A San Franciscan reflects on the crushing of the 1968 Prague Spring
By Lutzka Zivny Special to The Examiner • February 27, 2022 (SFExaminer.com)
By Lutzka Zivny
Special to The Examiner
I don’t remember the tanks rolling into Prague, my home city, in 1968. The Russian invasion was a quick affair, but the following occupation was not.
It took my family years to decide to leave the country, and a few more to manage to get out. I arrived in this country, at San Francisco International Airport, in 1985 as a political refugee, gliding in on Reagan’s generous immigration policy open to anyone fleeing communism.
I was amazed to hear from a number of Americans what a big impact the Prague Spring and the Russian invasion had made on them. I had no idea anyone paid attention to our small country. Yet many Americans wanted to talk about it, even though it happened almost 20 years prior.
“We were all thinking of you,” they tended to say. “The footage from Prague with Russian tanks on Wenceslas Square was all over the news.”
This was surprising information to a teenager who grew up behind the Iron Curtain. I had never seen any photos from 1968. There was no mention at school of the Prague Spring, the eight-month period of democratic liberalization and mass protests that ended on August 20-21 when 200,000 Russian troops and 2,000 tanks entered the country. And while Czechs and Slovaks did talk about the invasion, they were generally pretty careful.
The first time I saw the photos was right before we left the country and in secrecy. My parents had some newspapers from the invasion hidden away under the floorboards, and I was shocked when I saw them. Russian tanks in the vicinity of my high school seemed unimaginable. There were some Russian soldiers around when I was growing up, but never did I see a real show of military power in downtown Prague. The tanks and troops were kept at the bases outside the capital and in the smaller cities.
Why didn’t my parents show me the photos in the newspapers earlier? After their Eastern European century of war and economic mayhem, they were not keen to prompt their kids to get involved in any kind of activism. Doing so would be incredibly dangerous.
Of course I knew about the invasion from my parent’s stories, but they skipped plenty of details. Nothing brought it home like the photos. As Marc Riboud wrote about his 1967 image of an American teenager standing nose-to-nose with armed soldiers in protest of the Vietnam War, “Photography cannot change the world, but it can show the world, especially when it changes.”
On Thursday and Saturday, I attended the protests in front of San Francisco City Hall and Justin Herman Plaza. It was to a large extent a Ukrainian crowd, and it was clear to me when I arrived that it was a good thing to show up and support my neighbors, many of whom were in a desperate state of worry about relatives and friends at home.
While I know that showing up for marches is a small thing, I also know that it does matter to be remembered and thought of. I hope Ukrainians know there are protests like this all over the United States and the world, everywhere the Ukrainian diaspora has gone.
I’ve been watching Czech news coverage during these days of invasion. CNN reports 80,000 people protested on Sunday in Prague’s Wenceslas Square, the same square where Russian tanks stood in August 1968, a scene captured in the photos that the world saw and that my parents showed me before emigrating.
Many ask: Do protests work? Yes, but not in an immediately obvious way. Protests show support to people who are directly affected. And imagine how history would judge us if an invasion of another country took place and no one showed up in the streets. I also must admit, I go because it makes me feel better. Doing something small feels better than doing nothing at all. So do whatever small thing works for you: protest, donate, speak out.
Lutzka Zivny is a longtime San Francisco resident who works as a graphic artist at the Exploratorium. You can follow her on Twitter @lutzkalutzka
