Section Archive From the Archives
August 21 1968 on the airwaves
In the course of 1968 the Soviet Union made it increasingly clear that it
disapproved strongly of the Prague Spring reforms. Yet, despite mounting
tensions with Moscow, the Soviet led invasion on the night from August
20-21 1968, came as a huge shock. Today we are going to hear some of the
broadcasts from that fateful day. We start with Radio Moscow, with an
official Soviet version of events.
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Alexander Dubček: hope and despair in 1968
The political reforms of the 1960s accelerated dramatically when on January
5 1968 Alexander Dubček became First Secretary of the Communist Party, the
most powerful position in the country. Dubček immediately set
Czechoslovakia on a course of economic and political reform, to create what
was described as “socialism with a human face”. Today we are going to
hear two recordings of Dubček from 1968 that show both the hopes with
which the year started and the despair which followed the Soviet invasion
in August.
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Satchmo and the liberating power of jazz
Nothing better symbolizes the political thaw in 1960s Czechoslovakia than
the boom in jazz, which many saw as embodying the very idea of individual
expression and freedom from constraint. It is not hard to imagine the
excitement when Louis Armstrong came to Prague in March 1965. Many people
felt that Czechoslovakia had at last come in from the cold, and his concert
at Prague’s Lucerna Ballroom was a cultural milestone. It ended with
Satchmo thanking his audience, commenting that the Czech passion for jazz
had come as quite a surprise to him.
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A Christmas message from the survivors of Lidice in 1945
With Christmas just round the corner, we break our chronological journey
through the archives this week to go back to Christmas 1945. We’re in
Kročehlavy, a suburb of the industrial town of Kladno near Prague. This
was home to the survivors of one of the horrors of the wartime occupation,
the murder in June 1942 of all the men and most of the children from the
nearby village of Lidice. Only one Lidice family had survived the massacre
intact: Josef Horák was one of two young pilots from the village who had
fled at the beginning of the occupation, and he spent the war serving in
Britain’s Royal Air Force. After the liberation he moved straight back
to
Czechoslovakia with his English wife Wynne and their two small children.
The family was a symbol of a new life for Lidice, and over Christmas 1945
Czechoslovak Radio arranged a radio bridge to Britain from a Christmas
party in the Horáks’ living room. Here is a slightly edited version of
that broadcast. More
A Proustian moment in 1960s Czechoslovak Radio
By the mid 1960s political control over many aspects of cultural and social
life in Czechoslovakia had relaxed considerably. This was the height of
the
“New Wave” in Czechoslovak cinema, in theatre socialist realism had
long gone out of fashion and in music the swinging sixties were well under
way. But it was not just through the music it was playing that
Czechoslovak Radio tried to keep pace with the changes. One programme that
broke the traditional mould was launched in 1966 and was called “The 33
Questions of Marcel Proust”. These were questions that the French
novelist had compiled in the belief that by answering them you could
better
understand your inner self. In the programme, a well known personality
would answer questions based on Proust’s list. More
Paul Robeson in Prague: paying homage to Dvořák and socialism
In last week’s From the Archives we featured Martin Luther King,
interviewed by Czechoslovak Radio in 1963. But Dr King was not the first
civil rights campaigner to address Czech and Slovak radio listeners. Four
years earlier, in June 1959, Paul Robeson came to Prague, to take part in
an international left-wing cultural congress. Robeson was a man of many
talents – singer, actor, athlete, writer and civil rights activist. He
never concealed his sympathies with the communist regimes of the Eastern
Bloc, and his political views – combined with the colour of his skin –
earned him virtual pariah status in many sections of the US political
establishment. This culminated in 1950 when he was refused a passport. More
Transforming token integration into good faith: Martin Luther King talks to Czechoslovak Radio
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the
true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that
all men are created equal.’” The unforgettable words of Dr Martin
Luther King Jr., delivered on August 28 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial in Washington DC. The speech, addressed to a crowd of a quarter of
a million, was a defining moment in the American civil rights movement, and
its echoes reached as far as communist Eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia
the civil rights movement had already aroused considerable interest, and
not just because of the pleasure that the regime took in pointing to
America’s shortcomings; Czechoslovak Radio's correspondent in the United States,
Karel Kyncl, had already interviewed Dr King in March of that
same year. Here is a short extract from the interview, where Dr
King has just been outlining the progress made so far in ending
segregation:
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Shared destinies: Kissinger and Dienstbier meet in 1964
The early 1960s saw dramatic developments in the Cold War, with the
building of the Berlin Wall and then the brinkmanship of the Cuban Missile
Crisis. But there were also signs of a greater pragmatism in East-West
relations. One channel for dialogue was a series of international
gatherings, where scholars and public figures discussed how to reduce the
risk of armed conflict. These were known as the Pugwash Conferences, named
after the town in Canada where the idea was first launched back in 1957. In
September 1964, one such conference was held in the Czech spa town of
Karlovy Vary.
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Seeking asylum in communist Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia played an active part in the Soviet Union’s propaganda war
with the United States during the 1950s, a time of edginess and paranoia on
both sides. There was no shortage of people trying to flee across the Iron
Curtain to the West, but every now and then the flight would be in the
other direction, and someone from the West would actively seek asylum in
the Communist Bloc. For the communist regimes this was a propaganda
opportunity not to be missed.
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Yuri Gagarin: to Prague via the stratosphere
Even after the death of Stalin in the Soviet Union and Klement Gottwald in
Czechoslovakia the 1950s remained a period of high political tension
between East and West. The Cold War was at its height; with it came the
arms race and the space race. Here is Czechoslovakia’s president Antonín
Novotný, in a New Year radio address on January 1 1958:
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