John O'Sullivan: On the fortieth anniversary of the Prague Spring
[O'Sullivan was educated at London University and stood for Parliament as a Conservative in the 1970 general election for Gateshead West. He is the founder and co-chairman of the New Atlantic Initiative, an international bipartisan effort dedicated to reinvigorating and expanding the Atlantic community of democracies. The NAI was formally launched at the Congress of Prague in May 1996 by President Vaclav Havel and Lady Thatcher.]
Under the glowering gaze of the National Museum at the top of Wenceslas Square stands a forty-year-old Russian tank. Its fuel tanks are strapped vulnerably to its rear and its gun aims at nothing in particular. Tourists and students walk around and past it with mild curiosity as if it were an exhibit from the distant past like a stone spearhead or a medieval pike. But behind the tank, pasted to the Museum walls and staircase, are placards with cartoons and graffiti of a deliberately crude style that evokes only yesterday. The names slapdashed down in whitewash give us a more precise fix on what is being recalled. "Dub?ek-Svoboda," they proclaim.
Forty years ago those names were a slogan and even a chant. Old newsreels show tanks identical to that outside the museum, manned by nervous and disoriented soldiers, stationary in the midst of vast Czech crowds who repeat the names of the leaders of Czechoslovakia's "reform Communism" as a sort of revolutionary reproof. Troops from four Warsaw Pact countries—East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union itself—had entered Prague on August 21, 1968 and taken up positions in and around the city's main monuments, including where the tank stands today.
Sloping down from the Museum, on the pedestrian middle section of Wenceslas Square (which is not really a square but a sort of boulevard) is an outdoor exhibition of photographs mostly taken on the first full day of the 1968 invasion. These are the work of the Paris Match photographer Franz Goess, who had previously photographed the Hungarian Revolution and the Six Day War. There are a few pictures of Dub?ek at political events throughout the Prague Spring, and some photographs of ordinary people debating with puzzled Soviet soldiers. Most photographs, however, are of rough-hewn cartoons, slogans, and caricatures calling on the invaders to depart. Such cartoons had appeared by the dozens, perhaps hundreds, on windows and buildings up and down the square on the first morning of the invasion. Soldiers were ordered to remove them by nightfall. But while this extraordinary exhibition of People's Art was still in session, Goess preserved it for posterity.
"We don't want borsch, we want freedom and Dub?ek," says one poster. Another depicts a dove of peace pierced through the heart by a Kalashnikov. A third shows a boot stamping hard on an outline map of Czechoslovakia. All of them are angry; few are aggressive. The dominant theme is "Go home, Ivan, to your families and let us live in peace with ours." Patriotism is there, but it is a domesticated patriotism. There is no hint of revanchism (not surprisingly perhaps since the Czechs had gained from the territorial changes of 1945). The style of art is rough, unpolished, and with a touch of the counterculture about it. Many cartoons resemble the artwork of the "underground" magazines then making their way in the West. That may reflect the hurried circumstances of their production. Or perhaps the influence of the West's counterculture....
Read entire article at New Criterion
Under the glowering gaze of the National Museum at the top of Wenceslas Square stands a forty-year-old Russian tank. Its fuel tanks are strapped vulnerably to its rear and its gun aims at nothing in particular. Tourists and students walk around and past it with mild curiosity as if it were an exhibit from the distant past like a stone spearhead or a medieval pike. But behind the tank, pasted to the Museum walls and staircase, are placards with cartoons and graffiti of a deliberately crude style that evokes only yesterday. The names slapdashed down in whitewash give us a more precise fix on what is being recalled. "Dub?ek-Svoboda," they proclaim.
Forty years ago those names were a slogan and even a chant. Old newsreels show tanks identical to that outside the museum, manned by nervous and disoriented soldiers, stationary in the midst of vast Czech crowds who repeat the names of the leaders of Czechoslovakia's "reform Communism" as a sort of revolutionary reproof. Troops from four Warsaw Pact countries—East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union itself—had entered Prague on August 21, 1968 and taken up positions in and around the city's main monuments, including where the tank stands today.
Sloping down from the Museum, on the pedestrian middle section of Wenceslas Square (which is not really a square but a sort of boulevard) is an outdoor exhibition of photographs mostly taken on the first full day of the 1968 invasion. These are the work of the Paris Match photographer Franz Goess, who had previously photographed the Hungarian Revolution and the Six Day War. There are a few pictures of Dub?ek at political events throughout the Prague Spring, and some photographs of ordinary people debating with puzzled Soviet soldiers. Most photographs, however, are of rough-hewn cartoons, slogans, and caricatures calling on the invaders to depart. Such cartoons had appeared by the dozens, perhaps hundreds, on windows and buildings up and down the square on the first morning of the invasion. Soldiers were ordered to remove them by nightfall. But while this extraordinary exhibition of People's Art was still in session, Goess preserved it for posterity.
"We don't want borsch, we want freedom and Dub?ek," says one poster. Another depicts a dove of peace pierced through the heart by a Kalashnikov. A third shows a boot stamping hard on an outline map of Czechoslovakia. All of them are angry; few are aggressive. The dominant theme is "Go home, Ivan, to your families and let us live in peace with ours." Patriotism is there, but it is a domesticated patriotism. There is no hint of revanchism (not surprisingly perhaps since the Czechs had gained from the territorial changes of 1945). The style of art is rough, unpolished, and with a touch of the counterculture about it. Many cartoons resemble the artwork of the "underground" magazines then making their way in the West. That may reflect the hurried circumstances of their production. Or perhaps the influence of the West's counterculture....