the atrocities of the Soviet prison system under Stalin, in large part through the personal experiences of 227 victims. It seared the term ‘gulag’ into the conscience of humanity.
 
As a result, authorities expelled him from the Soviet Union the following year. (Poet Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, whose death I covered in April 2017, suffered reprisals from the authorities for his moral support of Solzhenitsyn at the time of his expulsion, something I failed to mention in that article.) He picked up his Nobel in Stockholm later, when the 1974 prizes were awarded. He eventually settled in the U.S. in a small town in Vermont. He became increasingly isolated (a local gas station at one point posted a sign: “No directions to the Solzhenitsyns”), as he refused to temper his criticism of the West as well as that of the Soviet Communist Party. He caused quite a stir with his 1978 Harvard commencement address condemning American materialism.
 
He continued to work on various books from his Vermont residence. His Soviet citizenship was restored in 1990 under Gorbachev, and he finally returned to Russia in 1994, after the disintegration of the USSR, when he famously took a train journey from Vladivostok across the country.
 
When I made my first trip to Russia for language study in the summer of 1995, I was curious about the author, having read parts of Gulag Archipelago in college. As I was living year-round in Slovakia at the time, I told one of my students (I taught English a couple of hours per week) I'd chosen to go to Czechoslovakia in 1990 in large part because of the presidency of playwright/political prisoner Vaclav Havel. My student couldn’t resist asking, “So if Solzhenitsyn becomes president, you will move to Russia?”
 
Back then Solzhenitsyn had a twice-monthly TV program, which I watched with my host mother. She would interpret his political commentary into simplified Russian when necessary, as well as fill in the background. I could understand things like his parody of tendentiously worded referendum questions: “Do you want this wonderful, brilliant [measure] – ili nyet, or not.” My host mother explained the cronyism in the sale of previously state-owned factories, using the then widespread term priskhvatizatsia, a blend of ‘privatization’ and the verb meaning ‘snatch up.’
 
Solzhenitsyn became a backer of Putin in the early 2000s, a position from which he never swayed before his death in 2008. While he is associated with the Russian right’s emphasis on Orthodoxy and other traditions, he lambasted the far right’s obsession with conspiracy theories involving Free Masonry and world Jewry. Some commentators have found latent anti-Semitism in his works, yet Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Elie Wiesel claimed the man was "too intelligent, too honest, too courageous, too great a writer" to be an anti-Semite.
 
Whatever his faults and controversies, he should be celebrated for his contributions to literature and history.
 

For a somewhat more detailed treatment of Solzhenitsyn's life, I suggest this commentary from Dr. Angela Brintlinger of The Ohio State University, whom I had the pleasure to know in my years of graduate study there.

Part 3 of a 3-part series.

​Please read:
Part 1: "End of WWI & of Austria-Hungaria: But the Tragedy Continues"
Part 2: "The Troubles of (Dividing) Empire"

Although multi-ethnic society under Habsburg rule gives many positive examples of supranational ideals, in practice there were a lot of historical inequalities that led to its breakup. 

Czechs had resented Austrian domination, especially since the Battle of the White Mountain, the first big conflagration in the Thirty Years’ War. In the aftermath, rebelling Bohemian Protestant nobles were punished severely. The main offenders had their severed heads placed atop pikes on the entrance to Prague’s Charles Bridge as an example for all who passed by. Worse still, for the Czech nation, was the confiscation of Protestant Czechs’ property and their replacement with German-speaking Catholic landlords. The Czech language fell into disuse in education and administration.

Some Czechs like to say that the Austrians banned their language for three centuries. The truth is a bit more complicated. Czech language enjoyed a resurgence in the nineteenth century. At one point, imperial officials required that all functionaries in Bohemia and Moravia would have to know Czech as well as German. The German bureaucrats, many of whose families had held cushy posts for generations, were outraged. Czechs, who were much more likely to be bilingual, would be at a distinct advantage. We should also consider the fact that, by 1900, Czech literacy had reached 97 percent, whereas among Germans it was only one point higher. Property requirements for suffrage had been eliminated in Austria; every male 23 or older had the right to vote.

