40 Years After Prague Spring
By Lee Keun-yeop
I wrote the following impromptu verse to celebrate the so-called Prague Spring of 1968. The title was taken from the Bohemian composer Bedrich Smetana's ``The Moltava'' and I wrote it to contribute to the Rude Bravo, the Czech Communist Party daily in 1969.
Song of the Moltava
― On the 1st anniversary of Soviet invasion of Czechoslovak Aug. 21, 1969 ― Who heard a year ago The millions of cries in the Square of Wenceslas Amid the rumbles of monsters By the name of Soviet Union's T-68 tanks? All the saints called this day the 21st day of August, 1968! Again we gathered this day In the Square of Wenceslas Under the hell of a grilling sun Like the raging tide of the Caribbean Sea Crashing against so many cliffs. You're from Blno, Moravia, He's from Bratislava, Slovakia, Me? Born in Prague, Bohemia. All alike we're sons of the Moltava. This land, once so fragrant Was the odor of culture in the West, Where Dvorak played the New World, Where Smetana praised the Moltava River, The waves of freedom are the Moltava. And this day, in our tradition and pride Looms high the statue of King Wenceslas Put up that standard of freedom. There from the frozen land with a gust of wind The rumbles of the devils' caterpillars The moment the square, once so lively, Was filled with the toll of mourning, The martyred had a girl so dear to him, Yet, Jan Palach immolated himself for the loftier cause, We brethren, let's be marching out Singing the Moltava!
In 1925 a Slovak man, Stefan, who had returned from the United States dissatisfied with the life there after moving from Czechoslovakia, emigrated to the Soviet Union with his family including his newborn child, Alexander.
He founded a cooperative farm in the Far East Russia near the border with China. In 1935 the family returned to Czechoslovakia.
In 1944 Alexander sustained a wound in his leg, while fighting the German army on a Slovak mountain. He was Alexander Dubcek who became the Communist Party leader in January 1968.
Dubcek opened the era of the Prague Spring. He pushed a series of reform packages: lifting censorship and shifting from ``the gospel according to Marx and Lenin'' to economic reform adopted by Ota Sik, a Czech economist and politician.
The packages included the introduction of incentives, the manager's right to fire unnecessary workers, the quick expansion of trade with West Germany. However, Czechoslovakia's attempt to create ``socialism with human face'' was intolerable to the Kremlin.
On Aug. 21, 1968, a massive invasion force from the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations swarmed across the Czechoslovakia's borders to wipe out the dangerous wave of liberalism before it could spread throughout the ``socialist commonwealth.'' Thus the bells tolled the death knell of the Prague Spring.
Some 20 years later when Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party the Soviet Union, introduced programs for glasnost and perestroika for the creation of socialism with a human face, the Western media described him as the Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, or Adam Smith of the communist world.
Amid the anomic situation in Russia, a Siberian woman in despair said, ``What Gorbachev and (Boris) Yeltzin brought us is nothing but sorrow and frustration.'' I still remember media reports about many Russian army officers' suicides due to overdue salaries during wintertime.
Following the fall of the once mighty Soviet Union and the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact, we have seen a drastic increase in the CIA budget, the endless U.S. and British-led eastward thrust and the invasion of Iraq that devastated the Middle Eastern country. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been incessantly expanding its sphere.
Former Czech President Vaclav Havel, one of 20 drafters of the 2,000 words manifesto during the Prague Spring and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, tried to invite the NATO headquarters to Prague. And the Czech Republic later signed an agreement to set up U.S. radar installation against the will of the majority of the Czech people.
The Mazurian Lakes in the northern Poland neighboring Kaliningrad (former the east Prussian capital of Konigsberg) was the battleground of the 1913 Russo-German Tannenberg campaign.
The U.S. and Poland signed a preliminary deal to set up missile silos there in defense of the U.S. from ``Iranian missiles.''
Thus the Czech Republic and Poland are inviting the U.S. force into their territories, aiming a dagger at yesterday's ally ― Russia. Georgia, the birthplace of the late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, tries to join the NATO and its armed forces attacked the separatist South Ossetia. This invited the Russia's punitive action.
Is Vladimir Putin a ``czar'' as Time magazine calls him, or a ``messiah'' for the Slavic nations who can save them from two decades of humiliation? Forty years later, the jubilation of the Prague Spring has turned into an abyss.
Dr. Lee Keun-yeop taught educational philosophy at Yonsei University. He is a Vietnamologist and a founding member of Korean Association for East Europe and Balkan Studies. He is a regular contributor to The Korea Times. He can be reached at kylee300110@hanmail.net.