Ellie Lightfoot - Czechoslovakia from the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution

In this series of interviews, people living during either the Prague Spring (1968) or the Velvet revolution (1989) reveal their own incredibly interesting personal history during, before or after these time periods. In the first interview, Ilja talks about his own participation in rebelling against the soviet invasion and the normalization of the reforms made in the Prague Spring. Professor Danes, in the second interview, discusses escaping from the communist country before the Prague Spring and returning to see the once flourishing country in shambles. Finally, with the third interview, Helena gives us a unique perspective of her experiences during the Velvet Revolution from the viewpoint of a child.

Interview # 1
Ilja Holubec

Speaking easily and slow, Ilja painstakingly recounted his experiences from the Prague Spring until the period of normalization in 1971. We had just met a couple minutes ago through a mutual acquaintance at the American Czech Embassy, and yet within a matter of minutes we transformed from awkward strangers to friends with the retelling of his story. During this time he was eighteen years old, living in a small town outside of Prague.

The iron curtain was real, and so present. People often use the term figuratively nowadays, but it was more than that. It was an enormous divide. I was eighteen years old during the Prague Spring, living in a small town 200 miles east of Prague with my father and brother. My father worked on a railroad in town to support our family.
The new freedoms Czechoslovakia gained were incredibly exciting. Most notably was the freedom of speaking without the certainty of arrest. It was such a new phenomenon for us, we were so used to the constant fear of being overheard. My friends and I would go to parks similar to Hyde Park in London and discuss politics and make political jokes, and it was such a foreign concept that we would continuously check our surroundings for signs of our arrest.
But I knew it was too much change too quick and I knew it was not going to last. Soon, in Bratislava, a town on the Czech border, the soviets stationed themselves. On August 21st the tanks started to roll and the big planes stormed the sky. The tanks emerged at midnight on that day. In fact, the previous day, August 20th, I left Prague heading for Austria with my older brother. When the tanks came the next day, we were sleeping at my Auntie’s house, a midpoint in our journey. I wasn’t surprised when my brother told me about the invasion; I was more just incredibly worried about our family. We knew we had to go back home. At first we tried to get a taxi, then when that failed we barely caught the last bus.
By the time we got back to Czechoslovakia, it was such an enormous passive resistance by the people. They took down all street signs, and signs of the town, so that the Russian’s would have no idea where they were heading. India was warning people that the Soviets came to destroy the reforms and the Palestine people told us to take the street numbers of the houses, take the street signs down! Everything was off, so if you didn’t know the area you were completely lost. If you asked directions and were not recognized by the locals, they though you were secret agents working for the Soviets and would either tell you nothing or wrong information.
There were three main roads going east to west. One was going through the town where I lived at that time. There were hundreds of thousands of tanks going through for three days and three nights. Everything was shaking. I saw people get shot, I wasn’t in the crowd myself, but they were showing it on films. The Russian’s planned it differently. The Russian who was a “hardliner”, he ordered to stop all television broadcasts, radio broadcasts and all newspapers, but nobody listened to his orders. Everything was broadcasted but nothing changed, the Soviets still invaded.
I was so young, and I knew so many of the Russian soldiers that were there. We had to study Russian at school, so I could speak the language. I talked to them, these soldiers, a lot of them were my age. They called the soldiers stationed the “Soviet Military Command”, and they had them in every county-town. Where I lived was a county-town, so they had them there to. My friends and I would come and talk and translate for them, And these poor boys of nineteen or twenty thought that we were attacked by West Germany and they came to save us. That’s what they believed. They were surprised when people were spitting at them, yelling at them. I wanted to tell them “that’s not true, there was no fight before you came!” It was hard to be mad at those young boys.
We made big posters, and it said, in Russian: “We will welcome you as tourists, but not as occupiers.” They didn’t like it. The tanks were going by and we were standing, turning the posters so they could read. One of these tanks suddenly wheeled off the street and toward us. We were standing on the park benches, and behind us was park. We ran straight into the park, and the tank followed, even wheeling over the benches. If we stayed there and we didn’t run away the tank would’ve run us over.
A lot of the boys were as young as I was, like in Prague, many boys would run behind tanks, especially those who were already in the army with military training, and open the fuel tank, fill the space with lighter fluid and set the tank to flame. We didn’t have any arms to fight with and the army couldn’t fight because it was all so connected to the Warsaw Pact. All orders had to go Moscow and they didn’t have their communications without it.
So when we reached home, my brother and I finally began to believe that it was such a powerful resistance that the world condemned it, that they would have to go away. My father told me that the Soviets would have no choice but to leave, and me being on eighteen, what could I say about it? We believed that they would have to go, but wrongly they didn’t.
Some of the Russian’s weren’t human. They came to the central committee of the communist party and arrested all the Czech government working there, brought them to Moscow and under machine guns ordered them to sign the treaty to normalize the situation. It until 1971, slowly but surely they were taking one freedom after another until it was back to how it was before Prague Spring, or even worse.

