A 2018 exhibit of rarely seen photographs documenting the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968 shows the shock and grief of ordinary Czech citizens, and also their efforts to impede the plans of the occupying troops.
On August 20th and 21st, 1968, fifty years ago this week, hundreds of thousands of Soviet and allied Warsaw Pact troops poured over the Czechoslovak border from surrounding countries in a massive show of force that quickly deposed the government of Alexander Dubček. As the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Czech Communist Party, Dubček had presided over a short-lived experiment in Communist liberalization known as the Prague Spring.
Nowhere in New York do the wounds of 1968 feel more fresh than at the hundred-and-twenty-year-old cultural center on East Seventy-third Street known as Bohemian National Hall. There, the Czech Center, part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has put up “August 21, 1968,” an exhibit that painstakingly documents the first twenty-four hours of the invasion.
Dvorakova had originally planned a commemorative exhibit featuring the work of Josef Koudelka, who took many of the iconic photographs of the Soviet invasion. But Koudelka’s photographs were already well known, and a friend suggested that Dvorakova instead speak with Dana Kyndrová, another Czech photographer, who was working inside the Czech Republic to collect photographs of major events in Czech history, including the invasion of 1968.
Dubček had grown up on an idealistic farmer-worker cooperative in Kyrgyzstan, which his parents had been early members of during the first years of the Russian revolution. For a time, the group, which spoke Esperanto, made an estimated twenty per cent of Kyrgystan’s industrial products and was considered the Soviet Union’s finest coop. But by 1943, it had fallen out of favor. Stalin declared many of its members enemies of the state and they were executed.
If nothing else, the events surrounding the Prague Spring helped to punctuate the limitations of authoritarian solutions. When I asked Barbara Karpetová, of the Czech Center, about Dubček, she looked a little pained and said that she thought he was naïve to have imagined that he could accomplish what he wanted within the system he was working with. “It serves as a reminder,” she’d said earlier, “that freedom should never be taken for granted.
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