to the barber’s. It was the era of long hair, and mine was much too long for an event as staid as an international conference. The barber had read about the conference in the papers, and since barbers like to chew the fat as they work, I regaled him with human interest stories about the star of the conference, the structuralist Roman Jakobson, a world-renowned linguist whose biography I knew well because I had studied with him. He had fled his native Russia after the Revolution (“and a good thing, too,” the barber interjected) and come to Prague (“and a good thing, too”), where he helped to found the famous Prague Linguistics Circle (“didn’t know we had one”), and after the Hitler’s invasion he fled to America, where he still lived (“smart guy!”).
Chatting with my Czech teacher, Jakobson’s wife, I learned that after she made a brief visit to Czechoslovakia in the late fifties (the first time she was allowed back since she and her husband had fled), her sister, a perfectly innocent Czech housewife, was picked up by the secret police and interrogated. All they wanted to know was: “What is structuralism? What is structuralism?” They must have thought it was a plot against the regime. But by ’68 the political situation had changed to such an extent that Jakobson could receive an honorary doctorate from Masaryk University in Brno, where he had once taught.
My Czech teacher, myself, and a few other Czech professors had dinner together at a Prague restaurant on what turned out to be the evening before the invasion. It was in the air, of course, but we all agreed it would be counterproductive on the part of the Soviets. It would tarnish an already tarnished reputation, and what would it gain them? Dubček, the symbol of the Prague Spring, called for “socialism with a human face,” not the reinstatement of capitalism. Most of my Czech friends were not particularly enamored of capitalism either; they wanted to reform the system from within and set an example for the other Warsaw Pact nations and even the world: a third way. No one knew how far the current changes would go, but that was an internal Czech affair. “No, the odds were against it,” we concluded and went home.
I was holed up in the empty apartment of some American journalists who were vacationing on the Adriatic. At about four in the morning the phone rang. It was my Czech teacher. One of her friends had called to report the invasion was underway. I quickly turned on Czech radio. It had gone off the air, a bad sign. Then I switched to the German station Deutsche Welle, and suddenly things were clear. A half hour later I saw the tanks. The street where I happened to be living was Czechoslovak Army Street, and the apartment was only a few blocks from the Ministry of Defense.
In the week that followed, I constantly crisscrossed the city interpreting between Czechs and the soldiers. Czechs were all supposed to learn Russian in school, but they had such antipathy to the language that even though Czech and Russian are closely related they could not communicate with the invaders. No Czech ever asked me who I was. They were just grateful I could help them convince the Soviet soldiers what a mistake they were making. The soldiers were mostly naïve kids and mostly non-Russians, that is, members of the national minorities. I suspected they had been singled out as a demonstration of the possible consequences of trying to strengthen their national identity, which is after all what the Czechs were after.
Daciana Branea: So they simply didn’t know what they were doing there.
Michael Heim: They thought they knew, because they believed the propaganda they’d been fed, namely, that they were to give “brotherly aid” to a Warsaw Pact country invaded by capitalists. As proof Pravda published a front-page article showing a cache of “West German weapons” and bemoaning the threat of German invasion. The irony was that Germans had in fact invaded, but East Germans not West Germans.
In this connection I encountered an interesting instance of false linguistic friends. When the Czechs told the soldiers, “We didn’t ask you to come,” some of the soldiers admitted they’d been surprised when the populace greeted them with—using the Russian word—“fists” (s kulakami), while they’d been told they would be welcomed with open arms. The Czechs did not understand; the Czech word for “fist” is pěst, and they thought the Russians were talking about “kulaks,” the supposedly rich peasants Stalin annihilated as a class in the thirties. “But we have no kulaks!” the Czechs protested through me. The Czechs were not armed and couldn’t protect themselves, so they resorted to the ruses they so pride themselves on as a nation. One of the things they did, which took on a great deal of importance for me in the days following, was to paint over the street signs, to prevent the Soviets from locating the people they were out to arrest. There were, of course, some Czech traitors who guided them around, people who went on to occupy high positions in the new regime.
Daciana Branea: So the majority chose a non-violent strategy consistent with their traditions.
Prague, 1968. Photograph by Michael Heim.
Michael Heim: Right, and it worked. Permit me a digression. One day, as I was making the rounds to say good-bye to my friends, night began to fall. Because the invaders had placed the country under martial law, it was illegal to walk the streets after dark. I could easily have been arrested. So I ducked into a hotel, thinking I could sit it out in the lobby until morning. As it happened, a West German television crew had put up there, and I joined them. We worked together for several days. Despite the painted-over street signs I knew the city well enough to get them where they needed to go to warn potential victims that Soviet agents were after them. And since I also spoke both German and Czech, I could help them find ordinary Czech citizens to interview. (German was still the most commonly spoken foreign language in Czechoslovakia at the time, and several of the Czechs I interviewed lamented over the “good old days,” by which they meant the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy of their youth, and one made a telling slip of the tongue: “It was awful when the Germans—I mean the Russians—invaded last week.”) I also recall a graphic example of the non-violent strategy you referred to, a hand-painted poster depicting, on the top, a little girl offering a flower to a tank decorated with the hammer-and-sickle coming to liberate the city from the Germans dated 1945, and on the bottom, the same little girl with her flower crushed under the same tank dated 1968.
Prague, 1968. Photograph by Michael Heim.
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