But things were different in the Hungarian part of the dual monarchy, which had been created in 1867 to give the Maygars—really just the aristocrats—more autonomy vis-à-vis Vienna. And these elites resisted the sort of universal male suffrage that had been enacted in the Austrian part of the empire, in spite of Emperor Franz Joseph’s urging.

Here’s another point at which narratives can get oversimplified. Many Slovaks claim that “the Magyars oppressed us for a thousand years, tried to force us all to speak their tongue.” There is scant evidence that in the first few centuries after the Hungarian conquest there was any attempt to Magyarize the Slavic population.

Ludovit Stur, the leading nationalist who codified the Slovak language in the 1840s, wrote a treatise called the “Old and New Age of the Slovaks,” in which the “old” age was the first centuries after the establishment of the Kingdom of Hungary, a polyglot society which used Latin as a lingua franca for high-level official communications. Of course, few people received any education—and those who did got it through Latin—so there is no argument about Slovak-language schools versus Hungarian-language instruction. It was only in the eighteenth century—the beginning of Stur’s “New Age”—that Magyar first became privileged over Slovak (or Croatian or Rumanian). The process of Magyarization—of forced assimilation to the Hungarian language—didn’t get seriously underway until the 1820s or so. And this happened through institutions of the church—including Protestant churches, as Stur well knew from his own experiences—at least as much as through institutions of state. At least until the Hungarian government began shutting down Slovak secondary schools in the 1860s, two decades after Stur’s death.

So while oppression of Slovaks was relatively new, Czechs had had legitimate grievances going back to 1620. But most of the institutional discrimination against the latter had been eliminated by 1900, even if the Czech still had a lot of catching up to do vis-à-vis the Germans.

It’s also worth noting that government discrimination against Jews in Austria-Hungary had been eliminated by Franz Joseph’s decree in 1860. Other forms of progress, such as health insurance for working-class subjects, had been implemented. It was a land that Jewish-Viennese writer Stefan Zweig could call “World of Security,” the title to the opening chapter of The World of Yesterday. The book describes growing up during the reign of Franz Joseph and seeing this homeland ruined. Another Jewish Austrian, Joseph Roth, wrote in a preface to his novel The Radetzky March that he “loved this homeland with all its faults.”

Because much of what followed was far worse than Habsburg “oppression”: Hitler and then forty years of Communist-Party rule.

One other question that might be raised is whether the Danubian monarchy could have reformed itself, could have presided over a looser, more democratic confederation. Both Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Emperor Karl had such aims. Indeed, the creation of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-hyphen-Hungary had led some to believe that a Trial Monarchy, with Slavs as the third pillar of the state, was the next step. Plans for Franz Joseph’s coronation as King of Bohemia around 1870, which would have been a nod in the direction of the Czechs, were scrapped for fear of upsetting the Magyars. Bedrich Smetana had even composed the opera Libuše for the occasion, which never happened.
With or without speculating about might have been, we should seek a more nuanced understanding about what really was.

There have been two positive developments in this direction, both attempts to restore those toppled statues. In Prague, sculptor Petr Vana has worked fifteen years without pay to create a replica of the Marian statue. But the debate rages, with one artist comparing it to restoring a Stalin monument. Others argue that it should stand on the square along with John Huss, the fifteenth century reformer, as a sign that the city welcomes a variety of religious opinions.

In Bratislava, Martina Zimanova has created a scaled-down replica of the Maria Theresa statue based on photos and remaining fragments. It stood in front of the downtown Hotel Carlton near the National Theater for a while. But this past March 15, the city council decided it should move to a less prominent location.

Perhaps one day, if the wounds of the past don’t fester too much, Czechs and Slovaks will reconcile with the imperial past. Maybe they’ll even learn to be proud of it.