Interview #2
Professor Henry Danes

Meeting through a mutual connection at the Czech American Embassy located in Seattle, the Professor was incredibly personable for a first time encounter. Although slightly deaf in one ear, we communicated like old friends at the noisy Czech restaurant. He was completely understandable, with a fairly thin accent. He told me enthusiastically about his experiences before, during and after the Prague Spring…

In 1950, we lived in Pilsen, CZ. My wife was a Teacher of English and I was Assistant Professor of Physics at the Pilsner Branch of Charles University. Previously, we both were involved in the anti-Communist activities, but our political efforts were terminated by the 1948 Communist Coup. Nevertheless, as "class enemies," we were under constant observation. Finally, due to one informer's stupidity, I found out that our arrest is forthcoming and we escaped. Contrary to all probability, we managed to cross the border and end up in a "Displaced Persons' Camp" in the vicinity of Nuernberg. While there, in another incredible event, we probably were to be "sold" back to the Communists, but discovered the plot and survived. In that process, miraculously, we met an American couple, completely unknown to us, who accepted us as members of their family, helped us to immigrate to the US and start a new existence. We lived first in Michigan, then near Pittsburgh, PA, and, in 1959, came to the Pacific NW. My wife taught German and I became Professor of Physics at UPS.
After our escape, for years, we were not allowed to communicate with our parents and other relatives left behind, neither were they allowed to have any contact with people in the "capitalist" world. Only after Stalin's death, the tension eased to the point that we could write to them and receive their mail: of course, every letter was opened, censored and (probably) microfilmed. Even the stamp on the envelope had to be attached by the post office, lest there be some secret message hidden under the stamp.
Although both my parents were physicians and my wife's father was in civil service, they were "punished" for our escape by having their income cut down to bare survival. My brother was forbidden to study at the Institute of Technology and my wife's parents had to share their private home with a family of trusted Communist informers. Nevertheless, as time went on, we were permitted to help them by sending them US dollars for which they could, in special stores, purchase food, clothing, shoes, laundry, soaps and other items not available in ordinary stores.
During that time, the entire country deteriorated, so that, to this day, the damage still may be noticed: plaster fell off the walls of buildings, but material for repair was nowhere to be found. The same about roofs, water pipes, windows - practically everything was needed and nothing was available. Show windows only presented portraits of Lenin and Stalin, no matter whether the shop behind that show window was a food store, cobbler's shop, butcher's, or anything else.
The situation started improving noticeably around 1963 or 1964. A man by the name Alexander Dubcek became Czechoslovakia's Minister President. He still was a faithful Communist, but he tried to introduce a system which he called "Socialism with a Human Face." (Ironically, it revealed two points: first, the previous system was a monstrosity. And second, it was only the face, not the heart, that would be human! Naturally, if you give a monster a human face, it still is a monster.) Matters eased to the point that, in 1966, we, political refugees, were permitted to visit the country and our families. We accepted that opportunity. Unfortunately, my father died suddenly just six months before we arrived, but I still saw my mother, brother and sister, and my wife met both her parents.
To see the once rich and prosperous country impoverished, the people without hope, alcoholism rampant, and everybody feeling insecure, "lest someone hear what we say," was a shock, but we were glad and thankful that we finally, after sixteen years, could see each other, and our parents could see their grandchildren. They were happy when they realized that my wife had taught both our children the Czech language. It took literally thousands of hours of speaking, reading, writing, explaining the very complicated grammar, as well as teaching them the ancient Czech mythology, history, customs and geography, but every second of those thousands of hours was worth it. To this day, our children are completely bilingual. Our son now works for the National Museum in Prague as translator and computer programmer, our daughter is a licensed court translator.
