Forty years after Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, veterans recall the Soviet occupation and the crackdown on freedom of expression which followed, writes Daniel McLaughlinin Prague
ON AUGUST 20TH, 1968, Josef Koudelka was an unknown photographer returning from assignment in Romania to his native Czechoslovakia, a nation electrified by debate and dissent unleashed by the liberal reforms of the Prague Spring.
The next day he was taking the pictures that would make him famous, images of the occupation of his country, which killed both "socialism with a human face" and the notion that communist states could choose their own path without being crushed by the Kremlin.
With 100,000 soldiers, 2,300 tanks and 700 aircraft, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia overnight on August 20th reaffirmed Moscow's grip on its empire, but the dissenters it buried under a wave of repression would re-emerge to kill off communism in the Velvet Revolution two decades later.
Koudelka's grainy black-and-white pictures show the bewilderment of a modern city as it awoke to find soldiers stationed outside the pub and the corner shop, tanks in parks and squares, and foreign aircraft roaring across the most familiar of skylines.
In one photograph, a man holds open his jacket to the levelled rifle of a Russian soldier; in another, with white hair tucked neatly under a black beret, an old man clutches his briefcase in one hand and hurls a brick at a tank with the other.
Koudelka's subjects throw paint over tanks and shove sticks into their tracks, then become bolder as hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets. Soon, some are clambering onto gun turrets and talking to soldiers, discovering that most of the mighty Red Army are frightened young conscripts who don't know where they are or why.
After the initial shock of occupation, native Czech wit soon resurfaced. Street nameplates were removed and signs reversed to disorientate the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies from Bulgaria, East Germany, Poland and Hungary. Graffiti appeared declaring "Ivan go home! Natasha is waiting for you!" and "Mao, bite them on their arse!", while one poster asked: "Why are you killing us 'friends'? We have no weapons."
Dozens of people were killed and hundreds injured on the first day of the invasion, and more than 100 people died over the course of 1968, as the occupying force swelled to some 750,000 soldiers.
Ever-present in Koudelka's pictures is a sense of physical peril for the photographer and the people who fill his frames.
He rode around Prague on Russian tanks, and fled across the rooftops when soldiers mistook him for a sniper and stormed a building where he was taking pictures.
But now, at 70, what has stayed with Koudelka is not the danger but the spirit of 1968. "I was not a political person . . . but I was so excited about what was happening," he says of the Prague Spring, when censorship withered and long-suppressed groups and individuals returned to public life. "In a country where nothing was possible, suddenly everything was possible. We could finally say what we wanted to say.
"The Russians were on manoeuvres but I had no idea they would attack us . . . I was a citizen of this country and I was interested in photography. So I thought this was my problem. I picked up my camera and photographed as much as possible. There was so much to do."
WHILE KOUDELKA was photographing gypsies in Romania, Jirina Siklova was immersed in the vibrant discussion groups that blossomed after the liberal Alexander Dubcek became head of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in January 1968. He and his reformist allies loosened restrictions on travel, the press and independent political organisations, and advocated closer ties with western Europe and the introduction of elements of the free market and even democratic elections, with the proviso that the Communist Party retain its "leading role" in Czechoslovak society.
For Siklova, a sociology professor at Prague's prestigious Charles University, this was a time of unprecedented freedom. "I began to support the reform movement after the Writers' Congress of June 1967, when Milan Kundera, Václav Havel, Ivan Klíma and others criticised the Communist Party and censorship," Siklova recalls.
"Journalists, writers, films and theatre were all pushing the boundaries of what could be said, and censorship was retreating. People who had been banned since 1948 started coming back to teach at the university. Dozens of non-party organisations appeared, even one for former political prisoners. But by spring 1968 it was becoming impossible for the Communist Party. They opened the door a little bit and a torrent of water poured through. And the more popular the reformists and the reforms became, the worse it looked to Brezhnev."
Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was not convinced by Dubcek's insistence, at several meetings during 1968, that his government was not a danger to Kremlin control of eastern Europe. After withdrawing troops only as far as Czechoslovakia's borders after military exercises in June, Moscow and its allies launched the invasion just before midnight on August 20th, and controlled most of the country by lunchtime the next day. This was the violent birth of the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, by which the Soviet Union pledged to "defend" socialism wherever it was threatened, so providing justification not only for the crackdown in Czechoslovakia, but retrospectively for the bloody 1956 invasion of Hungary.