First in a series of three this week.
Please see also: Part 2: The Troubles of (Dividing) Empire
              Part 3: Austria-Hungary's Nations: From Resentment to Reconciliation?


I founded this website in anticipation of my 2014 trip to Sarajevo for the centenary of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, and to other European destinations marking the outbreak of World War I. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be in Paris today to mark the end of the war. For millions, the end of suffering, dying and killing. But only for 20 years.

France's President Macron used the occasion to warn of growing nationalism today. Indeed, it was nationalism that started the war. And regardless of your opinion—positive or negative—of Austria-Hungary, it was a nationalist’s bullet that plunged the empire into war, and nationalism that tore it apart in the end. Arguably, the state had been a bulwark against nationalism.

In my last blog post, I cautiously celebrated the centenary of Czechoslovakia’s founding. ‘Cautiously,’ noting that the country had real freedom for barely a quarter-century total, from 1918-1938, in the aftermath of WWII from 1945-48, and again from 1989-92. And I lamented that, even though it was probably the most democratic state to emerge in Central Europe after WWI, it was fraught with problems.

It’s those problems I’d like to focus on today (and in the coming days in the continuations of this post) in reflecting on the passing of Austria-Hungary.

I say ‘today,’ but there is no precise date for the last day of that empire. Czechoslovak statehood had been declared on October 28, 1918, in anticipation of the armistice. When that came on November 11, the last emperor, Karl, signed a carefully worded statement granting the German-Austrian people the right to form a new state. He also relinquished the reins of government, but he avoided the word ‘abdication.’ Although some saw it as just that, he continued to believe he was a rightful sovereign. He also released a similar declaration to the people of Hungary two days later.

Mary and Maria Theresa: Two Statues Fall
Some Czechs might want to consider November 3 as the end of the empire, for that’s the day on which they symbolically toppled it on Prague’s Old Town Square. The object in question was a Marian column, erected in 1652 to celebrate the end of the Thirty Years’ War. For Czech Protestants, at least, it was a vestige of Catholic Habsburg domination. Crowds gathered with ropes to pull it down and both the statue of the Virgin and the column broke into several pieces which are today found in the Lapidarium of the National Museum.

While the column may have represented the victory of Catholic forces in a very religious war, it also expressed gratitude to Mary for saving Bohemia from the marauding of Swedish troops. Whether Czech Protestants really welcomed these fellow believers from Scandinavia is a matter that doesn’t seem to get much debate. At any rate, the mob which pulled it down destroyed a priceless piece of baroque sculpture. The instigator, so I’ve read, later regretted it.

Similarly, a group of Czechoslovak legion soldiers in Bratislava tied ropes to a statue of Maria Theresa in October 1921 and pulled it down with a truck. This empress had been crowned Apostolic Queen of Hungary—one of her numerous titles—in 1841 in Bratislava. At the time the city was called Pressburg in German, Presporok in Slovak, and Pozsony in Hungarian. It had served as the capital of the Kingdom of Hungary since Turks invaded Budapest in the mid-sixteenth century.

Curiously, there is little reason to consider her coronation, the subject of the statue, as a symbol of oppression. After all, she issued an edict, De Ratio Educationis, calling for education in pupils’ native tongues, something Slovak rights activists had to keep struggling for. The fact that the coronation ceremony took place in St. Martin’s Church in the center of town ought to be a proud part of Bratislava history.

But the rub is that Pressburg/Presporok/Pozsony was a trilingual capital, and that had to change in the new nation-state. It was re-christened Bratislava, and eventually became overwhelmingly Slovakized. Homogenization was the new trend. The old empire had at least represented pluralism – even if its record was inconsistent.

I’ll take up some thornier issues in my next post. Look for it Thursday!

