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The streets of Prague on 21 August 1968.
Photograph: Milan Linhart

Prague 1968: lost images of the day that freedom died

This article is more than 5 years old
The streets of Prague on 21 August 1968.
Photograph: Milan Linhart

Fifty years ago on 21 August, Milan Linhart reached for his camera as Soviet tanks rolled into the streets of Czechoslovakia’s capital. His previously unseen photographs have stirred uncomfortable memories.

The images provide an intimate and sometimes painfully unheroic close-up view of chaos, confusion and upheaval in the face of military subjugation.

A corpse lies on the street as passers-by walk on seemingly unperturbed; burned-out buses block normally busy thoroughfares; troops in military vehicles display boredom, exhaustion and fear; angry civilians remonstrate beside tanks; a soldier aims his gun, disconcertingly, straight at the camera at point-blank range.

Against the backdrop of military might, some incongruous snatches of everyday normality shine through: a man astride his bicycle, well-dressed office workers en route to work, smiling teenagers with trendy haircuts chatting in front of a tank, watched by wary soldiers.

Young Czechs crowd around to talk to soldiers. Photograph: Milan Linhart

The pictures were taken by a Czech photographer, Milan Linhart, in the hours following the Soviet-led invasion of what was then Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces on 21 August, 1968.

They are now on display in Prague’s Wenceslas Square as the city prepares to mark the 50th anniversary of one of the most dramatic episodes of the cold war.

The then Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, backed by eastern bloc allies, had dispatched a massive invasion force to crush the Prague Spring movement led by Czechoslovakia’s communist leader, Alexander Dubček, whose liberal reforms had won wide domestic support but alarmed Moscow, who feared that they could presage the eventual loss of a cold war ally.

A man on a bicycle squeezes past a tank. Photograph: Milan Linhart

As troops and tanks flooded the streets, Linhart, a 19-year-old telephone engineer and amateur photography enthusiast, found himself perfectly placed to capture history unfolding, after arriving at 6am for his job at the construction of a parliament building in Prague where he was installing the phone lines.

With a normal working shift clearly impossible, Linhart seized the moment. Grabbing his small, Russian-made Zenit 3M camera that he kept in a drawer, he rushed into the streets, taking as many dramatic shots as he could, often at great personal risk.

Milan Linhart in 1968 with his Zenit 3M

“I felt like I was in the first day of a war,” recalls Linhart, who is now a professional photographer.

“There were foreign soldiers and people shouting and screaming at them, asking them, ‘why have you come here?’ There was a lot of chaos and I was running on adrenaline and really in shock. But I realised this was something historical and I wanted to capture as much as I could.”

Yet despite their clear documentary value and graphic nature, the photos lay forgotten and unseen for the next 43 years, as changing political times rendered them at first too dangerous and later irrelevant. They were discovered hidden behind a bookshelf in the home of Linhart’s father, Josef, after he died in 2011.

Josef, also a photographer who had ironically captured shots of Soviet soldiers being joyously welcomed in Prague when the city was liberated from the Nazis in 1945, stashed them away for safekeeping after the Czechoslovak secret police, the StB, interrogated Milan about a separate batch of photos he took at a demonstration a year after the invasion to mark its first anniversary.

He took the measure to shield his son from a post-invasion crackdown euphemistically called “normalisation”, when the communist authorities pressured citizens to accept the reversal of freedoms they had won under Dubcek.

“There were many citizens who took pictures and hid them because you could become a focus of attention for the StB, who could destroy you,” Linhart said. “After some time I forgot about them because I had other problems – getting married, having a family, building my home, my career. Even after 1989 [when the communist regime fell from power in Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution], there seemed no interest in the photos of ’68 because society was thinking about something different. No-one cared about them.”

Warsaw Pact tank crew . Photograph: Milan Linhart

Now, he insisted, attitudes have changed because of renewed fear of Russia, which is “gaining back the position it had during the cold war”. It is a sentiment held by many, though not all, Czechs suspicious of presumed meddling by President Vladimir Putin’s government in what is seen as an effort to undermine support for the Czech Republic’s membership of the European Union and Nato.

Yet Linhart’s previous memory failings are consistent with a wider trend with regard to 20th-century events that evoke few feelings of national pride but instead may stir long-repressed feelings of shame, especially among those who collaborated with communism.

“One of the problems is that 1938 [when Czechoslovakia ceded territory to, and was later occupied by, Nazi Germany] and 1968 happened within a short space of time and both resulted in major demoralisation of the nation,” said Jan Kavan, a radical student leader during the Prague Spring.

