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. “Dubček-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.

Forty years ago those names were a slogan and even a chant

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 Dubček 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 Dubček,” 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.

The invaders had crossed the Czechoslovak borders that night in a fraternal intervention to save Czech socialism from . . . well, what? As the posters and cartoons repeatedly imply, that is a question that requires some unraveling.

The “Prague Spring” was an attempt to liberalize communism from the top down with the slogan “Socialism with a human face.” Under the leadership of Alexander Dubček and his fellow-reformers in the politburo, measures were taken to decentralize the economy, abolish censorship, allow foreign travel, and permit greater political freedom in general. Mindful of what had happened in Hungary twelve years earlier, however, Dubček pledged to maintain a pro-Soviet foreign policy in order to deter a Soviet crackdown. Nor did the Czechs abolish “the leading role of the party” or, less euphemistically, the communist monopoly on power. The compromise then seemed just about viable.

In retrospect the Prague Spring looks like a doomed transition. If it had been allowed to run its course, it would either have evolved (or collapsed) into a genuine democracy or retreated into a hard communist shell. After all, the former is what happened to perestroika in the Soviet Union and the latter to the early Chinese experiments in reform. When socialism with a human face as a system was stamped on by the Soviet boot, it was saved as a myth.

Then and later socialists and social democrats thought that a valuable Third Way between socialism and capitalism—the gentle revolution of their perpetual imaginings—had been brutally closed off. Conservatives were both more skeptical and less surprised. They saw the Prague Spring as a half-way house to freedom but one the Soviets would have to dismantle anyway lest the idea spread to their other colonies. Brezhnev, employing a Marxist version of the same logic, saw it shrewdly as a drift to counter-revolution—and acted accordingly.

How did the puzzled-looking soldiers in the Russian tanks view it? We now have an idea of that because some of those soldiers have been reminiscing on the fortieth anniversary of 1968. Muhammed Salih is today an Uzbek dissident and the author of twenty books. In 1968 he was a soldier in a reconnaissance battalion of the Red Army that on August 21 crossed into Slovakia and drove into Bratislava. His comrades had been told that their mission was to save the Czechs and Slovaks from the armed machinations of the Western bourgeoisie. As he frankly told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in an interview, however, their main feeling about the forthcoming battle was exhilaration. Their officers and sergeants would now have to treat them decently.

Apparently that happened to the extent that they were allowed to trash the palace where they were billeted in Bratislava. But these adolescent pranks were soon overwhelmed by more powerful experiences:

Such incidents are inevitable even in the smallest of wars. The invasion was such a war in part because the Czech Army had been ordered to remain in barracks (by a President Svoboda who played a slightly ambiguous role in these events, protecting his more radical colleagues but ensuring lack of resistance to the Soviets). Bloodshed was therefore light. In these circumstances, the main response of ordinary Czechs and Slovaks was to appeal to the fellow-humanity of the young Soviet recruits by arguing with them.

Czechs since then have occasionally lamented that, as in 1938 and 1948, they failed to fight for their deliverance. This self-criticism (and worse) is unreasonable. Fighting would have ensured more innocent deaths without changing the outcome. But the failure to fight has wounded the national psyche in various subtle ways of which the immediate self-contempt of the 1970s is only one. It may also have led people to over-emphasize anti-heroic and evasive Schweik-like elements in the Czech character as a sort of justification. And, indeed, the pacific resistance to the invasion can provide real justification. Salih again:

Salih was impressed that an unarmed person could stand against an armed one and drew from this experience what he calls “the freedom of an unarmed man.” He went on to found the National Salvation Committee which, despite its slightly putschist title, is the umbrella organization of opposition groups in Uzbekistan.

Many others learned the same lesson. Seven Russian dissidents ventured into Red Square that same time and unveiled a banner reading “For Your Freedom and Ours.” It was an act of conscience and self-sacrifice that led them into years of harassment and repression. Dissident movements throughout the Soviet bloc were inspired by the velvet resistance of ordinary people to tanks and guns. Initially, however, Czechs and Slovaks seemed to forget the lesson they had taught to others.

Gustav Husak’s hard-line regime succeeded Dubček and imposed a long winter of “normalization” on the country. People were asked to sign statements of support for the Soviet invasion and, if they refused, found themselves unemployed, unfit for further education, steered into jobs such as stoking and cleaning. Dubček himself was reduced to the status of a gardener by some bureaucrat who never knew that gardening is a famous recipe for a happy life. For a while, these suffocating tactics worked. The entire nation seemingly lapsed into a disturbed sleep of self-contempt and slothful bitterness. When I visited Prague in the early 1970s, I was struck by the sourness, depression, inefficiency, and dishonesty of everyday life. After the goulash gaiety of Budapest, it was like stepping into a home for the depressed.

That depression began to lift with the founding of Charter 77.

