This is what the Pravda, the most influential Soviet newspaper, wrote at the time: "They have come to do their internationalist duty to the fraternal people of Czechoslovakia, protect its gains and give anti-socialist forces a firm rebuff."
As Russia reappraises recent history, it sees that the invasion ushered in the decline of Communist totalitarianism both in the Soviet Union and outside it. The more embittered Czech and Slovak republics say the invasion revealed Russia's innate aggressiveness and inability to compromise.
I, too, thought so forty years ago. I shall never forget the morning of August 21, 1968. My friends and I, all provincial students, heard the news from foreign radio broadcasts as we were lounging on the beach with a transistor during a vacation in Feodosia, a city on the Black Sea coast. The shock transformed our carefree skepticism into firm anti-Communist convictions. Czech writer Ludvik Vaculik, the author of the Manifesto of 2000 Words, was right, we said - the regime had no brain, no humor and no dignity. Televised footage of tanks in Prague depressed us.
Gloom went hand in hand with amazement at the lack of Czech resistance - only two tanks were hit. A pilot friend of mine, who took part in the Prague operation, told me half a year later that he was surprised when airport guards never shot at his plane, which was the first to land. He said the Czechs were a pack of cowards. I saw their docility as betrayal of the Prague Spring.
We were bloodthirsty while the Czechs were nonviolent.
I saw the Czechoslovak tragedy as H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds re-enacted in reality. Today, I don't take it so dramatically, at least in comparison with later experience. Every sound mind constantly reappraises history. Take World War II. One thought it was a fight against an aggressive Germany and its Nazi ideology, until the Allies liberated Auschwitz and Majdanek and revealed their blood-curdling horrors to the world, which then realized that it was also an interracial war.
The Soviet Union personified all deadly sins as long as it existed. When it collapsed, the world saw that the Evil Empire lacked not only brain, humor and basic necessities but also - paradoxically - the energy of evil. The Kremlin's lax control was incomparable to Pol Pot's devilish grip on Cambodia. The occupation of Czechoslovakia, when Soviet troops had only blank cartridges, looks like child's play compared to the recent Balkan War, despite NATO's bureaucratic political correctness.
The debility of the Soviet regime was evident to all - yet there was no cruelty and perfidy in it. True, the Evil Empire was an aggressor, yet its aggression came to small effect. It did not crush the occupied country. The Czechoslovak state survived, as did the equestrian statue of St. Wenceslas on the Prague Square that bears his name. There were no show trials throughout the occupation, and no one was shot or hanged. The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia shrank by a third. That was the only tangible result of the Kremlin flogging, as shocked Czechs and Slovaks left the party en masse. Reform leader Alexander Dubcek was not put behind bars but merely became a private citizen and forestry officer. Imagine present-day European authorities in the place of Soviet occupiers - he would possibly face something like the Hague Tribunal! True, the last forty years have made the world much tougher.
I often wonder whether we should judge the past with the yardstick of today - why not appraise it as a thing in itself? "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity," says the principle known as Occam's razor. This is reasonable and convenient rule of thumb from the point of view of logic - but how should we apply it to judging historical experience? After all, this experience alone can give us at least a shadow of justice done, and allow retribution for past wrongs, if it is only carried out in our minds.
This is how we come to a paradoxical conclusion: the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was the most toothless of European military-political actions of the 20th century.
I spent two months in Prague in autumn 1989 being drawn into the maelstrom of the Velvet Revolution. I spoke at rallies, wrote leaflets, etc., etc. One day, during a meeting the film director Jiri Menzel said to me, overcome with feeling: "I have never uttered a word in Russian for twenty years! That was my protest against 1968. Now, I'm lifting the taboo!"
You could see his joy! I think he was triumphant because he had put an end to his personal rejection of Russian culture. He could again take from his shelf the books of authors he had forced himself to hate. He could love Chekhov again. Jiri leapt over the abyss that had separated the two countries. Thank God, there were no bodies in that abyss - victims shot with Russian bullets or burnt with Russian napalm.
The two peoples were reconciled then, when Russia supported the Velvet Revolution twenty years after the Prague Spring it crushed. It was all the easier to make up thanks to the mutual attraction of the two Slav cultures, and to the historical truth of the Russian evil being mostly a blank cartridge, like the ones Soviet troops were issued in 1968.
One day at the height of the Velvet Revolution, when thousands came into the Prague streets, I was strolling on the island in the middles of the Vltava near the statue of the Czech composer Smetana, and suddenly spotted a fisherman in a boat. His back to the chanting protesters, he was lost to the world, his eyes glued to his motionless float. The man personified European independence and love of privacy, which he put on a par with any social upheaval, if not above it. If someone had been fishing imperturbably in the Neva opposite the Winter Palace in Petrograd in 1917, he might have stopped the Bolshevik Revolution, I thought.
Six months ago I visited Poland. I went with trepidation. I thought my Polish colleagues would give a Russian writer a hard time. My fears left me as soon as I saw a newspaper kiosk at Warsaw airport. The cover of magazines piled on the counter bore a vicious cartoon of Uncle Sam, pointing a gnarled finger at me with the words: "Why don't you love America enough?" I saw Poles had a new object of derision now. Old Karl Marx was right when he said that humanity parted with its past, laughing.
But back to Czechoslovakia in 1968. The absurd Soviet action of suppressing the Prague Spring was worthy of Jaroslav Hasek's pen. He would have invented excellent new adventures for good soldier Schweik. The invasion demonstrated rampant Russian stupidity and the impotence of Russian evil, which would give the satirist ample fodder. Amazingly, present-day Czechs dislike Hasek. There is not a single statue of the classic writer in Prague, though there is a monument to his dog. Some say that Hasek made a laughing stock of his people. If he had taunted Germans, Russians or Poles, his statue would stand close to Smetana's in the heart of Prague - just where the fisherman sat in his boat, shrugging off history as it was made before his very eyes.
Writer Anatoly Korolev is a member of the Russian PEN Club
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