It’s now been a hundred years to the day since the creation of Czechoslovakia, a country which has been very much a part of my life. It was the fulfillment of the aspiration of Czechs and Slovaks to have a state of their own. The United States, as suggested by the Pittsburgh Agreement of May 1918, drafted by representatives of those two nationalities in exile as World War I was winding down, played a key role in its formation. But the fact that Czechoslovakia unraveled within two years of my arrival also shows how fragile the experiment was from the beginning.

I came to Czechoslovakia in October 1990, enthusiastic about the country’s emergence from four decades of Communist Party rule, its playwright-president Vaclav Havel, and prospects for democratic development. Education for Democracy, an organization that placed U.S., Canadian and other native-English speakers in schools and universities there, sent me to Martin, a Slovak provincial town of fifty thousand in the mountains. I was a little disappointed not to be assigned to Prague, now bustling with new ideas and new-found freedom. And where I might just run into Havel enjoying an intellectual discussion over Pilsner in one of the city’s many pubs.

While that hope was a bit unrealistic, imagine my excitement when I learned Havel would be visiting Martin barely two weeks after I’d settled in there. The occasion was the ratification of Czechoslovak statehood there on 30 October 1918, two days after its declaration in Prague. Which may be surprising unless you know that Martin had been Slovakia’s unofficial cultural capital in the mid-19th century, and continues to house institutions dedicated to preserving Slovak heritage.

As much as Havel was there to celebrate the country’s birth, he also wanted to warn against division. He cited a short story by Slovak author Martin Kukucin, about two poor brothers who worked hard and overcame difficulty but finally prospered. Then, others became envious and tried to divide them, knowing that then they would be weaker.

The reference to nationalist Slovak politicians, cynically exploiting old resentments about hegemony from Prague, and ready to gain power at the expense of national unity, was clear. But it also became clear to me over the next two years that the original founding of Czechoslovakia was fraught with problems.

The Czechs, in 1918, had had understandable grievances against the Austrians, and the Slovaks had suffered much under Hungarian rule. But the new state, carved out of the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy, inevitably contained sizeable German-speaking and Magyar minorities. Some observers held out hopes that the fledgling Central European republic would be a “new Switzerland.” But the treatment of these minorities was not necessarily the best. Once the Hungarian population of Bratislava fell below the 20-percent threshold necessary to guarantee certain rights, all the Magyar-language street names in the city were covered over in thick black paint.

But in many other ways, the democratic Czechoslovakia was an example to the rest of Central Europe. Unfortunately, ethnic tensions surround the German-speaking minority in Czech areas resulted in the Sudeten Crisis of 1938, the Munich Pact allowing Hitler to occupy those areas, and his takeover of all of Bohemia and Moravia the following March. Slovakia became a nominally independent Nazi puppet state.

The post-war years saw the expulsion of German populations and the communist takeover in the coup of February 1948. Then the experiment with “Socialism with a Human Face” in 1968, which ended in that August’s invasion of Warsaw Pact tanks. (Czech history has a habit of happening “on the 8’s.”) Finally, 1989’s Velvet Revolution ushered out the communists, and ushered in democracy.

Sort of. But then came the populist movements I’ve mentioned already. I didn’t realize it at the time, but they would become a harbinger of what we’re currently seeing now, even in the U.S., the UK, in Germany with it’s AfD, and elsewhere.

Czechoslovakia only had twenty years to blossom in the interwar period, and it never had a great chance due to the economic depression of those time. Then it had a breath of freedom after WWII, then the Prague Spring, then the Velvet Revolution.

So, over a period of roughly seventy years, with interruptions, the country enjoyed maybe twenty-five years of something reasonably approaching freedom and prosperity. Which is still more than the majority of the human race can say.
​
At any rate, let’s learn from this history, and try to imitate the best of Czechoslovakia. And hope that the peoples of Central Europe will have a better future.

28 September, Feast of St. Wenceslas (Cz. Václav, Gm. Wenzel), Patron of Bohemia. Martyred A.D. 929 (or 935) in Stará Boleslav.

