RUSSIANS GO HOME!

IT had been a lilting summer day throughout Eastern Europe. In the cool of a starry evening in the Czechoslovak capital of Prague, vast Wenceslas Square was alive with couples strolling arm in arm, tourists and Czechoslovaks bustling homeward. Then, just before midnight, telephones began to jangle as friends and relatives living in border towns frantically put in calls to the capital. The alert was spread by taxi drivers and owners of private cars, who raced through the medieval streets with their horns wailing warning. Soon the roar of jet engines reverberated through the night skies; Russian planes were flying ominously low. At 1:10 a.m., Radio Prague interrupted a program of music to confirm the worst: "Yesterday, on August 20, about 11 p.m., troops of the Soviet Union, the Polish People's Republic and the Hungarian People's Republic, the German Democratic People's Republic and the Bulgarian People's Republic crossed the frontiers of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic."

Striking with stunning speed and surprise, some 200,000 soldiers of the five Warsaw Pact countries punched across the Czechoslovak border to snuff out the eight-month-old experiment by Alexander Dubcek's regime in humanizing Communism. Russian and East German units smashed southward from East Germany. Forces thrusting from the

Ukraine rolled across from the east. Polish and Russian troops quickly seized the industrial city of Ostrava in northern Czechoslovakia. Some 250 Soviet T-54 tanks raced from Hungary into the Slovak capital of Bratislava. They hit the city at an awesome tank speed of 35 m.p.h., their smoking treads churning up the asphalt as they knocked down lampposts, street signs, even automobiles that stood in their way.

Prague was assaulted first from the air, as giant Tupolev transports, covered by MIG jet fighters, began landing every minute at Ruzyne airport. The first passengers were the elite paramilitary units of the KBG, the Soviet secret police, whose mission was to secure the capital's airfields, railroad stations, cable offices and broadcast centers. It was perhaps at Ruzyne that the first sign of Czechoslovakia's remarkable campaign of passive resistance appeared. The airport officials refused to supply the Soviet planes with fuel. At nearby Pardubice airport, the Russians had to set up their own control tower after Czechoslovak air force officers re fused to guide the arriving armada down to the landing strip. Forbidden by the Dubcek government to shoot back at the overwhelming force of invaders, the Czechoslovaks, from high army officers down to shoeshine boys, quickly established a principle and stuck to it through the days that followed: anything that the Warsaw Pact intruders wanted done they must do themselves. With few exceptions, the invaders found no collaborators.

New Business. As Moscow undoubtedly knew, Dubcek's Presidium was assembled in the yellow stucco headquarters of the Communist Central Com mittee at the very moment the invasion began. It met regularly on Tuesday evenings, a circumstance that saved the Soviets the trouble of tracking the Czechoslovak leaders to their homes to arrest them. On the agenda of the session was the special party congress due to be held on Sept. 9, at which Dubcek and his colleagues dedicated to reform and liberalization intended to oust the last of the hard-core conservatives on the Central Committee, among them Presidium Members Alois Indra, Dra-homir Kolder and Vasil Bilak. Kolder and Indra brought to the session a memorandum stating that the party was losing control of the country and that something had to be done. Dubcek's majority on the Presidium rejected it.

There was pressing new business as well. The Kremlin, after a two-week truce following the reformers' triumph at the Cierna summit with the Soviet Politburo, was talking tough again. An editorial in Pravda two days before had accused the Czechoslovaks of "or ganized persecution" of pro-Soviet workers and renewed the Kremlin com plaint that Prague was failing to control anti-Communist "reactionary" forces in the country. Also, Dubcek had just received a letter from Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev warning that he had not lived up to his agreements at Cierna. In the midst of the dis cussion, a Czechoslovak military officer telephoned the news that the Soviets had invaded. Premier Oldfich Cernik took the call. "This is impossible," he said. When Defense Minister Martin Dzur in a second call insisted that it was all too possible, Cernik hung up with a hoarse cry: "Treason, betrayal!"

