Czechoslovakia: A Release of Animosity

Beneath crystal chandeliers inside Hradcany Castle, on a high hill over looking Prague, the party and government leaders of Czechoslovakia gathered to observe the 50th anniversary of their independence from Austro-Hungarian rule. The moment was solemn — and cautious. “I beg you not to demonstrate,” Josef Smrkovský, President of the National Assembly, had pleaded with the students of Prague’s Charles University. “Would it be surprising if tanks appeared? If you demonstrate, we might all be sorry.” Most of the university heeded the warning, marking the day quietly with a philosophy-department “teach-in” against the Russian occupation. But other Czechoslovaks refused to cooperate in the campaign to avoid giving offense to the Soviets.

As the leaders met at the castle, 3,000 young people, mostly workers and high school students, swarmed up the narrow streets of the Mala Strana quarter to the gates of Hradcany. Waving red-white-and-blue Czechoslovak flags that they had torn from buildings festooned for the anniversary, the youths shouted what their elders no longer dared: “We want freedom!” “Better dead than shame!” When they spotted Soviet Ambassador Stepan Chervonenko’s black Chaika limousine behind the barred iron grille of the castle, the crowd cried, “Russians, go home!” “We have the truth, they have the tanks!” For a moment, the gates threatened to give way, but a squad of Czech police and militia managed to push the crowd back. The Soviet ambassador left by the back door.

It Will Overcome. For the next twelve hours, demonstrations swirled across Prague in a release of pent-up animosity against the occupiers. In the afternoon, 10,000 people marched through the city’s center after a protest rally in the Old Town Square in front of the monument to the 15th century Czech reformer Jan Hus. In the evening, demonstrators waving Czech flags marched to the National Theater, where the audience later gave a thunderous, emotional ovation to the final aria of Smetana’s opera Libuse:

My beloved Czech nation will not die

It will gloriously overcome the terrors of hell

It will overcome.

When some demonstrators tried to march on the Soviet embassy, Czech police halted them. Had such outbursts continued, the Soviet tanks outside Prague could easily have rolled back into the city. But the police herded the last protesters home about midnight. Communist Party Chief Alexander Dubcek’s government promptly made it clear that it could not tolerate such demonstrations. Police, a spokesman warned, will carry out their “duty of maintaining public order.”

Next morning, when the country’s leaders took a train to Bratislava, capital of Slovakia, another crowd of 10,000 broke police lines, scattered the band and the honor guard, and mobbed the railway station, shouting: “Long live Dubcek!” “Long live Svoboda!”

Dangerous Precedent. The Bratislava ceremonies marked not only the anniversary but also the passage by the Czechoslovak National Assembly last week of the long-awaited bill creating a federated nation of two states—one of Czech peoples in Bohemia and Moravia, the other of Slovaks in the southeastern part of the country. The new law will give the Slovaks, who feel that they have played a subordinate role in the republic, a measure of home rule on domestic matters but will leave control of foreign policy, defense and national economic planning to Prague.

The Soviets have not been eager to allow the Czechoslovaks to create a federation, since it could set a dangerous precedent for their own Ukrainians and other restive nationalists who have been clamoring for more autonomy. But the federation proposal was too far along for Moscow to veto it outright. Instead, the Russians demanded that the Communist party apparatus in Czechoslovakia remain unified. The Slovaks have long had their own small party, subservient to the national party. The Czechs had hoped to create a new party of their own, and the Kremlin would then have had to deal separately with Slovak and Czech parties, increasing the Czechoslovaks’ chances of bargaining for their surviving reforms. During the negotiations on the issue in Moscow, Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev told Slovak Party Leader Gustav Husak that if he did not agree to the Soviet plan to keep the Communist apparatus unified, “We will take your little party away from you.” Reluctantly, the Czechs and Slovaks agreed.