Probably best known to most English speakers from the Christmas carol “Good King Wenceslas,” this Central European saint was actually a duke. To those who've been to Prague, he's best known for the large equestrian statue at the head of Wenceslas Square. Crowds gathered around him - and four other Czech saints surrounding the plinth - in 1968, as Soviet tanks rumbled over the cobblestones, and in the protests of 1989 which finally brought freedom. Although Czechs are widely reputed for lack of religion, they still widely look up to him as an essential symbol of their nation and state.

There is an 

The carol reflects largely on legend about his doing good works for the poor, which is accurate from the standpoint of the hagiographical material. In addition to his charity, he was known for promoting peace and Christianity, tearing down pagan idols, and growing grain and wine for communion.

Wenceslas (b. 907 [903?] near Prague) was the grandson of Bořivoj, a ruler of Bohemia who had converted to Christianity, but many of whose powerful relatives remained pagan. Bořivoj’s wife was St. Ludmila, who oversaw Wenceslas’ upbringing until he attended a Latin school in Budeč. Ludmila assisted in this Christian education by her chaplain Paul, who was a disciple of St. Methodius and had personally baptized Wenceslas.

Wenceslas’ parents were Vratislav, who ruled Bohemia from 915, and Drahomíra, who according to Butler’s was “daughter of the chief of the Veletians, a Slav tribe from the north.” Wenceslas’ younger Brother was Boleslav (Boleslaus). After Vratislav was killed in fighting with the Magyars (Hungarians), Drahomíra, who was nominally Christian, adopted a policy hostile to the new religion. From this time, around 922 or 923, Wenceslas reigned under his mother’s regency. Against this backdrop, St. Ludmila encouraged Wenceslas to assume full power. Two nobles went to Ludmila’s castle at Tetín and strangled her in order to end her influence over him and to hinder Wenceslas’ ascension, but Wenceslas managed to take over the reins of state in 924 or 925.

According to one source (Životy), Wenceslas had his mother banished for the crime; another (Butler’s) claims that he recalled her to court from Budeč after her banishment and that “there is no evidence that for the future she ever opposed Wenceslaus.” Životy also states that Wenceslas had his grandmother’s remains transferred to Prague.
Wenceslas acquired relics of St. Vitus, a saint of Saxony, from Henry I (the Fowler), with whom the young Bohemian ruler pursued peace, recognizing the Saxon as the legitimate successor of Charlemagne. According to legend, Henry saw on Wenceslas’ helmet a luminous cross and two angels and excused him for his late arrival at an imperial council. According to another legend, rival prince Radslav also saw this sign when about to fight with Wenceslas, who had sought a duel in order to avoid greater bloodshed, and acknowledged the sovereignty of the latter.

His conciliatory policies and his promotion of Christianity garnered for Wenceslaus many enemies among those nobles still practicing paganism. Boleslav apparently conspired with them after the birth of Wenceslas’ son, which effectively cut off the younger brother’s path to the throne. Boleslav invited Wenceslas to his home in Stará Boleslav for the feast of Cosmas and Damian. The next morning, as Wenceslas was going to mass, his brother and his co-conspirator’s killed him. The saint’s dying words were, “Brother, may God forgive you.”

Wenceslas was first buried in the Church of Sts. Cosmas and Damian in Stará Boleslav, but his remains were removed three years later, at the behest of Boleslav, to the Cathedral of St. Vitus in Prague, which Wenceslas had been active in building.

Of interest:
The Crown of St. Wenceslas, probably first worn by Charles IV (b. 1316, d. 1378), has become an important symbol of Czech statehood. His feast day is an official holiday, Czech Statehood Day, in the Czech Republic.

