1968 - Mark Kurlansky [148]
At almost 3:00 in the morning on July 31, a rail worker and a small group of Slovak steel workers recognized a man out for a walk as First Secretary Comrade Dubek. Dubek invited them to a small restaurant that was open at that hour. “He spent about an hour with us and explained the situation,” one of the workers later told the Slovak press. When they asked why he was out so late, he told them that for the last few weeks he had been sleeping only between 3:00 A.M. and 7:00 A.M.
Czech television interviewed Soviet tourists and asked them if they had seen counterrevolutionary activity and if they had been treated well. They all spoke highly of the country and the people and saluted Soviet-Czechoslovak friendship. For four days, the two presidiums met in ›ierna nad Tisou, a Slovak town near the Hungarian-Ukrainian border. On August 2, when the meeting had ended, Dubek gave a television address in which he assured the Czechoslovakian people that their sovereignty as a nation was not threatened. He also told them that good relations with the Soviet Union were essential to that sovereignty, and he warned against verbal attacks on the Soviets or socialism.
The message was that there would be no invasion if the Czechoslovakians refrained from provoking the Soviets. The following day, the last of the Soviet troops left Czechoslovakia.
Dubek appeared to be reining in free speech. Still, he seemed to have won the confrontation. Sometimes survival alone is the great victory. The new Czechoslovakia had made it through the Prague Spring into Prague summer. Articles were being written around the world on why the Soviets were backing down.
Young people from Eastern and Western Europe and North America began packing into Prague to see what this new kind of liberty was about. The city’s dark medieval walls were being covered with graffiti in several languages. With only seven thousand hotel rooms in Prague, there was often nothing available anywhere in the city, although sometimes a bribe would help. A table at one of the few Prague restaurants was getting hard to come by, and a taxi without a fare was a rare sight. In August The New York Times wrote, “For those under 30, Prague seems the right place to be this summer.”
PART III
THE SUMMER OLYMPICS
The longing for rest and peace must itself be thrust aside; it coincides with the acceptance of iniquity. Those who weep for the happy periods they encountered in history acknowledge what they want: not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
—ALBERT CAMUS, L’Homme révolté—The Rebel, 1951
CHAPTER 14
PLACES NOT TO BE
In the colonies the truth stood naked, but the citizens of the mother country preferred it with clothes on.
—JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, Introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, 1961
EVERYTHING SEEMED to get worse in the summer of 1968. The academic year had ended disastrously, with hundreds walking out on Columbia graduation—even though President Kirk did not attend in order to avoid provoking demonstrations. Universities in French, Italian, German, and Spanish cities were barely functioning. In June violent confrontations between students and police erupted in Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo and in Ecuador and Chile. On August 6 a student demonstration in Rio was canceled when 1,500 infantrymen and police with thirteen light tanks, forty armored vehicles, and eight jeeps mounted with machine guns appeared. Often the demonstrations began over very basic issues. In Uruguay and Ecuador the original issue had been bus fares to school.
Even relatively quiet England was at last having its 1968, with students ending the year occupying universities. It had begun in May at the Hornsey College of Art and Design, a Victorian building in affluent north London, where students had a meeting about issues such as a full-time student