As you can read here, the family recently enjoyed a birthday celebration which included a chance to ride Segways around a park on Prague’s Kampa Island. It was a little bit nerve-wracking watching the kids zoom around, as an innate sense of caution is not usually the dominant trait in eight-year-old boys. Or in six-year-old boys, for that matter — early on, Garrett clipped the base of a tree with his left wheel and went tumbling forward off the contraption. Garrett was uninjured, the Segway just needed to be reset, and off he rode to another adventure.
In addition to hurting themselves, there was always the possibility that the boys would clip a person, rather than a tree, as they weaved in and out among the moving obstacles that kept strolling through the park on a sunny afternoon. And along came a perfect target for such a collision, an elderly woman making her way gingerly along the path, with the help of a pair of crutches. They weren’t the kind that tuck under your arms like when you have a broken leg. These were more like extended canes, with a grip-type handle, and above that a cradle for the forearm, for better stability. In Prague you often see an older person with a single crutch of this type. This woman used two.
Kate and I were talking with an English couple whose son was another birthday guest. The woman paused as she went past, then turned and said something to Kate, who happened to be nearest her, and I came over to interpret. I made some apologetic remark about how I hoped the kids wouldn’t crash into anyone.
“Oh no," she said, "it’s marvelous to see them moving about like that. Ever since I’ve had to use these crutches, I’ve been fascinated by anything that moves perfectly.”
She and I talked a little more, then one of the kids took a tumble (it turned out he was fine). "Oh, that's OK," said the woman. "When my kids were young they played ice hockey and one time a kid went down and hit his head on the ice. The coach came over. 'How many fingers am I holding up? … Three, good. Does your head hurt? Only a little? Fine. Do you feel like you're going to throw up? No? Good. Take five minutes on the bench, then back in the game.' I came over and looked in the boy's eyes to see if the pupils were the same size — if they're not, that can indicate bleeding inside the head and you have to get it taken care of right away. The coach asked me what I was doing and I explained. 'Oh,' he said, 'I'll add that to my list of things to check.'"
We got talking about languages and learning Russian, and she said she'd gone to a high school right nearby in Malá strana that had "expanded Russian education." In the communist period all schools taught Russian, so all Czechs ended up with some familiarity with the language. A few designated schools spent considerably more time on it, and students coming out of those places could actually use the language.
"They say that every idiotic thing in life is good for something," the woman explained. Then she told me a story of 1968.
By way of background, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was perhaps the most … loyal of the communist parties in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. By "loyal" of course I mean that it spent the most time trying to figure out what Moscow was likely to want it to do, even before Moscow expressed its will, perhaps even before Moscow knew its own will. This had some comic effects, as when the party decided to build the world's largest statue of Stalin.
It took them so long to work it out, that it didn't go up until 1955 — two years after the dictator's death, and only one year before Khrushchev would deliver his "secret speech" in which he "revealed" many of Stalin's crimes. Lots of people knew about the crimes already, but once the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union laid them out in a speech, it was OK to talk about them. And it was also somewhat embarrassing to have just put up the world's largest statue of a man who was now officially considered problematic. In 1962 they finally got around to dynamiting the thing.
The local party's slavish devotion to Moscow's line had less humorous consequences as well, resulting in conditions that were arguably more repressive here than in other Soviet satellites. All of that started to change in 1967, both with rehabilitation of people convicted in Stalinist show-trials in the early 1950s, and with writers starting to argue openly that literature should be independent of Party doctrine.
In late 1967 and early 1968 things started moving within the Party as well, with Alexander Dubček replacing a more conventional leader and starting to work out a reform program. Over the following months this developed into the famous "Prague Spring," an effort to create what Dubček called "socialism with a human face" (which itself is a pretty damning statement about what socialism was like up to that point). There were economic components, trying to make the economy more innovative and moving away from Soviet-style emphasis on heavy industry. But there were also political aspects, with ever-greater press freedom and discussions of multi-party elections.
Dubček and the Czechoslovak leadership repeatedly assured their allies in the Warsaw Pact of their continued support of the alliance and their unwavering devotion to socialism, but the course of developments over the spring and into the summer revealed the inherent contradictions in their position. On the one hand they promised socialism and fealty to the Soviet Union; on the other, they were letting people say more and more what they wanted to say, and people were saying they wanted free elections sooner rather than later, and people were saying that socialism actually had a lot of problems — how could you possibly have a truly free press and free elections and still guarantee that the country would remain socialist and would stay in the Warsaw Pact?
Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev drew the obvious conclusion, wholeheartedly supported by the leaders of the other satellites, who didn't want their own populations getting any dangerous ideas about elections, free speech, and the like. On the night of August 20-21, 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia and set the country on a path back to pro-Soviet orthodoxy, a period that came to be known as "normalization."
There have certainly been deadlier invasions — for instance, the one that put down the Hungarian revolution of 1956. Dubček called for people not to resist, and as far as using violence, they generally listened, though people tried confusion tactics like switching street signs, or taking them down, and Soviet tanks in the streets of Prague were covered with people urging the soldiers inside to go home. Still, it was an invasion, there were tanks and foreign soldiers everywhere, and some people did die.
Back to the woman at Kampa. She was in Čáslav, a town about an hour east of Prague, and needed to get back to the capital. There were tanks on all the roads and people weren't supposed to travel without permission. A young man in Čáslav was having liver trouble and needed to be taken to Prague for treatment, and the woman saw her opportunity.
"Being 32 and foolish, I figured they wouldn't shoot at an ambulance, so I went along for the ride."
But along the way they were stopped by two Soviet soldiers from Kirghizstan. The woman got out of the ambulance and tried explaining that they were taking this sick man to Prague and they had to get there "or it's amen for him," but their Russian wasn't very good and she wasn't making herself understood. Then an officer came out of the woods and started shouting at her, what the hell did they think they were doing, driving along like this? She explained about the man with the liver condition. The officer opened the back of the ambulance and saw the man's gray-yellow skin and smelled the particular, offensive smell of the sweat that comes off of people with liver problems, so he knew she wasn't making it up about the illness.
Eventually another officer came over and shouted at her some more, but finally agreed to accommodate her. He called over a soldier who had a board on his back, which served as a writing surface. One of the officers wrote out papers allowing the ambulance to continue to Prague, and even gave it an official stamp. The woman took the papers and went to get back in the ambulance.
"The driver said, 'You might want to think about whether to sit in front or in back.'"
"'What do you mean?' I asked, and then I smelled it."
"'Well, actually,’ he said, ‘it probably won't matter — I've already shit my pants.' When we got to the hospital in Prague, the staff asked how we'd managed to get through, and the driver pointed to me. The doctor asked if I was crazy, but I was just a foolish 32 year old, and I thought they wouldn’t shoot at an ambulance."
And she spoke good Russian. Every idiotic thing in life is good for something.
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