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Dissident recalls impact of 1968



August 29th, 2007 issue

For former dissident and current women’s rights activist Jiřina Šiklová, 1968 represents a year of hope and disenchantment.

Until 1969, Šiklová worked as an associate professor at Charles University, and was one of the architects of the Prague Spring student movement.
When Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague on the night of Aug. 20, 1968, Šiklová and her family were in Yugoslavia, where she was giving lectures on social reforms. After months of supporting the social enlightenment movement in what she thought was a relaxing political climate, Šiklová was shocked by the decisive invasion.
“I considered it completely incomprehensible,” she says. “I did not think the Soviet Union would have vested interests in the fate of such a small country.”
Despite her disillusion, Šiklová says she never considered remaining in exile.
“Even when we did realize what was going on, what it all meant, we assumed we could go back,” she says. “My children were with me, but I still had my parents and the rest of my family [in Czechoslovakia].”
When Šiklová returned home in the fall, she became a vehement supporter of the student-led protests, joining the ranks of activists such as Jan Palach, who in January 1969 publicly burned himself to death in protest of the regime.
After losing her job at the university for political reasons, Šiklová continued to publish anonymous articles and smuggle banned literature in support of the reform movement, braving persecution and imprisonment.
“Every year on the anniversary of the invasion, there would be StB agents hiding in the woods behind our cottage,” she says. “They were watching to make sure I wasn’t plotting anything. I don’t know what they thought I was up to.”
Despite the hardships that followed, Šiklová says Aug. 21, 1968, sowed seeds of progress into the national conscience.
“The invasion put an end to an era of Soviet influence on Western Europe,” she says. “The communist party never recovered from it.”
— Markéta Hulpachová


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