It is a grave error to call upon foreign troops to teach one’s people a lesson.
—Josip Broz Tito
THE sIXTIES ENDED badly for Communism and terribly for Noel Field. In 1968, Moscow violently reversed the “corrected mistakes” and the “forward march.” As in 1956, Soviet tanks were the instrument of the reversal. The Prague Spring, as it came to be known, was begun by Czech Communists fed up with Moscow’s stranglehold on their lives. Alexander Dubček, the newly elected head of the Czech Communist Party, was a Soviet-trained apparatchik. Like Imre Nagy in 1950s Hungary, Dubček wanted to reform the party from within. For a while, the Kremlin, now under Leonid Brezhnev’s collective leadership, saw no need for alarm.
But as in Budapest, so in Prague the talk of reform proved as intoxicating as champagne to a population dying of thirst. The gruesome truth about the Slánský trial—in which Noel’s name had been used to convict loyal Communists—had recently been publicly exposed. In its aftermath, Czech Communists were calling for a more general cleansing, including a reexamination of the 1948 “suicide” of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk. Suppressed atrocities and abuses of Soviet power in the name of the “the people” suddenly exploded in public and in the press. Exuberant mass rallies supporting the party’s call for “socialism with a human face” were in flamboyant contrast to the stolid, obligatory May Day marches. The idea—launched by Dubček and his party—of Communism with free elections, a free media, and, eventually, over a ten-year period, a multiparty system—was heady indeed. The Prague Spring was about the power of words and ideas, not guns and Molotov cocktails. To the Kremlin, both were equally dangerous.
From Budapest, Noel followed reports of students massed on Wenceslas Square—their banners proclaiming “Free Speech! Free Elections!” Prague was a city Field knew intimately, so these scenes surely stirred deep emotions. Then, too, as a youth at Harvard and later in Washington, he had marched for similar rights for the disenfranchised and powerless. These were not “counterrevolutionaries” but students with backpacks, housewives carrying string bags of groceries, workers in their soft caps. Wenceslas Square—the heart of the Prague Spring—was the historic neighborhood from where Field himself was kidnapped in 1949.
“I have a hard time,” Noel wrote his brother on March 24, 1968, “not giving way to depression and alienation most of the time, and this, to a lesser extent applies to Herta as well.” As always, America, not the Soviet Union, was to blame for all the world’s ills. “While we have the advantage of living in a society whose aims we basically approve of, we are profoundly affected by what goes on in the rest of the world, especially in America. Sometimes I feel that if I were in America now, I’d have little choice but to set fire to myself in the White House grounds. I realize this may be over pessimistic. I follow positive developments with close interest—from the hippies through the Black Power [movement] to [Eugene] McCarthy and [Robert] Kennedy. But is there any real hope in the face of the forces of evil?”
Evil showed its face on August 21, 1968. Its features, however, were not American. Five hundred thousand Warsaw Pact troops from Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany, under Soviet command, poured into Czechoslovakia and crushed Prague’s Spring. Soviet tanks rumbled down Prague’s narrow, cobblestoned streets as they had in Budapest twelve years before. The demonstrators did not disperse, however. Armed only with clenched fists and rage, they blocked the “fraternal” army of occupation. Graffiti became another of the Czechs’ weapons of choice.
Students drew swastikas on Soviet tanks and scrawled “Rusove Tahnete Domo!”—“Russians Go Home!”—on walls. Surrounded by faces tight with hate, the soldiers, under orders not to shoot, were prisoners in their own tanks. For weeks the population continued to surge against the occupiers. The Czechs’ passive resistance was brave and deeply moving, but ultimately futile. The Kremlin had demonstrated that Czechoslovakia was just another province of the Soviet empire, whose power to determine its own fate was nil. Times had changed in one regard. Alexander Dubček was not executed at dawn, merely dispatched to oblivion in the provinces, and later made ambassador to Turkey. In the eighties, Dubček lived to see a real Prague Spring under Václav Havel. He stood beside Havel and cheered when Warsaw Pact troops withdrew—permanently.
After the Soviets’ violent crushing of Czechoslovakia’s experiment in reform, perhaps not even Noel Field could delude himself about Communism’s true nature.
This time, Noel made no statements supporting the repression. His colleague at the magazine, Rudi Fischer, remembers Noel as withdrawn and tight-lipped after Prague’s suppression. That year, Field stopped paying his Communist Party dues.