Prague Spring Quotes

North Korean students and intellectuals didn’t dare to stage protests as their counterparts in other Communist countries did. There was no Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. The level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take root.

I went to China, I went to Prague; I died, and was born in the spring; I found you, and loved you, again.

The Ogre does what Ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man. But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech: About a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from his lips.

On August 21, 1968, Pavel and six of his friends reacted with horror to the shortwave reports coming out of Czechoslovakia. For months they had been listening for every detail of the Prague Spring, cheering on Alexander Dubček’s attempt to create a “socialism with a human face.” They waited to see how Khrushchev’s conqueror and successor, Leonid Brezhnev, would deal with the rebellion of a satellite state. Would he show the same ruthlessness Khrushchev showed Hungary in 1956, or would there be a new sense of tolerance? Now the answer was clear.

North Korean students and intellectuals didn’t dare to stage protests as their counterparts in other Communist countries did. There was no Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. The level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take root. Any antiregime activity would have terrible consequences for the protester, his immediate family, and all other known relatives. Under a system that sought to stamp out tainted blood for three generations, the punishment would extend to parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins. “A lot of people felt if you had one life to give, you would give it to get rid of this terrible regime, but then you’re not the only one getting punished. Your family would go through hell,” one defector told me.

In May 1981, Yuri Andropov, chairman of the KGB, gathered his senior officers in a secret conclave to issue a startling announcement: America was planning to launch a nuclear first strike, and obliterate the Soviet Union. For more than twenty years, a nuclear war between East and West had been held at bay by the threat of mutually assured destruction, the promise that both sides would be annihilated in any such conflict, regardless of who started it. But by the end of the 1970s the West had begun to pull ahead in the nuclear arms race, and tense détente was giving way to a different sort of psychological confrontation, in which the Kremlin feared it could be destroyed and defeated by a preemptive nuclear attack. Early in 1981, the KGB carried out an analysis of the geopolitical situation, using a newly developed computer program, and concluded that “the correlation of world forces” was moving in favor of the West. Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was proving costly, Cuba was draining Soviet funds, the CIA was launching aggressive covert action against the USSR, and the US was undergoing a major military buildup: the Soviet Union seemed to be losing the Cold War, and, like a boxer exhausted by long years of sparring, the Kremlin feared that a single, brutal sucker punch could end the contest. The KGB chief’s conviction that the USSR was vulnerable to a surprise nuclear attack probably had more to do with Andropov’s personal experience than rational geopolitical analysis. As Soviet ambassador to Hungary in 1956, he had witnessed how quickly an apparently powerful regime might be toppled. He had played a key role in suppressing the Hungarian Uprising. A dozen years later, Andropov again urged “extreme measures” to put down the Prague Spring. The “Butcher of Budapest” was a firm believer in armed force and KGB repression. The head of the Romanian secret police described him as “the man who substituted the KGB for the Communist Party in governing the USSR.” The confident and bullish stance of the newly installed Reagan administration seemed to underscore the impending threat. And so, like every genuine paranoiac, Andropov set out to find the evidence to confirm his fears. Operation RYAN (an acronym for raketno-yadernoye napadeniye, Russian for “nuclear missile attack”) was the biggest peacetime Soviet intelligence operation ever launched.

The political version of this was the seemingly clearcut choice before the New Left, to either transform the Establishment from within (the Long March through the institutions envisioned by the Prague Spring reformers and Western social democrats alike), or else to instigate an actual revolution in the streets. History teaches us that both options were illusory; national social democracy could temporarily flourish in the hothouse export-platform economies of Central Europe, but a resurgent neoliberalism was about to strangle the effective global demand this model depended on and thus reactivate the latent class tensions smoothed over by the golden age of state-monopoly Keynesianism; meanwhile the national-democratic and anti-colonial revolutions in the Second and Third Worlds could defeat the US Empire’s rampaging armies with guerilla tactics, but could hardly be expected to counter the far more insidious enemy of falling raw materials prices on world markets. Neither international solidarity actions nor neo-national political disruptions were, by themselves, really capable of challenging the henceforth global habitus of multinational capitalism; only truly transnational labor and political movements would be able to do that.