There used to be a YouTube video with music composed (based on an ancient choral to the saint) in the autumn of 1989, and showing various stages of Communist oppression in the former Czechoslovakia, from the show trial of Milada Horáková, to the Warsaw Pact Invasion of 1968, to the downfall of Communism (it began with images of the infamous Pankrác Prison and ends with its destruction). The music is a very touching song invoking the saint’s aid: Saint Wenceslas, do not go away and remain with us, do not abandon us. Below is a video of my rendition of the song for the 25th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, including my English rendition, starting (with some spoken intro) at around 10:00.

Sources:
Životy svätých: Ikonografia. Ivan Rusina, Marian Zervan. Bratislava: Pallas, 1994.
Butler’s Lives of the Saints: Concise Edition, Revised and Updated. Michael Walsh, ed. San Francisco: Harper, 1991. 

With all the anniversaries this year – end of WWI and birth of new states, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in ’68 – it’s easy to lose sight of some. Fortunately, I’ve not been able to lose sound of this one, as Public Radio has broadcast any number of flashbacks on his life and creativity.
 
As a teenager, I listened to West Side Story repeatedly enough to really get the social justice message of the lyrics – by Stephen Sondheim with Bernstein’s score, and of course the latter was totally on board with the themes on racism, addiction, poverty, and violence. I was a marching band kid with plenty of exposure to classical and other music through piano lessons, school, and my parents’ record collection. The latter also contained the red-jacketed West Side Story, whose content was racier than they probably realized. Anyway, I really went for the mix of jazz, Latino, and modern.
 
I finally saw WSS onscreen in college, but my next major “encounter” with Bernstein came when I, still delirious over the fall of East Bloc communism, saw clips of his conducting Beethoven’s 9th at the Berlin Wall on New Year’s 1990. I’d recently come to appreciate that work, thought this paean to humanity the perfect way to celebrate the reunion of East and West, and so was enthralled with Bernstein once again.
 
Then I departed for Europe for the first time, headed to Czechoslovakia by way of Vienna, to teach English in this newly free part of Europe. As the plane began descending, CNN came on the projection screen and announced Bernstein’s death. I couldn’t help but feel their was some significance to it all, that Bernstein’s “end” and my new beginning were interconnected.
 
So here’s to you, Leonard Bernstein: may you continue to inspire those seek to unite with music – and by countless other means!

​“Normalization”
The occupation was denounced by a Communist Party congress as the tanks were prowling. But within days, Dubcek was forced to sign “Moscow Protocols” reversing much of his reforms. While he was allowed to remain in power for several months more, he and Svoboda were eventually replaced with hard-liners.
 
Then followed a period of “normalization,” a return to a stricter, more old-fashioned socialism. A third of Party members were purged. Intellectuals were forced to renounce the declarations they’d signed, censorship was restored. Dubcek briefly worked a diplomatic stint in Turkey—where he would be out of the way—but soon after was expelled from the Communist Party and went to work for the Forestry Department.
 
Despair overwhelmed much of the populace. No one captured the sensation better than Czech folk singer Karel Kryl, who composed Bratricku, zavirej vratka (“Little Brother, Close the Gate”) the day after the invasion. Kryl soon put out an entire album in this despondent mood, which was banned shortly after appearing on store shelves in early 1969. (You can see my performance and translation, created especially for this anniversary, below.) Kryl soon emigrated to West Germany, where he began working for Radio Free Europe.
 
Other artists who left include film director Milos Forman, who came to the U.S. and went on to direct Hair, Amadeus, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, among other hits. Author Milan Kundera moved to Paris. And the list goes on.
 
Of course, others stayed behind. Playwright Vaclav Havel was kicked out of the writers’ union after ’68, meaning he could no longer publish. At one point he worked in a brewery, which inspired his play Audience. He agitated for human rights, especially as a founding member of Charter 77, which called on the government to observe its obligations under the Helsinki Accords. His activities landed him in prison – and made him the country’s leading dissident.
 
