Living with Russians

With a wrench, the mood of Czechoslovakia suddenly changed. Resuming operations, the official press, radio and television began to speak of the Russian invaders as "the visiting fraternal forces." Overt opposition all but ended, and most Czechoslovaks did their best to tolerate their unwanted visitors. While they still felt great animosity to ward their occupiers, they nonetheless recognized that since they had not resisted at the moment of the invasion, it was useless to provoke repressive measures by acts of defiance now. As a result, the country began to assume at least a veneer of normality. TIME Correspondent Peter Forbath took the measure of the new Czechoslovak mood throughout the country last week, and filed this report:

After ten days of work stoppages, with drastic losses for Czechoslovakia's already ailing economy, factory laborers relit blast furnaces and returned to their work benches. The 10 p.m.-to-5 a.m. curfew was lifted. Nightclubs and cinemas reopened. One showed My Fair Lady, but another slyly screened The Good Soldier Schweik. Svelte bar girls in scalloped miniskirts or skintight trousers flitted through the cocktail lounge at Prague's Esplanade Hotel. The juggler was even back in action at Prague's Tetran club, though he tended to drop more plates than usual.

At the Jan Hus memorial, where only days before angry crowds had confronted Soviet tanks, hippies strummed their guitars. Prague police hustled young Czechoslovaks away from the statue of Wenceslas, the country's patron saint, where for days they had kept a silent vigil in honor of the 70 or so patriots who died under Soviet guns and tank treads in the first days of the invasion. On the spot where the bloodied clothes of a slain 14-year-old had lain surrounded by candles, city workmen emplanted rows of blooming red salvias. Then a water truck sprayed the flowers, finishing the job of converting Czechoslovakia's main shrine to its martyrs into just another bit of cosmetic civic landscaping.

In a helicopter crouching like a giant insect in a Prague soccer field, mini-skirted girls sat between the brawny legs of Soviet aviators. Wearing the borrowed caps of the flyers, the girls pretended, between pinches and giggles, that they were learning how to operate the machine. Nearby, young Czechoslovak boys sprawled in the grass with Soviet enlisted men, examining their submachine guns and playing a sort of mumblety-peg with the short Soviet bayonets. As if to demonstrate their amiable nature, the Soviets put on a show by the Red Army Ensemble, complete with singers and a bosomy Russian blonde, in Prague's Esplanade playground. The Czechoslovaks pointedly stayed away.

Response to Tears. The switch from defiance to docility was a conscious and uncomfortable act of a people who by and large are not collaborators but simply captives. It came as a response to the tearful pleas of the man whose seven-month-old experiment to humanize Communism had prompted the Soviet invasion. On his return the week before from three days of negotiations in Moscow, Party First Secretary Alexander Dubcek told the Czechoslovak people that their only sensible alternative was to submit to the Soviet will. Then, setting the example, he began the humiliating task of dismantling Czechoslovakia's short-lived freedom and reforms.

As a result, across the country the visible signs of resistance disappeared. On Dubcek's instructions, Czechoslovaks purposefully scraped away anti-Soviet posters from walls and windows. Women in billowing peasant skirts moved down miles of highway painting out the anti-Soviet graffiti that had been lettered on the roads. At highway intersections, farmers readjusted the directional markers that had been turned the wrong way in hopes of confusing the invaders.

Following Orders. Dubcek struggled to persuade the Soviets that his regime was becoming what the Russians called "normal." At Soviet behest, he rid his Cabinet of two of his most important liberal supporters: Interior Minister Josef Pavel and Deputy Prime Minister Ota Sik, who designed the country's Western-oriented economic plan. In addition, the government was drawing up a harsh press law that would slap a police-state muzzle on Czechoslovakia's radio, television and newspapers.

As part of the Moscow accord, the Czechoslovaks also drafted laws to suppress the embryonic opposition parties that had sprung up during the spring of liberalization. Tragically, they were also being forced to revoke the reform law that enabled victims of Stalinist show trials in the early 1950s to seek redress. Now literally tens of thousands of Czechoslovaks who suffered torture and prison on trumped-up charges will have no way to clear their names.

No Justification. Even so, Dubcek and his people were not behaving quite as the Soviets wished. While carefully avoiding any direct criticism of the invaders, the press was not entirely submissive. Mlady Svet, a Prague weekly, ran a straightforward report of how Soviet troops shot up a children's hospital and a cartoon that showed a man dreaming of a tank entering a giant buttock. Under the heading "Thoughts for the Day," another paper ran quotes about freedom. Sample: "Gandhi said freedom is worthless if it does not include the freedom to err." Rude Pravo, the official party newspaper, had a straightfaced report that the state prosecutor in Kosice had started an investigation into the deaths of nine citizens "who lost their lives in connection with the arrival of foreign forces." It noted that "there is no reason to believe that the civilians started the shooting."

Postal authorities in the industrial city of Brno were franking outgoing mail with a pledge of support to Dubcek and his liberal regime. On the grounds of the Brno industrial fair, which is scheduled to open this week, the Czechoslovak flag still flew at half-mast, and workers refused to help set up the displays from the countries that participated in the invasion. At the Mototechna machine works in the Moravian city of Jihlava, Soviet officers rounded up 100 workers for a lecture on how the Russians saved them from a counterrevolution. At the end, the Red Army officers asked any worker to stand if he still considered the Russians to be an army of occupation. All the workers sprang to their feet.

On that point, Dubcek and his colleagues were equally unbending. As a justification for their invasion, the Soviets wanted Dubcek to make a public statement thanking the Red Army for saving Czechoslovakia from the clutches of counterrevolutionaries. Dubcek refused. Nor could the Soviets prevail upon two Novotnyite conservatives, whom most Czechoslovaks suspected of issuing the call for intervention, to give some credence to the rumor by at least keeping their mouths shut. As soon as they were re-elected to a new Central Committee that Dubcek formed last week, Oldrich Svestka and Jan Filler issued denials that they had asked for Soviet intervention. The Soviets were still unable to identify the mysterious Czechoslovaks who had brought the Warsaw Pact forces running.

Revisionists and Zionists. In a development ominously similar to the scenario that preceded the invasion, Soviet Ambassador Stepan Chervonenko hastily flew from Prague to Moscow, where the Soviet Central Committee was in emergency session. Next day, Soviet First Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetsov flew to Prague for talks with President Ludvik Svoboda, 72, whose sagacious firmness in the crisis has won him the affectionate nickname of "Iron Grandfather."

Meanwhile, the Soviet press resumed its attacks against Prague. In a Moscow dispatch, Tass reported that the counterrevolution in Czechoslovakia had assumed such great proportions that workers who were loyal to socialism lived in fear for their very lives. A Polish army newspaper chimed in with a report that revisionists and Zionists in Czechoslovakia refused to give up their fight against Communism.

It sounded all too familiar to the Czechoslovaks, who remember the virulent press criticism that preceded the tanks just a few weeks ago. Nearly everyone braced for some new Soviet move. Some Czechoslovaks feared that harsh new pressures would be placed on Dubcek or that he might be shunted aside in favor of Gustav Husak, the leader of the Slovak branch of the party, who last week seemed to have won some favor with the Soviets for his open criticisms of "errors and inadequacies" in Dubcek's former policies. Others feared, but hardly dared say it, that the Soviets, having already made one tragic mistake in invading Czechoslovakia, might now compound it by ousting Dubcek and placing the country under a military government. In that case, the country's mood of self-imposed docility might well explode into defiance even more daring than the anger that faced down the tanks in the streets of Prague and left the blood flecks at the statue of St. Wenceslas.

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