From the Archives Jiří Dienstbier remembers a fateful day
Because August 21 is the fortieth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the radio played such a central role in the events of those dramatic days, in this edition of From the Archives we shall be hearing the memories of one of the key journalists involved in those dramatic events. Jiří Dienstbier was one of Czechoslovak Radio’s star reporters at the time. Later he was to become one of the best-known dissidents of the ‘70s and ‘80s, and after the Velvet Revolution he was the country’s first post-communist foreign minister. On the morning of August 21 1968, he was one of several radio journalists, playing a cat-and-mouse game with the Soviet occupiers, as the Soviets tried to silence the radio station. In some of the recordings that survive, you can hear quite distinctly tanks and machine-gun fire in the background.
Jiří Dienstbier, photo: Kristýna Maková
Back