The city of Ceske Budejovice - tucked into the southwest corner of what is now the Czech Republic, close to the frontiers of Austria and Germany - was one of the last to fall.
"People had turned around road signs to confuse the Russians, and it took them a long time to get to us," says Hana Kostohryzova, who was a 16-year-old schoolgirl in 1968.
"We were on the roof of our apartment block when we saw the tanks appear in the nearby hills. They looked like these big, round beasts waiting to come down into town. I can still see it in my mind's eye. There was less a feeling of fear than of hatred and anger. Local radio was still on air and they had put up a sign on their building saying 'kindergarten'. But, eventually, the Russians found them. The broadcasters wished everyone luck and played the national anthem before they were suddenly cut off," says Kostohryzova, shivering at the memory on the sunny terrace of a Prague cafe.
Dubcek and his allies were quickly seized and flown to Moscow, and the Soviet Union claimed to have been asked to intervene in Czechoslovakia by senior local officials who feared counter-revolution. Such a letter had been signed by conservative elements of the party who were at odds with the reformists and feared liberalisation.
As the Kremlin moved to install a puppet regime, Communist Party delegates from around Czechoslovakia flocked to a Prague factory to form a temporary administration to defend the policies of Dubcek and his team and demand their return from Moscow.
"Workers from a local factory built a radio aerial for us and two of the country's most famous broadcasters told the nation about our decisions," says Venek Silhan, a reform-minded economist who was effectively party leader in Dubcek's absence.
"We declared a national strike, and there has never been a strike like it. Every town and village took part, and there was no one on the streets. Nothing moved. And it was not a strike for bread, but for freedom."
In one of his most famous photographs, Koudelka holds up his watch to show that it is midday on Wenceslas Square in the heart of Prague. And it is utterly deserted.
Non-violent resistance to the occupation by millions of Czechs and Slovaks, and the quick political reactions of Silhan and his colleagues, helped dissuade the Soviets from immediately installing a conservative puppet government.
But the Kremlin did persuade Dubcek and all but one of his allies to sign the Moscow Protocol, in which they agreed to reinstate censorship, sack certain officials and suppress opposition groups. The defeated reformists were flown home on August 27th.
Dubcek was replaced as party leader by Soviet-backed loyalist Gustav Husák in April 1969, marking the start of almost two decades of "normalisation".
FOR KOUDELKA THAT meant the start of a nomadic life in exile, in which he put his name to his most famous photographs only in 1984, when he felt his family in Czechoslovakia was finally safe from persecution.
For the lecturer Siklova, normalisation brought dismissal from her faculty, a new job cleaning classrooms where she had previously taught, and at least one short term in jail.
For Silhan, it signalled the end of political and academic work and the beginning of a series of jobs as a builder and bulldozer driver, as well as his own occasional prison spells. It was in Silhan's modest Prague flat, however, that Havel and others drew up the famous Charter 77 demand for greater respect for human and civil rights in Czechoslovakia.
And Siklova still has the cabinet with a false bottom in which she hid dissident manuscripts before they were smuggled abroad in a van that had been built to carry weapons from Britain to Ireland.
Dubcek quickly disappeared from public life and was given a job as a forestry worker in Slovakia. When he reappeared it was alongside Havel, during the 1989 Velvet Revolution, which transformed the playwright into president and made the former Communist Party leader the speaker of a democratically elected parliament.
Siklova, Silhan and most historians agree that the brutal 1968 invasion killed off any lingering hopes that Soviet-led communism could be reformed, and deeply undermined Moscow's influence on the political left in western Europe. When, 21 years later, the spirit of change was again unleashed in Czechoslovakia, it tore down the whole system.
"When Jan Palach died, one of my classmates wrote a message on the board in chalk, and it stayed there for the whole school year," says Kostohryzova, recalling the 21-year-old Prague student who set himself on fire in January 1969 to protest the rollback of reforms.
"It said: 'The person who tastes freedom once will never forget it'."