When Soviet Russia invaded Czechoslovakia on 21 August 1968 Moscow presented the assault as ‘coming to the aid of a friend’. Many Russians believed the official excuses and Red Army soldiers were surprised to find themselves unwelcome in Prague. Back in Moscow a few citizens protested. On August 25, seven of them, to be exact, one a woman with a baby, demonstrated for 15 minutes on Red Square. Knowing the secret police – always better named the political police – would quickly whisk them away, still they felt they had to come out, to show the world ordinary Russians had a conscience. Their astonishing courage always seems worth remembering when the anniversary comes round.
Still the penalties were so harsh that what critical voices existed retreated into poetry.
One poet wrote (in lines not published until 2006):
On the day of terrible disgrace
do not turn your face,
but look how the shadow falls
on Prague’s heroic walls,
the Communist Red star
looks like a two-headed scar.
The well-known poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko simply headed his verses ‘Tanks in Prague’ and sent a telegram to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev expressing dismay. Only one poet, Alexander Tvardovsky, published his anguished poems openly, half a year later. He could do that as editor of the most important literary journal in the country, Novy Mir, though he would soon lose his job and perhaps die of hearbreak.
It’s one of those extraordinary facts about Soviet Russia, that poetry was the genre and the discipline that laid down the evidence, of a kind, that future historians would need to gauge what resistance there was to August 1968. With their clever conceits and underground audiences poets were prepared to take the risk and express the alternative view.
Was there dissent therefore? Of course. 1968 was a year in which many of the intelligentsia feared their country was about to slip back into Stalinism. Russia had enjoyed a period of relative liberalizing after Stalin’s death in 1953. After Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin officially in 1956 writers cautiously tested new waters in what became known as the ‘Thaw’. The Thaw anticipated the Prague Spring by ten years. At its height, in 1962, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a former labour camp inmate, published his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He told the whole world – but more importantly he told Russia itself — of the continuing horrors of the Gulag, where, though the figure continues to be disputed, between 1.5 and 1.7 million people had died between 1930-1953.
In 1968, even as Brezhnev was preparing the Czech invasion, Moscow was alive with critical thinking. Two remarkable intellectual dissidents were discussing the future of an alternative Russia as the tanks rolled. What might Russia become if it could break free of its self-defeating ideology? A spiritual culture again, said Solzhenitsyn. A truly progressive socialist country, said the nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov.
When Sakharov published ‘Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom’ on July 22, 1968 in The New York Times, it was a moment of solidarity with the Czechs and Slovaks and their readiness to pursue ‘Communism with a human face’. Sakharov called for his country to stop fearing open discussion and to cease persecuting dissent. He declared he admired the liberalizing Czech experiment and saw it as a sign that the Communist East and the Capitalist West should converge.
Solzhenitsyn’s position was less clear. He failed to complete and send a letter of protest over the 1968 invasion, according to his biographer D.M. Thomas. But he had set out his profound disillusion with the condition of Russia in a speech to Soviet writers in May the previous year. Preparing his attack on ‘this no longer tolerable oppression’, he played a record of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to help him get the intensity of Russia’s longing for freedom down on paper. Meanwhile 1968 saw the publication in the West of his two great novels, Cancer Ward and The First Circle. They were magnificently imagined denunciations of what the Soviet Union had become (the latter of course alluding to Dante’s vision of Hell) and Tvardovsky, though he failed, agitated to get them published in Russia.
Humbled by each other’s achievements, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn talked for four hours, at the house of a friend, somewhere in Moscow, on 26 August, 1968. It was an extraordinary summer.
Within hours of their talk Sakharov was trying to get the KGB to do the right thing and release the seven Red Square protesters. His efforts were the stuff of another behind-the-scenes moral drama. He’d recently lost his job over the New York Times article. Yet only a few weeks earlier he had been one of the leading scientific minds in the country, with a hotline to the Kremlin. Could he not get back into his old Institute one more time? A friendly colleague allowed him to do just that. He rang the head of the political police and begged for the dissidents to be freed.