Going to Moscow was a dream for us,' Ilich said years later. He and his younger brother started the course within weeks of Soviet tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia to crush the heady 'Prague Spring'. But they soon found that discipline at the cosmopolitan university, whose 6000 students were all selected through the Communist Party of their country of origin, was as stifling as its modernist architecture. Drab grey concrete blocks squatted around a charmless artificial pond. The only dash of colour was a map of the world painted on to the façade of one block in a valiant attempt to symbolise the ideals of the university: from an open book, symbol of learning, a torch emerges, issuing multicoloured flames that spread like waves across the planisphere. Perhaps Ilich drew some comfort from glancing up at the mural as, huddled against the rigours of the Russian winter and wearing a black beret in tribute to Che Guevara who had died riddled by bullets in October of the previous year, he trudged across the bleak square on his way to lectures. Coincidentally, the base of the flame is very close to Venezuela. Rules and regulations governed virtually every aspect of Ilich's life from the moment he started the first year's induction course, which was designed to flesh out his knowledge of the Russian language and introduce him to the delights of Marxist society before he launched into his chosen subjects, languages and chemistry. Like father, like son. Ilich rebelled against the rules, preferring to spend his time chasing girls. He would often crawl back to his room drunk. His professors at the university, some of them children of Spanish Civil War veterans who had sought refuge in Moscow, were unimpressed by his academic performance. 'His name alone, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, was so strange that people were curious about him,' relates Kirill Privalov, a journalist on the newspaper Druzhba (Friendship) which was printed at the small university press, and an acquaintance of Ilich. The Venezuelan's escapades, wildly excessive by the standards of the university, only fanned people's interest. 'llich was not at all the typical student sent by his country's Communist Party, nothing to do with the good little soldier of Mao who laboured in the fields every summer. He was a handsome young man although his cheeks looked swollen, and he was a great bon viveur. Flush with cash sent by his parents, Ilich could afford to spend lavishly on whisky and champagne in the special stores that only accepted payment in hard currencies and which were off-limits to most people. More Russian than the Russians, the privileged student and his friends would throw over their shoulders not only empty glasses but bottles as well. The university authorities, frustrated in their attempts to impose discipline on Ilich, reasoned that his freedom of action would be drastically limited if the allowance that his father sent him were reduced. But when they asked Ramírez Navas to be less generous, the father, piqued, retorted that his son had never wanted for anything. 'The university had a sort of vice squad, and at night students were supposed either to study or sleep,' recounts Privalov. "One night the patrol entered Ilich's room and saw empty bottles of alcohol and glasses on the table, but he was apparently alone. The squad opened the cupboard door and a girl who was completely drunk fell out. She was naked and was clutching her clothes in her hands. They asked her what she was doing there and she answered: 'I feel pity for the oppressed.' She was obviously a prostitute. Another time, and with another girl, Ilich didn't bother to hide her in the cupboard. He threw her out of the window. This one was fully dressed and landed in two metres of snow a foor or two below. She got up unhurt and shouted abuse at him.

I never understood the place of the workers all that time, which was proudly called, 'The Spring of Prague'. It is quite possible that he was right. It is possible that it was actually the students who managed to drag the country into these reforms. If this is true, I thought to myself, they are also guilty of the Soviet occupation. After all, they caused it.

...an unlikely group pieced together these past few weeks from parties and family references, friend-of-friend happenstance, and (in one case, just now being introduced) sheer, scarcely tolerable intrusiveness-five people who, in normal life back home, would have been satisfied never to have known one another. Five young expatriates hunch around an undersized cafe table: a moment of total insignificance, and not without a powerful whiff of cliche. Unless you were one of them. Then this meaningless, overdrawn moment may (then or later) seem to be somehow the summation of both an era and your own youth, your undeniably defining afternoon (though you can hardly say that aloud without making a joke of it). Somehow this one game of Sincerity becomes the distilled recollection of a much longer series of events. It persistantly rises to the surface of your memory-that afternoon when you fell in love with a person or a place or a mood, when you savored the power of fooling everyone, when you discovered some great truth about the world, when (like a baby duck glimpsing your quacking mother's waddling rear for the first time) an indelible brand was seared into your heart, which is, of course, a finate space with limited room for searing. Despite its insignificance, there was this moment, this hour or two, this spring afternoon blurring into evening on a cafe patio in a Central European capital in the opening weeks of its post-Communist era. The glasses of liqueur. The diamond dapples of light between oval, leaf-shaped shadows, like optical illusions. The trellised curve of the cast-iron fence seperating the patio from its surrounding city square. The uncomfortable chair. Someday this too will represent someone's receding, cruelly unattainable golden age. (4-5)

You don't have to be guilty of anything in order to feel guilt

Before the autumn was at an end, and while the brown leaves still stood thick on the beeches in our park, my brother and Bertha were engaged to each other, and it was understood that their marriage was to take place early in the next spring. In spite of the certainty I had felt from that moment on the bridge at Prague, that Bertha would one day be my wife,