1968 - Mark Kurlansky [169]
Over the weekend, when protesters were just beginning to settle into Lincoln Park and the Chicago police hadn’t yet taken their first good swing, the fate of Prague East, as they called it in Chicago, had already been decided by Brezhnev and Kosygin in Moscow. The Soviets believed that once the Czechoslovakian presidium, already in session, saw the tanks coming, they would oust Dubek and his team. According to some scenarios, Dubek and other key figures would quickly be put on trial and executed. The official East German newspaper, Neues Deutschland, believing the Soviet plan would work, ran a story the night of the invasion about the uprising and the new revolutionary government that had asked for Soviet military support.
But no new government had been formed, and no one had asked for Soviet intervention. The presidium session, as predicted, went late into the evening. A working supper was served. Two of the members frustrated the others by presenting a proposed text that went back on the progress they had made. But it received little support. At 11:30, without any shift in power, the premier, Old=ich ›erník, called the defense minister and returned to announce, “The armies of the five countries have crossed the Republic’s borders and are occupying us.”
Dubek, as though alone with his family, said softly, “It is a tragedy. I did not expect this to happen. I had no suspicion, not even the slightest hint that such a step could be taken against us.” Tears began to slide down his cheeks. “I have devoted my entire life to cooperation with the Soviet Union and they have done this to me. It is my personal tragedy.” In another account he was heard to say, “So they did it after all—and to me!” It was as though at that moment, for the first time in his life, he had let go of his father’s dream of the Soviet Union as the future’s great promise. The initial response of many officials, including Dubek, was to resign, but quickly Dubek and the others realized that they could make it far more difficult for the Soviets by refusing to resign and insisting that they were the sole legitimate government. After that, it took only a day for leaders in Moscow to start understanding the terrible mistake the Soviet Union had made.
Lenin weeps in a poster taped to a window in Prague after the invasion
(Photo by Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos)
Three days earlier, on August 17, Dubek had had a secret meeting with Hungary’s Kádár. The Dubek generation in Prague had little regard for Ulbricht and Gomułka. Zdenk Mlyná, one of the Party Central Committee secretaries, called them “hostile, vain, and senile old men.” Bulgaria’s Todor Zhivkov was closer to Dubek in age but was considered dull and possibly stupid. János Kádár, on the other hand, was regarded as an intelligent and like-minded communist who wanted reform to succeed in Czechoslovakia for the same reason Gomułka opposed it: He thought it might spread to his own country. But he had come to realize that he was out of step with the rest of the Hungarian leadership and that he risked bringing Hungary out of step with Moscow. Hungary, having experienced invasion twelve years earlier, was not going to become a rebel state again. Kádár probably knew the decision to invade had already been made or was about to be when he met with Dubek to warn him and convince him to back away from his positions. He even cautioned Dubek that the Soviets were not the men he imagined them to be and that he did not understand with whom he was dealing. It was probably too late, but in any event, Dubek did not understand Kádár’s subtle but desperate warning.
In the beginning of July, after the Cierna meeting had appeared to resolve the crisis, the Soviet Union had genuinely decided against invasion and it is still not completely clear what changed its mind. In 1989 Vasil Bilak, who had been one of the pro-Soviet officials in the Czechoslovakian government, revealed in his memoirs that on August 3, two days after the Cierna meeting, he and eighteen other pro-Soviet Czechoslovakian officials had given a letter