The invasion of Ukraine brought back my raw memories of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Four armies of the Warsaw Pact invaded my small country under Soviet orders, putting a bloody end to the hopes and reforms of the Prague Spring.
I was 14 when I saw Russian tanks on the streets of Prague, Russian soldiers in the park near my home. I had to pass their stinking latrines on my way to school. We made fun of the soldiers by pretending to photograph them until they confiscated our fake cameras: a matchbox with a pencil drawing inside saying “Ruskies go home.”
But they stayed. Less than a month before the invasion, Soviet and Czech delegations met for so-called friendly discussions in Čierna nad Tisou, a small Slovak town near the border with Soviet Ukraine. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev assured Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party Secretary Alexander Dubček and President Ludvík Svoboda that their “socialism with a human face” would be allowed to continue, sealing the agreement with a mafia-style kiss on the cheek. I remember watching the news with my parents and saying to my father, “I think they’re lying.” He replied, “You’re starting to understand politics.”
The Prague Spring was an audacious, possibly utopian experiment in transforming a communist regime into a democratic system. Free press, open borders—these were freedoms no other country in the Soviet bloc could even hope to have. It wasn’t really surprising that it made both Moscow and the hard-liners in the Czechoslovak Communist Party extremely nervous.
The official pretext for the invasion was to liberate Czechoslovakia from the dangers of Western corruption. The Soviet soldiers were told we wanted them there. The Czechoslovak army was not allowed to mobilize (a painful echo of the lack of military resistance when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939), but the unarmed civil population tried to resist by demonstrating and encircling the tanks. The crucial battle to defend the main radio station took place minutes from my house. Civilians tried to block the soldiers by burning tanks and throwing stones.
The most effective part of the early resistance turned out to be confronting the individual Soviet soldiers in Russian, explaining that their mission was based on a lie and Czechoslovakia didn’t ask to be liberated.
Many became demoralized and were sent back, but the occupation proceeded as planned. It crushed the democratic freedoms and reforms gained during the hopeful months of the Prague Spring. It re-established Czechoslovakia as a key Soviet satellite state. The international reaction was an outpouring of sympathy for occupied Czechoslovakia and a warm welcome to its large wave of refugees. We received sympathy—not support. The condemnations of Brezhnev’s act of aggression did nothing to prevent the Soviet Union from violating Czechoslovakia’s right to determine its own fate.
My family emigrated to Germany two years after the invasion. By the time we left, I had come to understand the meaning of a Soviet occupation. With the Russian troops came “normalization,” to use the official term of the new regime, which meant the de facto rape of the country and silencing of free expression. When Czechoslovakia defeated the unbeaten Soviets in the 1969 World Ice Hockey Championship, thousands of people poured into the streets in what was both a celebration and a political protest, unstoppable on the day but ultimately leading to political repercussions. My father took me along to experience it. In retrospect, I think there was a sense of helplessness in all that euphoria.
The truly justified joy did not arrive until 1989, the year of the Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Iron Curtain. I never imagined I would see my country liberated in my lifetime. The freedoms of the post-Soviet era became the norm. I had trouble explaining to my children what it was like to grow up in a world that was no longer there.
Yet Mr. Putin’s demagogic justification of the attack on Ukraine as an act of liberation from nonexistent threats was taken straight out of Brezhnev’s 1968 playbook. When this new invasion began, I saw so many similarities I couldn’t imagine a different outcome. The Ukrainian woman confronting the Russian soldier with words, the man blocking the tank with his own body, the displacement of families—the trauma, individual and collective.
But my sense of reliving my own invasion disappeared as soon as it became apparent that Ukrainians were fiercely fighting back with their own army and their own armed civilian resistance. We are witnessing a heroic battle for freedom far beyond Ukraine’s own borders. In a time when democracy has become a hollow word in many parts of the world, Ukrainian citizens are sacrificing their own lives to preserve it. Unlike in 1968, many countries and international institutions are trying to stop the Russian aggression rather than appease Moscow. It remains to be seen whether we are doing enough.
I look at the horrific scenes on our television screens—peaceful Ukrainian cities turned into war zones overnight—and I think of the individual lives and stories, all changed by this bloody conflict. History is who we are today.
Ms. Lappin is a British novelist and journalist and author of the memoir “What Language Do I Dream In?”
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