That depression began to lift with the founding of Charter 77. One of its signatories, Anna Sabatova, now head of the Czech Helsinki Group, who spent three years in prison for distributing leaflets, points out that the Charter had several foundations and a rather complicated history. Its gradual success in establishing a space for dissidence arose from the confluence of three developments: the awakening memories of 1968, the fact that the Czechoslovakia had signed international rights covenants (which were thus part of Czech law), and growing support in Europe, the U.S., and Canada for human rights in foreign policy. Charter 77 was a unique organization, in part because it was hardly an organization at all. It brought together people of every ideological stripe (except, obviously, for those communists who supported the Husak regime) on a basis of equality and mutual respect. Its rules counseled the avoidance of both ideological language and divisive positions outside the narrow defense of civil and political liberties. And it refrained from anything that smacked of “opposition” activity.

Religion too played a role, though less so than in Poland. Ms. Sabatova points out that, insofar as there was a Charter 77 ideology underlying its defense of civil rights, almost all of its members were influenced by the Christian stress of some founders on forgiving and overcoming hate. It was this restraint that enabled a wide variety of ideological actors to cooperate as well as giving the movement appeal to the wider (and compromised) society. Rather like Polish Solidarity a few years later, though less spectacularly, Charter 77 established itself as the real moral authority of Czech and Slovak society as the 1970s and 1980s wore on.

Why then do we associate Czech dissidents far more with rock music than with religion? Tom Stoppard’s recent play Rock ’n’ Roll makes this link a powerful one—and not without good cause. As Sabatova points out again, the Husak regime’s decision to prosecute the Czech rock group Plastic People of the Universe was the catalyst that revived Czech dissidence. It demonstrated even to those who disliked such music that the ambition of the totalitarian state to control life and thought was in principle limitless and had to be resisted. But a secondary effect was that rock music became thereafter something of a symbol of Czech resistance. That had a further effect: it guaranteed Czech dissidents a wide sympathetic audience in the West on the Left as well as among traditional anti-communists. Social democrats who were deaf to the appeal of John Paul II and a religion-soaked Solidarity had no inner qualms about supporting the Plastic People of the Universe.

If rock music was undoubtedly one link between Charter 77 and the Western counterculture, it wasn’t the only one. The Christian stress on forgiveness underlying the charter overlapped heavily with the Western Left’s Gandhian stress on “peace” and disarmament. It could be presented—not accurately but plausibly—as very different and even hostile to Reagan’s Cold War intransigence. (Indeed, that is exactly how the Western “peace movement” of the 1980s did present it.) The emphasis on the anti-heroic in the Czech self-image also attracted pacifist Western identification. Even the social style of the Czech dissidents played its part. It was so relaxed, bohemian, and seemingly unconservative that Westerners were often amazed to discover that Vaclav Havel admired Margaret Thatcher as well as John Lennon.

But there were philosophical costs to this ambiguity. When Norman Podhoretz visited Havel’s apartment, he was alarmed to see the poster of John Lennon decorating the wall. He argued that the countercultural Left was an unreliable ally against Communism. Lennon’s utopian, hedonist, and Dionysian counterculture represented, he thought, a very different revolution to the sober bourgeois liberal democracy sought by Havel. It was a potentially disabling confusion of ideologies. Yet this confusion came to be encapsulated in the very idea of 1968.

At the time very few people thought that the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the student manifestations against de Gaulle in Paris were really different examples of the same thing simply because they happened in the same year. Among those who saw them as entirely separate were the leaders of the international student Left. Indeed, they saw them as opposites. Tariq Ali, “Danny the Red,” and other student leftist leaders met in London that summer to great media interest and some mockery. Private Eye ran on its cover a photograph of the leaders in front of Marx’s grave in Highgate cemetery. They are shown as singing “There’s No Business Like Show Business” while the bust of Marx throws out an aside: “Kindly leave the stage.” But when a British journalist innocently asked if they were not seeking the same “liberalization” as Dubček in Prague, he was shouted down. Liberalization was the last thing they were seeking. What they wanted was socialism. Of course, they wanted socialism without Soviet tanks, namely the democratic socialism that Solzhenitsyn would later deride as “boiling ice.” But, whatever their positive ideas, they had little sympathy with the reformist methods or the rightwards direction of the Prague Spring. As 1968 evolved from a year into a myth, however, it blended almost all the upheavals of then and later into a single revolutionary upsurge of a vaguely radical kind. Anti-Vietnam demos outside the Pentagon, student attacks on the Paris police, assaults on universities from Columbia to the LSE, sit-ins, teach-ins, and factory occupations, the classical invasion of South Vietnam by the North’s professional army—all were alleged to be symptoms of a world-wide discontent with capitalism (plus, to please the sophisticated, bureaucracy) that would shortly usher in a new world. It ought to have been impossible to fit the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia into this radical framework. But somehow it happened. Prague became another example of how the revolution had been unkindly snuffed out by bureaucracy. On programs celebrating the fortieth anniversary of 1968, Tariq Ali himself could be found regretting wistfully that the only real prospect of establishing a popular democratic socialism in Europe had been prevented by Soviet tanks that summer. Because the fit was a poor one, however, the Prague Spring played a diminishing role in the heroic mythology of 1968 as time went on. And because the Western counterculture had influenced Czech opinion, this blend of mistaking and forgetting 1968 has even spread to Prague itself.