Just two days after the tanks came rolling in, singer-actor Marta Kubisova recorded a song written for a TV series which had begun the previous year. “Song for Marta,” It was aired on the radio in a playlist that had been previously determined – with the note that it had nothing to do with events of the time. Yet it brimmed with the sentiments of the population: “May peace remain with this country. May hatred, envy, fear, grudge, and strife cease.” The song’s near-quote from educator-clergyman-philosopher John Comenius had a strong enough note of self-determination that it quickly became a form of quiet resistance against the occupation: “When your lost rule over things returns to you, people, it returns to you.”
 
Yet Kubisova was banned from public performance and, much like Havel, went on to relatively menial work. Kryl’s songs were copied, passed around, and sung quietly by rebellious students – who didn’t dare rebel too openly in what was now one of the East Bloc’s most repressive regimes, by many assessments topped only by Romania and Albania.
 
Revolution
In November 1989, Havel was the center of attention at meetings held in theaters to discuss the positions dissidents were to take in ongoing negotiations with the government – until the Communist Party leadership resigned in December. Marta Kubisova sang her song from a balcony overlooking Prague’s Wenceslas Square. Dubcek returned from obscurity and joined Havel to the cheers of demonstrators, whose numbers had grown to hundreds of thousands.
 
By coincidence, while all this was going on, Karel Kryl returned to Czechoslovakia for his mother’s funeral. On December 3, just four days after the Party had agreed to renounce its “leading role,” he appeared onstage at the “Concert for All Decent People.” It was a surprise to the crowd, who hadn’t been aware of his arrival in country. With teary eyes they sang along, songs they’d played to themselves quietly at home for years, and swayed, many with sparklers in hand.
 
My experience
I saw the film version of Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being while in college, and that gave me a sense of the air of freedom, of open debate, that came with the Prague Spring. But I got a much deeper experience (obviously) when I went to Czechoslovakia in autumn 1990. One of my students gave me a home-copied cassette of the Little Brother album. And soon I was having late-night discussions people who’d kept mum about politics for two decades. One friend had nearly defected while traveling to Italy with a folk-dance ensemble – but balked when reminded of the likely repercussions for family members back home.
 
With Dubcek back on the political scene, I had a chance to see him in Slovakia in 1992 when he was campaigning with the Socialists. I didn’t care what party, just wanted to see the humble giant of a man. But I sang in a choir that had a performance elsewhere the day he came to town. The group had shown great friendship to me, a foreigner, and I felt duty-bound to keep the date. Besides, I thought, I’ll be back soon enough, and I can see Dubcek then. The following spring, while studying in the U.S., I got the news that he’d died in a car crash.
 
My first encounter with Russian misconceptions of ’68 came in St. Petersburg, when I was taking language courses in summer 1995. One Saturday afternoon, I visited the nearby Peterhof palace with Czech friends. Outside the gates we met a WWII veteran wearing a jacket loaded with medals and ribbons from his service. He heard us speaking Czech and wanted to express his solidarity with fellow Slavs. “We really wanted to help you.” My friends just looked on blankly, too polite to tell him that’s not how they saw it.
 
That encounter lends a lot of truth to one scene in the film version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. A Russian official tells Czech character Tereza the invasion was to protect her people. “Protect us from what?” is her incredulous response. This exchange, oddly, is not found in the novel; it was, rather, apparently inspired by Kundera’s introduction to his play Jacques and His Master (Kundera hated the movie version of Unbearable and has refused to allow any more cinematic renditions of his works), in which the author relays his experience of leaving the country. He was driving through Southern Bohemia, when his car was stopped by a Russian officer who explained to him that the Russians loved the Czechs—if only they could appreciate it!

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Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, the memory of which is marked by images of Soviet tanks lining the streets of Prague and angry but unarmed Czech protestors thronging to challenge them.

1968 was a turbulent year, with its student uprisings in Paris, the assassinations of Rev. King and Robert Kennedy, and anti-war demonstrations in the U.S., including those outside the Democratic convention in Chicago. But the story of Czechoslovakia in that year is unique in its blend of hope, a spirit of freedom, renewal and youth, as well as eventual tragedy, defeat and bitterness.

