When I woke this morning, I found my mind occupied by my alarm clock, which told me: "When Czechoslovakians woke on Aug. 21, 1968, they found their country occupied by 500,000 Warsaw Pact troops."
It was 40 years ago today that Soviet tanks invaded, forcibly ending a period of internal reforms known as Prague Spring. The mild reforms that the communists within then-Czechoslovakia had tried -- and the central party in Moscow decided to crush -- were such grave threats to Mother Russia as: allowing people to play Western music; to form sports and women's groups; to be Boy Scouts; to show a pulse of creativity in a dour Orwellian landscape.
Funny to think about this anniversary with Mother Russia rattling its sword in Georgia today. Another year, another round of deaths to protect its sphere of influence. History repeats.
NPR's feature about 1968 today is really good. I hear my dad's voice in the audio clips of the Czech intellectuals they interviewed. NPR also has a good companion piece online about that era, which gets into the between-war period of Czechoslovak democracy and why the Soviet imposition of their bastardized form of pseudo-communism never sat well with the Czechs, who were historically a creative people with a healthy intellectual scene at the crossroads of Central Europe.
My father was one of the ones forced out (well, it was escape or die) way back in 1948, when the Soviets first said, "We're here!" Which is lucky for him, because the imprisoned friends he left behind had to live through hell and then the hope and heartbreak of 1968. That year, he was expecting his third child here in the U.S. Heh, maybe my brother owes his conception to a particularly hopeful 1968 spring.
The NPR story points out that, while the invasion and subsequent "normalization" brutally crushed hopes in Czechoslovakia, it may have had the benefit of permanently undermining the idea of an international communist (Soviet-bastardized style) movement: Other, "true" communists were appalled by the Soviet action, which was hardly an example of how to treat your movement "brothers."
So it would be two more decades before the Soviet era finally ended in 1989, after my father had given up hoping he would ever live to see it. Sometimes I forget how dramatically, incredibly things changed after that. My father went from thinking he'd never see his home again, to visiting it each summer and ultimately moving back.
Reading and listening to the NPR stories, it strikes me how much music is intertwined with those hopes and times, and how its control is representative of the way regimes like that just destroy the human spirit. It was the same way for my dad in the 1940s, when he fell in love with swing music and all these Western jazz musicians (which the Soviets quickly made illegal).
One man who was a foreign correspondent based in Prague [that spring] told me this anecdote illustrating how he understood something important was happening in Czechoslovak society:
While he was sitting at a café on the bank of the Vltava River, a few days after the 1967 Writers' Congress, an elderly man wearing a chef's hat and white uniform emerged from the basement kitchen. The cook confidently strode across the terrace, sat down at a piano and began to play and sing Cikanko ty krasna (Oh, My Beautiful Gypsy), a song from his youth, which at the time was still banned as bourgeois deviationism.
A doctor by training and a member of the social elite, he had been relegated to the margins of society and was forced to take menial jobs when the Communists took over in Czechoslovakia in 1948. Twenty years later, with the new ferment in society, the foreign correspondent told me, the doctor-turned-cook felt he could publicly reclaim his identity.
Life don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing.
..."That year, he was expecting his third child here in the U.S. Heh, maybe my brother owes his conception to a particularly hopeful 1968 spring."...
Then, the following year, after it was evident that Radko would never be able to go back to the Motherland, he became a true US patriot by conceiving his 4th child on the 4th of July, 1969 during an outdoor fireworks celebration.
Nine months later, in the midst of an out-of-season Spring snowstorm, the best of the brood was born...
By no one you know - 8/22/2008 4:59 AM
hee hee Nice addendum. Although "best *female* of the brood," I think you meant to say. Or perhaps "best *thus far*".
Though I do not have the Child of the Year credentials to back it up.
As you may have noticed, the site has changed. Sampa, the free-site host, did a version 2 of some sort.
Despite an FAQ that made it sound like allowing one's site to go through v.2 surgery would be okay, there were several flexibilities that surprisingly disappeared with the click of a button. (e.g. I cannot believe sidebars like this one are even narrower than before.)
And I'm told -- miraculously! -- that the conversion cannot be undone. Truth be told, I'm actually quite pissed. But free is free. Sampa has otherwise been good to me.
So I need to sort through site "features" to see how I can make do. Except that I don't have the time at the moment, in the middle of graduate classes and Lighthousehockey.com. (btw, I've removed that Lighthouse RSS feed so that you're not clogged with random Islanders hockey gibberish).
But I promise to touch up the accessories when I get a chance, and return to irregularly scheduled blogging.
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today is really good. I hear my dad's voice in the audio clips of the Czech intellectuals they interviewed. NPR also has 
Comments (2) for "40 Years after Prague Spring"
February, 2008