Of course, the Russians took a dim view of the political relaxation. Traditionally, they have always been suspicious of anything that was spontaneous. They cannot tolerate any club, society, orchestra, hiking party etc., unless it is organized, directed and supervised by them and by their government. It is a feeling of insecurity, shared by all bad, oppressive governments. Good governments need not fear armed and organized citizenry: good governments depend on them, trust them and harvest their confidence toward material advantage. Bad ones have good reason to suspect, fear and suppress spontaneous action: they are hated.
Anyway: the Russians were afraid that they may be losing control. It did happen to them in Yugoslavia in 1948 and they would not let it happen again. - However, the Czech underestimated the Russian paranoia and believed that the "thawing" was here to stay. Among other ventures, they created an International Congress of Earth Scientists in the summer of 1968. At that time, I already had a substantial amount of geophysical information that I, with the help of my family members and many UPS students, accumulated since the year 1962 when I started teaching at UPS. So I submitted a paper "On the Convection Processes In the Interior of the Earth and Other Planets." The paper was accepted and I was getting ready to attend the Congress. Then, - I do not know why - something happened in the preparations and I did not get my funds for the trip. Whether it was God's grace or the Devil's mischief, I will never know: that Congress started promising some fundamental revelations about the processes controlling dynamics of the Earth's surface and interior, but Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Mongol, Kirghiz and God knows which other troops invaded the Country from several directions. The disobedient government was arrested and the "hard hand rule" returned. People in the streets tried desperately to show the invading troops that there was no reason for their military action: they did not shoot at them, but painted their tanks with democratic slogans. Unarmed kids blocked the tanks' passage. But, of course, they achieved nothing. The spirit of liberation was dead for another twenty years.
The Russians returned to their paranoic distrust toward anything spontaneous, not realizing that they were cutting their own throat. Individual inventors, discoverers, experimenters were suppressed, lest they do something that conflicts with party line. As a consequence, Russian motorcycles are crude copies of the German BMW. Russian cars are immitations of American and European models from the 1960's. The Russians completely missed the development of the digital computer, because Stalin could not comprehend how the computer works. Only their Secret Police functioned perfectly: but you cannot eat, nor ride, nor milk police reports, and so it happened that president Andropoff finally realized that their gigantic "reconstruction of human society" in nothing more that a pubertal megalomania that had to fail, and would have failed long ago, if there had not been secret or open sympathizers among the so called "left oriented intellectuals" in the free world. I stress the word "intellectual," not intelligent: look up those terms in the big Webster, Collier or Oxford dictionary and you will learn that "intelligent" means a person with superior mental faculties, capable of making right decisions. Nothing like that pertains to the "intellectuals:" they are people often addicted to empty cerebrations, trying to influence public affairs, members of exclusive clubs, and the dictionaries list as synonyms the words "egg heads" and "snobs."
I have to admit that the breeding places of those "egg heads" are universities. I tried to change it, I tried to inform those egg head colleagues about the dangers of their foolishness, but all I achieved was making enemies. (I don't mind that: I would worry if they were among my friends!)

Interview # 3
Helena Hlouskova

I was thrilled when Helena agreed to do an interview with me, replying to a post on the “Czech and Slovak people living in Seattle” web page. She was only eight during the Velvet Revolution, living in Prague at the time, but she recounts many family stories told to her later. In addition to her memories of the Velvet Revolution, she also gives details of the period prior to the revolution, normalization. She remembers certain aspects that are unique to a child’s perspective, giving a new window into the topic.