Alas for a better Russia the gesture failed. Nor were the Solzhenitsyn novels published.
Meanwhile the leading August 25 protesters were confined to mental hospitals – psykhushki . As for Sakharov, his plain speaking, but also his vision, not only cost him his job but marked him for the rest of his life as the most outspoken critic of the Soviet system. He survived as a dissident for the rest of the duration of the Soviet Union partly because he was, after ’68, always in the Western public eye. But Solzhenitsyn was almost murdered by the KGB in 1971 and deported three years later. General Pyotr Grigorenko, a top military figure who supported the Red Square protesters, was also sent to a psykhushka before being expelled from Russia.
Perhaps Brezhnev did have the 1968 invasion on his conscience, for, on his death in 1982, a typed document found in his office desk was headed ‘Some comments on the question about the preparation of military and political actions planned for August 21, 1968.’ Perhaps he realised how many of his country’s two hundred million citizens had stopped believing in the self-declared peace-loving Soviet Union because of the invasion.
From quite different quarters of Russian society the occasion would persuade the intelligence agent Oleg Gordievsky to offer himself to the West and eventually defect to Britain. Sakharov’s second wife, Yelena Bonner, would meanwhile disown her Communist Party membership.
Brezhnev believed ‘that we need to interfere most decisively in Czech affairs, to put pressure on all fronts – up to the setting of an ultimatum.’ This was the intelligence briefing three months before the invasion, and which he saved as a memento locked up in his desk. It took a Czech politician at the heart of the Prague Spring and the negotiations with Moscow through the first half of 1968 much later to spell out what Brezhnev had actually meant by ‘fraternity’ when he justified the invasion. To quote a passage included in Suzanne Schattenberg’s recent biography, Leonid Brezhnev: The Making of a Statesman, ‘He seemed like a deeply broken patriarch who actually thinks it’s quite obvious and only right that his position as head of the family implies the unconditional subjugation and obedience of all other family members, since his opinion will naturally embody the highest authority and he only wants what’s good for them.’
Those words have to make us think of Putin’s Moscow today, and of that brutal patriarchal mentality which is so obscure to us in the West.
Sakharov argued for Russian convergence with the West in the name of reason and progress. For Solzhenitsyn ‘The Soviet leaders were soulless robots who had latched on to power and the good life and would not let go unless forced to do so.’ Under their governance the country had no underlying spiritual goal. Sakharov’s more appealing vision of the Russian future, from two-thirds of the way through the twentieth century, was of a country that might leave behind the ‘ossified bureaucracy’ and dishonest ideology that left it morally bankrupt. Institutional change and openness should be Russia’s new goals. And those were the changes which did after all happen in 1991. Yet Russia after the end of the Soviet Union found neither that ‘truth of the spirit’ Solzhenitsyn longed for, nor that honest convergence with the West which was Sakharov’s vision. No doubt the West didn’t play its role well enough. But how can it be that Russia invaded another country, sixty-five years on, using the same anti-Western excuses, and blaming ‘fascists’ and ‘counter-revolutionaries’ round every corner?
In August 1968 Czechs were stunned, much as Ukrainians were in February 2022. ‘We really loved Russia and Russians. And now? Now we realized that Russia and the Russians could come with tanks,’ survivors from that era told a recent historian. * In 2008 looking back on her life Natalya Gorbanyevskaya, the woman with the baby at the Red Square protest in ’68, and another extraordinary survivor, like Sakharov, said: ‘Perhaps things will change. But the chances are slim and that really bothers me.’
It bothers me too, after a lifetime of studying the country. Russia remains this brutal, clumsy power that confounds us all.
* Josef Pazderka, ed. The Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 The Russian Perspective (2019)
** Susanne Schattenberg Leonid Brezhnev: The Making of a Statesman (2021)
Lesley Chamberlain 