1968 - Mark Kurlansky [173]
A popular Czech singer, Karel Cernoch, recorded a new song: “I Hope This Is Just a Bad Dream.”
But for Moscow, too, this was a bad dream. Images had been instantly relayed around the world to every television station, the front page of every newspaper, and the cover of every magazine, and instead of being pictures of the new pro-Soviet government greeting the liberating forces, as had been planned, they were of unarmed young Czechoslovakians waving bloody Czech flags, defiantly running in front of huge Soviet tanks, throwing stones and lighted gas-soaked rags, sometimes just engaging in debate—longhaired, bearded Prague students and thickset, blond, frightened Russian country boys.
When in the past some had argued in Moscow against invasion, this must have been what their worst fears looked like. Their official story, that they had come to the aid of Czechoslovakia, was demonstrably untrue. Dubek had put out a radio broadcast saying that the country had been invaded without the knowledge of the president, the chairman of the National Assembly, or himself. The Soviets quickly learned that the Czechoslovakian people trusted their government and believed what their leaders said, especially Dubek, ›erník, and Smrkovsky. It was useless for the Soviets to contradict them. A brief moment of intrigue ensued when a Soviet agent in the government tried to sideline the broadcast, but he was caught. That Soviet plan A had failed and the presidium had not overthrown Dubek surprised no one, but that pro-Soviet elements were not able to take control even after the troops arrived was more of a surprise. That an unarmed population was not complying with the heavily armed might of five nations was infuriating. That it was being recorded and had already been broadcast and printed around the world was an unimagined calamity.
The Soviets had one card left to play: Ludvik Svoboda, the septuagenarian military officer who had, to the disappointment of the youth, been placed in the presidency. Party secretary Zdenek Mlynár said of Svoboda, “Not only was he not a part of the political reform, he was not a politician at all. He was a soldier. Already an officer in the army of the first Czechoslovakian Republic between the two world wars, by a quirk of fate, he became commander in chief of the Czechoslovakian forces that fought in World War II in the USSR alongside the Soviet army. It was clear that from this moment during the war, he embraced the notion that Czechoslovakia should unconditionally support the Soviet Union.”
But when a pro-Soviet group visited the president in Hrad^any Castle, where he was being held under armed Soviet guard, and asked him to sign a document endorsing the Soviet presence, the seventy-two-year-old soldier shouted, “Get out!”
Nothing seemed to be going according to Soviet plans. Normally an invading army or even coup plotters would have seized radio and television stations as a first order of business. But this had not been part of the Soviet plan because they had expected to be in control of the country by the time they arrived in Prague. When they finally did shut down Radio Prague, underground radio stations in secret locations began broadcasting news of the Soviet repression and the Czechoslovakian resistance. These stations also undercut Soviet propaganda. When the Soviets announced that Slovakia had defected, underground radio stations were broadcasting that it was a lie. They also reported on Soviet movements, whom the Soviets were trying to arrest, whom they had arrested. And as long as the Czechoslovakians were broadcasting, there was a sense that the Soviets did not completely control the country. The underground radio’s slogan was, “We are with you. Be with us.” Jan Zaruba, an official in the Czechoslovakian Ministry of the