I was just eight years old during the Velvet revolution, as I was born in 1981 and the revolution took place in 1989. We got off from school, and were watching the television and the big news that was going on. I didn’t really understand the political picture, but everyone was so thrilled and excited it was finally happening, that the nation was united.
We never really talked much about politics before the Velvet Revolution, people just were not used to talking politics at all at home. At least not in my family. I know my parents were not happy with it, they felt like it doesn’t matter what they do because they can not do anything about it. I know they were really unhappy, they wanted to travel, they wanted to see the world, they wanted to listen to Beatles. They couldn’t do it. You could listen to some music that was approved, but there was a big censorship. So like the Beatles, no.
Before the revolution there was no private sector, you could not start your own business. Just imagine you lived in Seattle and the only grocery store is Safeway and they are fixed prices, so you get what they had. So if you felt, ok, I’m not happy with Safeway I go to QFC or Trader Joes, no, there is Safeway only. There was a monopoly on everything – from railways, to grocery stores, everything was run by government. So you couldn’t open your little cute coffee shop like Seattle does.
My grandfather, he was a very talented person, he could be a musician if he was born in a free country. But because he was born in Czechoslovakia, there was communism after the 1950s and he was told what his job would be. My grandfather could never be a musician, the revolution was in ’89 and he retired in 1992 and died shortly there after. That was the same with my mother, I mean, just imagine you were growing up in a country knowing that someone would be telling you what to do for the next forty years. There wasn’t really room for personal improvement or going after things, or ‘having your dream come true’. There wasn’t much room for dreaming big, like you can do in US. It’s been more than twenty years since the Velvet Revolution and it still changes the peoples mind, even my mind. It’s really hard to change it. You always think that what you are told to do, you have to do, that your opinion doesn’t matter. Although it does, and it has for the last twenty years.
That’s what it was like. In Czechoslovakia, we used to say “what you cook at home, you eat at home”, meaning what we talk about at the home were don’t talk about outside the home. Even if there was like an ice hockey championship and people were rooting for certain countries but they were rooting for them at home, watching their home televisions, and if they were going out they didn’t want to show what country they were really rooting for. You had to pick your friends well. Freedom of speech wasn’t really there.
My dad escaped the country in 1981, shortly after I was born and just to be able to leave the country he had to prove he had commitment to country, to Czechoslovakia, and prove he was going to come back. The way he proved it was, he said “I’m married, I have a baby, and I just finished school and I’m starting a job”. Under these conditions they let him out, but he never came back and my mom paid for it. She couldn’t, I mean she did eventually, but she couldn’t finish her university for certain period of time. There were police coming through our house looking for things, and lots of interviews with my whole family asking if he was playing the system.
When my dad left my mom, me and my older brother, named Jiri, I saw my older brother take a part in the revolution. He wanted to be free and to help in the revolution, so he joined a group, the Civic Forum. His job was pretty sweet. He told me that he went to jails to the innocent citizens that the communists arrested and gave them supplies to write while they were locked up. Their goal was to let these innocent people be heard,
During the revolution everybody went out, and suddenly everyone was friends with everybody and they didn’t have to be scared anymore, they could really express themselves. Their was a huge desire to do so this whole time, so they finally could. They wanted to ring bells, but they didn’t have bells. So they would have these little, not strikes, but gatherings everywhere in town squares and they were ringing their house keys, that’s what I remember. After 4:00 PM everyday people gathered and painted posters, really expressing their feelings. Everyone was wearing a little flag on their clothes. So it looked like you do when you have a presidential election, but we didn’t have any of that because their had been no election for forty years.
And they started to travel, very shortly after we could. I mean we couldn’t afford much traveling, not big trips, but short three days or so trips to countries that we couldn’t go for so many years. You could only leave the countries that belong to Soviet bloc, you could go, but you couldn’t go to Western Germany, or Austria or England, Spain. You could go to Hungary, Poland, former Yugoslavia and that was pretty much it. My parents traveled all the time.
Shortly after Velvet Revolution when the market opened, suddenly we had the free market, the private sector, private market. People who really were not part of communist party didn’t have any money, so people who really started to run the businesses were the people who somehow connected to communist party. That’s the sad thing about it. That’s why when we recently had election to Parliament, like two weeks ago, the communist party reached like thirteen percent, which is a lot. They are still pretty strong even though people hate them so much, the older generation keeps forgetting the bad. They just keep voting.