1968 - Mark Kurlansky [171]
The Warsaw Pact soldiers had orders not to respond to provocations and to fire their weapons only if fired upon. But the invading soldiers did not always have the prerequisite discipline for the sensitive work of invading an ally. For the most part, these heavily armed troops were facing unarmed teenagers. At first, young people tried to block the oncoming tank columns by sitting in front of them—a sit-in. Like good ’68 students, they threw up barricades of cars, buses, and anything else they could scrape together. But they quickly discovered that the Soviet tanks would not stop—not for them or anything else put in their path. These tanks could run over people, cars, walls. Occasionally a tank was stopped. A legless World War II veteran stopped a tank in Prague by daring it to run over him. On Wednesday morning, the same day that many hours later the Chicago police would be filmed in a violent rampage, angry young people had filled the streets of Prague, ready to resist, though not exactly sure how. Reasoning that the Radio Center, home of Radio Prague, was a critical target, many had gone there to defend it. They got there ahead of the tanks and blocked off the street with their bodies. The tanks stopped, uncertain what to do, and watched the young Czechs build a roadblock with cars and overturned buses. Radio Prague was covering the confrontation on the air. Through loudspeakers they were giving the young resisters the same instructions the invaders had received: Don’t use weapons, don’t be provoked.
The Czechs started speaking Russian to the tank crews, asking them why they were there, why they didn’t leave. The young tank crews became flustered and, against their orders, opened fire over the heads of the crowd and then directly at the Czechs. Rather than flee, the Czechs produced Molotov cocktails and threw them at the tanks while the people around them were falling dead or wounded. Some of the tanks caught fire, producing black smoke, and a few of the tank crews were wounded. Some may even have been killed. But a huge T-55 tank moved into firing position, and Radio Prague broadcast the message, “Sad brothers, when you hear the national anthem you will know that it is over.” Then the first bars of the national anthem were heard as the tank opened fire and Radio Prague went silent.
In Bratislava young girls in miniskirts hiked them up, and while the Russian farm boys on the Soviet tank crews stopped to admire their young thighs, boys ran up and smashed their headlights with rocks and even managed to set some oil drums on fire. A tank column from Hungary noisily rumbled and creaked across the Danube bridge in Bratislava while university students threw bricks and shouted obscenities at them. A Soviet soldier dropped to firing position on the back of a tank and shot into the crowd, killing a fifteen-year-old nursing student. This further enraged the students, but the Soviets responded with more gunfire, killing another four students while their shower of stones and bricks clanked dully off the Soviet armor. Throughout the country, students threw Molotov cocktails. If they didn’t know how to make them, they threw burning rags. Sometimes a tank would catch fire. Young men wrapped themselves in Czech flags and charged at the tanks armed only with cans to stuff in gun barrels.
August 21, 1968, outside the radio station in Prague
(Photo by Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos)
Soon the tanks