{"id":374441,"date":"2018-08-22T18:32:15","date_gmt":"2018-08-22T17:32:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/eyewitness-to-the-soviet-invasion\/"},"modified":"2018-08-22T18:32:15","modified_gmt":"2018-08-22T17:32:15","slug":"eyewitness-to-the-soviet-invasion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/eyewitness-to-the-soviet-invasion\/","title":{"rendered":"Eyewitness to the Soviet Invasion"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Half a century ago today, I watched as Soviet tanks rolled into my native Czechoslovakia to suppress the slight relaxing of the odious repression that was necessary to maintain a purported socialist paradise. \u201cPrague Spring,\u201d as the loosening of tyranny was called, ended before the summer was over.<\/p>\n

The seeds of the Prague Spring 1968 sprouted at the Expo67 in Montreal. The Czech Pavilion was exquisite with long lines the entire time of the fair.\u00a0 The Czech artists, engineers and builders brought back the infectious freedom-bug to Prague at the end of 1967. The dawn of the New Year 1968 came in subdued pastel colors over the permanent gray in the Red paradise. \u00a0Suddenly, there were changes in the dark Kafkaesque corridors of the still Stalinist\u00a0Nomenklatura<\/em>\u00a0in Prague.\u00a0 The liberal communist A. Dub\u010dek and his team came to power.\u00a0 The people woke up from the imposed stupor and embraced the dystopian \u201cSocialism with a Human Face.\u201d\u00a0 Very few people saw through it \u2013 though our family did, but our warnings were ignored in the general mass euphoria.\u00a0 The voices calling for Swiss-like neutrality were unrealistic utopians.<\/p>\n


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\n<\/span>The Prague Spring of 1968 turned blue very quickly, though.\u00a0 Leonid Brezhnev and the ageing Kremlin Politburo were livid when Dub\u010dek\u2019s team opened the Iron Curtain a bit and allowed some freedom of the press and of assembly \u2014 previously unheard of!\u00a0 My father, who had been sentenced to menial labor in 1958 as an Enemy of the State and the People for defiantly riding a 750 cc Knucklehead Harley Davidson through Prague, openly listening to Elvis when everything American including jeans…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Half a century ago today, I watched as Soviet tanks rolled into my native Czechoslovakia to suppress the slight relaxing of the odious repression that was necessary to maintain a purported socialist paradise. \u201cPrague Spring,\u201d as the loosening of tyranny was called, ended before the summer was over. The seeds of the Prague Spring 1968 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-374441","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374441\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}