The remnants of a vehicle crushed by a tank. Photograph: Milan Linhart

“Just as under the Nazis, acts of courage after 1968 were in the minority and most people reluctantly conformed and tried to survive,” added Kavan, who served as Czech foreign minister following the 1993 break-up of the country into the separate states of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. “That demoralising impact is still here, but people don’t like to be reminded. Being reminded of your cowardice is a very unpleasant feeling psychologically.”

Speculation surrounds how the Czech Republic’s two most powerful politicians, the prime minister, Andrej Babiš and Miloš Zeman, the president, will acknowledge the anniversary. Babiš, 64, a Slovak, joined the then ruling communist party years after the invasion. Zeman, 73, another former communist who was expelled in the post-1968 purge, is a close ally of Putin and rejects arguments that the invasion stands as a historic warning against Russia’s resurgence.

“I’m interested in what Babiš says on 21 August, because he doesn’t care about our history,” said Pavel Žáček, an MP for the opposition Civic Democrat party and a former director of the Prague-based Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. “I think [1968] is alive for people who don’t forget. But for most it’s an event from history that we have no relationship to. That’s a problem, because it’s not just the past – it’s about our future, too.”

Among those “who don’t forget”, memories are as vivid as the images in Linhart’s photos.

For Kavan, the enduring recollection is the euphoria induced by the reforms introduced by Dubček, who pledged to break with hardline ideology and deliver “socialism with a human face” after becoming head of the communist party in January 1968. “Throughout my life, this was the period I felt the greatest amount of freedom,” he said. “There was an absolute absence of censorship, and freedom of the press and assembly – the atmosphere was almost revolutionary.

Citizens pass a body in the street. Photograph: Milan Linhart

“I met Dubček in his office in April ’68 with other student leaders, and he was smiling and treated us respectfully. It was a pleasant change to meet a senior communist who wasn’t arguing and making threats.”

But pressure was building, both from the Soviet Union and other rigidly orthodox Warsaw Pact nations – who feared that their own populations would use the Czechoslovakian example to demand similar freedoms, and potentially threaten the communists’ grip on power.

After a tense meeting with a worried Brezhnev in Čierna nad Tisou, near Czechoslovakia’s border with the Soviet Union, in late July, Dubček failed to warn the population that an invasion might be imminent. It meant that when the tanks came – in an operation codenamed Operation Danube – the shock was profound, with some slow to recognise the reality of the invasion.

A Warsaw Pact tank daubed with a swastika. Photograph: Milan Linhart

“I got a call from a friend at 2am telling me the Russians were here, but she used official communique language, saying the armies of five countries have crossed the border. It was ridiculous,” said Ondrej Neff, 73, then a journalist with Radio Prague.

Later, watching from a second-floor window at the radio’s headquarters in Prague’s Vinohradská street, Neff witnessed scenes resembling a war zone, as invading troops tried to enter the building to stop broadcasts.

“There were many dead people. Some were shot and others died in an accident,” he said. “A lorry with shells inside caught fire and there was a big explosion that left a hole in the street. Then Russian troops entered the radio building armed with machine-guns and wearing helmets. It was like some war movie and, for all of us, the first contact we’d had with such violence.”

The invasion seen from on high.
Photograph: Milan Linhart

Although unrest and passive resistance – including clandestine radio broadcasts and switching street signs and railway tracks to confuse the invading armies – continued, the Prague Spring was effectively dead.But not before a humiliating coda to Dubcek’s leadership in Moscow, where the Czechoslovakian communist chief and his senior officials had been forcibly taken to be browbeaten by the Soviet leadership after being arrested on their home soil after the invasion.

Once there, their ignominy was witnessed in full public view by some of their most ardent student supporters, who were coincidentally in Moscow on an exchange visit.

“We were in Red Square on 25 August and saw Dubcek and the others being driven into the Kremlin,” said Martin Boyar, 71, now one of the Czech Republic’s leading neurologists. “The girls were crying and I was shouting encouragement. I tried to throw a bouquet of gladioli into Dubcek’s open-top car but a KGB agent grabbed my arm and stopped me. I felt fear for them. I knew it was a risky business to be detained in a totalitarian state.”

Ondrej Neff’s testimony was provided courtesy of the Post-Bellum organisation

More on this story

More on this story

  • Russian presence divides Czechs 50 years after Prague Spring

  • Nearly half of Russians ignorant of 1968's Czechoslovakia invasion – poll

  • Czech communists confront bitter legacy of Prague Spring

  • Moscow crushes the Prague Spring - archive, August 1968

  • Statue must tell true story of Soviet ‘hero’, say Czechs

  • Observer picture archive: The Prague Spring, 27 July 1968

  • The big picture: childish defiance in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia

  • Where are all the revolutionaries of 1968? They’re long gone

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