See the Moody Blues' performance in Prague on the eve of the invasion below.

The Prague Spring
Following years of disappointing economic performance, and increased national tensions between Slovaks and Czechs, Slovak politician Alexander Dubček replaced Antonín Novotný as Czechoslovak Communist Party first secretary in early January 1968. Dubček, a relative unknown, soon initiated a program of “Socialism with a Human Face.” Censorship was relaxed, a move welcomed by the Czech and Slovak public, especially intellectuals and artists. 25 June saw the release of all political prisoners and the rehabilitation of victims of Stalinism. On the following day, 26 June, the National Assembly passed a law abolishing censorship; this was followed the very next day by the publication of “The Two Thousand Words,” a manifesto of support for Dubček’s liberalizing efforts, penned by leading author Ludvík Vaculík and signed by 70 leading writers, artists, and other public figures. Numerous similar declarations were made by other academics and intellectuals.

Yet storm clouds were gathering. Warsaw Pact maneuvers were held on Czechoslovak territory in June as an apparent warning by Brezhnev; when the exercises were concluded on 2 July, the Kremlin refused to withdraw all its troops. In late July, the Soviet leader called for a meeting with Dubček, and the two met in a small railway station in an East Slovak border town. This was followed a few days later, on 4 August by the Bratislava Declaration, in which Dubček seemed to have backed down to his “superior” on matters of press censorship. Brezhnev nevertheless berated Dubček one more time over criticism of the Party in the press, as revealed in a telephone transcript (finally released fifteen years ago). In that extended conversation, Brezhnev is both threatening and condescending to the president of his satellite state.

Invasion and resistance
During the night of 20-21 August, partly in response to an “invitation” from Czechoslovak Communist Party hard-liners, Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev sent in approximately 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops from Hungary, Poland, Rumania, and the Soviet Union, along with 2,000 tanks. Dubček was arrested and sent to Moscow. While the Soviet leader allowed Dubček to return and to remain in power for several months, the period of liberalization was over. In September, the “Brezhnev Doctrine” was declared, namely, that the Soviet Union had the right to invade other socialist countries if it felt threatened.

The world tends to remember the invasion most starkly for the images of the invasion, of Soviet tanks lining Wenceslaus Square while throngs of unarmed, flag-waving civilians attempted to stand them off. The focal point of the resistance was at the top of the square, at the equestrian statue of St. Wenceslaus, the patron saint of Bohemia to whom many Czechs, though not particularly religious, look for inspiration. To assert their national sovereignty, protestors marched through the streets chanting “Dubček – Svoboda,” the latter being the president of the country elected in March, whose name means “freedom” in Czech.

Another prominent scene is the defense of the radio station by the Czech civilians. Trucks, buses, and trolley cars were amassed at the approach to the building, and gasoline was set ablaze to thwart the troops’ advance. Still the tanks prevailed.

In the ensuing weeks, one of the Czechoslovaks’ most cunning tricks was to switch road signs to confuse invaders. They also used satirical messages such as “Last performance of Circus Brezhnev. Do not irritate his animals! Do not feed them, either!” Other messages were aimed at demoralizing the occupying soldiers: (in Russian) Natasha is sleeping with Kolya—signed, Your mother. The most common graffiti of the invasion period was РУССКИЕ ДОМОЙ! or “Russians Go Home!”
Often, the Czechs and Slovaks attempted to engage Russian soldiers in conversation, rather like Vietnam-era protestors confronting rifle barrels with daisies. Thanks to Slavic-language affinity and nearly 20 years of a Russian language requirement in education, communication wasn’t so difficult. But occupying soldiers were shocked at the objection they faced, having been sold on the notion they were engaging in a form of liberation, "brotherly assistance."
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TOMORROW: reflections on the aftermath of the invasion.
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