The Summer of '68

By BARBARA DAY

Conferences on 1968 are stretching back-to-back across Europe this summer, offering retrospectives on the meaning of that year - what was gained, what was lost.

I know what I lost. A scrap of tri-colored ribbon, pinned to my jacket as a talisman to see me through a train ride across occupied Czechoslovakia. I had spent 1965-66 as a student in Prague on a bilateral exchange program. In 1968, I was in search of a job in the theater, hoping to stay in this dynamic city.

I lost a talisman but I kept a diary. I started it at the beginning of that long, hot summer of swimming in reservoirs and lying in the long grass of hillside meadows, watching fireflies at dusk and picking cherries by moonlight. There were dreams and romance - but also intense political discussions, veering from elation to anxiety. No conversation was too private for someone not to interrupt with their own views.

I caught something of the times in a letter I wrote to a fellow student on July 15 of that year:

"I want to tell you about how it"s different here. There"s a tremendous awareness; even the people one criticizes as too materialistic to care are reading Literární listy on the trams and watching Otto Šik"s lectures on TV.
"The papers are full of political caricatures, all good-humored ones. [The bust of] Lenin has disappeared from the philosophy faculty... The place is empty and all the clocks have stopped at different times. Everyone is discussing what"s happening, it"s impossible to get off the subject. It was going on at the summer school for English teachers, where I said to my class, ';You say things will be better. What will be better?" There was a pause, then someone said quietly: ';There will be no more fear."

"Although there is as much frustration as ever, a lot of the old bitterness and harshness has disappeared. On the other hand, there is a heavy degree of pessimism, mostly in one age group, approximately 25-45. Under that age you have the students and others who only knew the irksomeness of the last few years, not the sheer wretchedness of the earlier ones. Over 45 - particularly those in their 50s and 60s - they remember the pre-war republic, and genuinely believe something like that could be built again. Those in between are really rather pessimistic about the future, even though they are enthusiastic about what is happening now.

"Prague trams are completely haywire; there are so many detours you don"t know where they are going. Scaffolding everywhere, the bridge across Nusle [valley] half-finished, a valiant attempt to make a subway in the middle of Wenceslas Square... On the other hand, some of the buildings are being completed, more people are going abroad and there are nice things in the shops.

"I"m beginning to get a picture of how it all happened, right back to last July. That was the Conference of Czechoslovak Writers, when a lot was said that usually wasn"t mentioned - things like lack of freedom of speech, censorship and so on.

"Particularly outspoken was the editor of Literární noviny. After the conference, a lot of writers were politely dropped from their jobs - including Václav Havel at Na zábradlí - and Literární noviny was taken over by the Ministry of Education.

"Then, in October, came the uprising of the Strahov [dormitory] students. And of course, in January, everything started to happen. That was when Literární noviny got back in the right hands and became Literární listy…

Still waiting

As a Westerner, it"s possible I knew more about the "sheer wretchedness" of the 1950s than many of my Czech contemporaries. The period of show trials, executions and disappearances was still fresh in the minds of the middle-aged teachers who came to me for English conversation, though not something they wanted to talk about to their children and pupils.

Now that we are 40 years removed from Prague Spring and nearly 20 years from the Velvet Revolution, there is again a feeling that, in the rush to be reinstated as a part of Europe, the past and the pain have been pushed under the carpet. Parents and teachers, aware of their own complicity in the normalization of the 1970s and "80s, have kept silent. Schoolchildren, it is said, scarcely know what happened in "68 or "89.

In June this year, the Czech Senate hosted two conferences on the subject of coming to terms with the past. The first, organized by Senator Martin Mejst?ík and the Senate Committee on Education, Science, Culture, Human Rights and Petitions, was on the European conscience and Communism. The second, organized by the Institute for Contemporary History, was on Civil Society, the mass media and the transfer of political and cultural processes in the Prague Spring of 1968.

Some of the papers by visiting academics from Slovakia, Denmark, Latvia, Britain, the United States and (overwhelmingly) Germany brilliantly illuminated different aspects of the period. One of them was the paper given by Svetlana Savranskaya of the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., titled "The Legacy of the Prague Spring in Soviet Society."

For 40 years, I had imagined that the August invasion had been peripheral to Soviet society. Not so. The intelligentsia had followed the developments in Czechoslovakia in 1967 and 1968, and been traumatized by the invasion and occupation. Savranskaya cited memoir after memoir, and noted that almost all of Gorbachev"s circle of advisers had, in one way or another, been connected with Prague. (Many Czechs still remember Boris Pankin, Soviet ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1990, who is believed to have negotiated Soviet acceptance of the Velvet Revolution; he went on to become the last foreign minister of the Soviet Union.)

"What a time, what a time to be in Prague," I wrote 40 years ago on July 31, during the Czechoslovak/Soviet negotiations at ?ierna nad Tisou, east Slovakia. "I"ve kept all the most important papers - Dva tisíce slov, the Warsaw Communiqué and the reply, the special edition of Literární listy with the open letter to Dub?ek. When will the waiting come to an end? We"ve been waiting for three days."

Three days. And then another 20 years.

- The author is a senior fellow and founding member of The Prague Society for International Cooperation.

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(e-mail: day@praguesociety.org)