1968 (53 page)

In Havel’s play
The Memorandum,
written more than a year before the invasion, there is a scene in which the men who drove Kraus from his position as director with a scheme to impose an artificial language realize that the entire scheme, language included, is an unmitigated disaster. They dust off Kraus, ask him to come back, and for the first time start calling him Jo, as though they are old friends. That is exactly what Brezhnev did to Dub
ek.

Brezhnev referred to Dub
ek as “our Sacha” and spoke to him in the Russian familiar
-ty
form, which struck Dub
ek as peculiar since they had never been familiar before. Dub
ek continued to address Brezhnev in the more formal
-vy
form.

For four days the Czechoslovak leadership met with the Soviets, sometimes with Brezhnev, sometimes with ranking Politburo members, sometimes with the entire Politburo, at a long table, with Czechs and Slovaks on one side and Soviets on the other. There was no discussion of table shape here. They fought across the table and with their own sides. Svoboda was eager to get an accord, believing that the longer they went without one, the more irrevocable would be the damage in relations. He also feared that the tension would be too great for the Soviet troops and discipline might break down. By September 2, 72 Czechoslovakians had been killed and 702 wounded. Increasingly, the deaths and injuries were caused by drunken Soviet troops, sometimes on shooting sprees and sometimes just in vehicle accidents. Loggers were afraid to go to work because of camps of drunken troops in the woods. While the meeting was going on in Moscow, on Jan Opletal Street in Prague, a street named for a student executed by the Nazis, a young apprentice named Miroslav Baranek was shot at close range by a drunken Soviet soldier.

Svoboda angrily pushed his government to quickly come to almost any settlement. He exploded at Dub
ek, “You don’t do anything but babble and more babble. Isn’t it enough that you have provoked the occupation of your country with your babble? Learn from the lessons of the past and act on them!”

But Dub
ek was not in the same hurry. He seemed more uncertain and more careful, and as always, it was difficult to understand his position. According to Mlyná
, most of them besides Dub
ek felt that they did not have much time or leeway “because the Soviet Politburo was acting like a bunch of gangsters.” As an exasperated Kádár had warned Dub
ek in that last meeting before the invasion, “Do you really not know the kind of people with whom you are dealing?”

Even while the Soviets were pushing from their side of the table, there was a wide range of viewpoints from the Czechoslovakian side, reflecting the nature of the Dub
ek regime. Svoboda was a dominant voice, rarely silenced, always urging resolution. Franti†ek Kriegel, the sixty-year-old doctor elected by the Central Committee to the presidium as one of three liberals in a compromise government, was more volatile. He was a Jew from the Galicia region of southern Poland. Kriegel had been arrested and imprisoned with Dub
ek, and when he arrived in Moscow with Dub
ek an angry Brezhnev said, “What is this Jew from Galicia doing here?” The Soviets banned him from the negotiating table, and the Czechoslovakians got him back only by refusing to negotiate without him. Kriegel had always been one of the radicals of the regime, pushing for relations with China as an alternative to the Soviet Union. Now the Soviets tried to keep Kriegel, a diabetic, reined in at negotiations by cutting back on his insulin supply. One of the few times Svoboda was silenced was when Kriegel turned to him and said, “What can they make me do? I have two choices, either they are going to send me to Siberia or they will shoot me.” Kriegel was the only member of the delegation who never signed the accord, saying in the end, “No! Kill me if you want.”