Earlier this year, in a session of the Prague Writers’ Festival about 1968, a largely American panel devoted itself almost entirely to a discussion, soaked in self-congratulatory guilt, of Vietnam and the U.S. anti-war movement. It was left to the sole Russian panelist to point out that at the very time the Soviets were supplying the North Vietnamese with the sinews of war (and helping them to shoot down John McCain), they were also sending tanks to within yards of where the panel was sitting that day. Some of the other panelists were simply baffled by this observation, but the chairman—Tariq Ali, who seems to have become the guru-to-go-to for 1968—demanded to know if the Russian panelist was for or against the Vietnam war. The Russian replied mildly that he was simply putting the U.S. role in Vietnam in the geopolitical context of 1968. This only baffled the Americans further. As it happens, however, the central and eastern Europeans of 1968 and later were strongly in favor of the U.S. effort in Vietnam—as liberal Americans visiting Prague and Budapest in those days were distressed to find. They had a stronger grip on geopolitical reality than American liberals of those days—and than some Czechs today.

When the Writers’ Festival was in session, the Franz Goess exhibition had not been erected. In the same space there was, however, an exhibition of sorts. A small tent protected tables on which petitions against the stationing of a U.S. missile defense system in the Czech Republic were presented for signature. This is a contemporary dispute in Prague. The Czech government strongly favors deployment of this defensive system and has signed a deployment agreement with the U.S. government.

Throughout the summer, though, the opinion polls had suggested that about two-thirds of the Czech people were opposed to deployment. No referendum was required to endorse the agreement, but the calculations of the conservative Czech government were that any parliamentary vote would be close. A narrow victory was likely, but a defeat possible. The petition displays were therefore playing to a sympathetic Czech audience.

At the same time they had an almost antique feel to them, displaying as they did the signs and slogans of the Western counterculture of 1968 and later. Even the arguments were seemingly recycled. Roger Scruton, speaking to a private meeting of Czech conservatives involved in the missile defense debate, described the underlying local argument of missile defense opponents as “Defense Equals Aggression”—much the same logic that the peace movement in the 1980s used to obstruct the stationing of Cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe while remaining largely silent about the Soviet SS20 missiles in the East. Twenty years after the Velvet Revolution, such neutralist inversions plainly appealed to large section of the Czech public that had forgotten geopolitical realities and embraced an outlook rooted in the Western counterculture and a certain wounded national self-image.

A young contemporary dissident from Belarus, Pavel Sevyarynets, drew a distinction in an RFE/RL talk between Paris and Prague in 1968 that echoes Podhoretz’s unease over the Lennon poster in Havel’s apartment:

That second freedom inspired Czechs and Slovaks in 1968 and 1977. As we have seen, the Czech dissident movement initially had a strong religious foundation. Also, since 1989, former dissidents in and out of office, in particular Havel, have taken strong positions in defense of Western values, Atlantic institutions, and dissidents needing help in Cuba and other despotisms. The present Czech government represents those conservative sections of Czech opinion that still remain robustly Atlanticist and suspicious of Russia. Over time, however, the countercultural strain in Czech political opinion, with its hedonism and utopian visions of universal and European peace had risen in influence and even begun to predominate. Today, Pavyarynet’s lyrical description of Czech freedom sounds more like the Polish freedom inspired and guided by John Paul II. With the threat of Soviet aggression no longer palpable, the Czechs had begun to feel that their liberty could be enjoyed without cost, without commitment, and without defense.

That second freedom inspired Czechs and Slovaks in 1968 and 1977.

Just two weeks before the fortieth anniversary of 1968, however, Russia sent in the tanks again—this time into Georgia—and seized two provinces of the invaded country. Within hours of this news, the atmosphere of Prague and of Czech politics changed sharply. Franz Goess and the other exhibitions suddenly became contemporary warnings. The sour mood of countercultural isolationism evaporated. It became the conventional wisdom that the missile defense agreement would survive parliamentary debate. Czech politicians settled down to the traditional task of working out what alliances they would need in this new world of geo-economic realpolitik. And Czechs had the opportunity to reflect on the lessons of someone else’s invasion—and of their concept of freedom.

Less than five minutes walk from the other end of Wenceslas Square is a small Franciscan friary. It is currently housing another exhibition of photographs of Russian occupiers. This modest display, however, shows the soldiers preparing to leave Czechoslovakia in 1990 following the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. The same kind of young men away from home are depicted as in the photographs from 1968. Like their earlier comrades, some of them are clearly homesick. They are not sorry to be leaving. But in these photographs they are disconsolate rather than puzzled. The accompanying pictures of broken tanks and ruined barracks give off a sad whiff of defeat, failure, and retreat.

After they have seen the Goess photographs, Czechs and Georgians should both visit this exhibition. It would remind them that the strongest hostile powers can be humbled. But that requires a spirit of liberty that is watchful and robust rather than utopian and hedonist—unless, of course, the hostile powers in question are obliging enough to issue the kind of unmistakable advance warning that Russia delivered over Georgia.