"How could they do this to me?" asked a dazed Dubcek. "I have served the cause of the Soviet Union and Com munism all of my life." Only Indra, Kolder and Bilak seemed unsurprised by the invasion, raising the suspicion that it was they who had provided Moscow with the slim pretext for the invasion. That pretext, as described by Tass, was "that party and government leaders" of Czechoslovakia "have asked the Soviet Union and other allied states to render the fraternal Czechoslovak people urgent assistance, including assistance with armed forces."

Bilak, in fact, admitted as much and, along with Kolder, urged the Presidium to cooperate with the Russians. But the reformers were adamant. National Assembly President Josef Smrkovsky hastened off to convene an emergency session. He was arrested there, but the Assembly continued to meet throughout the week, with 169 of its 300 Deputies in defiant session. Cer-nik left to rally the government, and was taken into custody at his office. Dubcek refused to try to escape and, with other Presidium members, waited for the Russian troops to ring the building; he was seized by 15 Soviet officers and plainclothesmen in his office.

Vise of Power. It was morning before most Czechoslovaks came face to face with the reality of the invasion, and by then tanks were lumbering through the streets of Prague and the entire country lay in the vise of Soviet power. The occupation force was largely in place: twelve Russian mechanized divisions, one division of troops from Poland and one from East Germany, along with token units from Hungary and a few from Bulgaria that had been brought in ships to Russia across the Black Sea. The Germans were prudently kept out of sight in the countryside, because Czechoslovaks remember all too vengefully the last visit by German troops in 1939.

The long guns of tanks swiveled from side to side in the baroque alleyways of Prague. The Russians surrounded the presidential palace on Hradcany Hill, planted artillery on the heights of Letna Hill, where a mammoth statue of Stalin once overlooked the city. In Old Town Square, they even placed six antiaircraft guns by the Jan Hus monument, the symbol of Czechoslovakia's historic quest for liberty. Everywhere, paratroops in purple berets stood guard alongside tank crews in full battle dress, cradling automatic rifles in their laps. In swiftness of execution, the invasion had been a model military operation. But the occupation was soon to prove quite another matter in ways that the Soviets had not foreseen. The Czechoslovaks, as the invaders discovered to their discomfiture, were simply not impressed.

On the first day of the occupation, Czechoslovak crowds surged around the alien tankers and sentries and virtually smothered them in fraternal attentions.

As the tanks moved down Wenceslas Square, youths marched to their front and rear, shouting in chorus, "Long live Dubcek! Russians go home!" The statue of King Wenceslas was covered with boys waving the red, white and blue Czechoslovak flag. Atop the king's head, they erected posters proclaiming

HURRAH, DUBCEK and U.S.S.R., GO HOME. WE ARE A FREE NATION,

Whenever the tanks stopped, the interrogations began--surely some of history's most curious confrontations between conqueror and conquered. Hounded by questions, many of the Russians--some of whom were youths no older than 18--looked nervous and stared blankly into the distance to avoid further embarrassment. A few told crowds in the street that they were in Czechoslovakia to protect the people from "counterrevolution" or the "re actionaries" in West Germany. But many had little notion of their mission and were apologetic. "We are only following orders," a youthful paratrooper said to an irate questioner in Prague. "We have our orders. Surely you, too, were once a soldier and know what it means. The political decisions are not our affair."

Then, TIME Correspondents Peter Forbath and Friedel Ungeheuer reported from Prague, the Czechoslovaks' mood began to change. Mobs of youths mounted squat tanks, forcing their crews to disappear inside the hatch. Like elephant trunks swatting at flies, their gun turrets swung around eerily in an effort to knock off the screaming, chanting Czechoslovaks, who also bombarded the tanks with bricks, painted their flanks with swastikas, and dumped garbage on their hot engine covers to create a stench. Daring youths in Prague and Bratislava even charged the tanks and set a few afire with flaming pieces of carpet and bottles of gasoline. In response, the tanks chased the youths into alleys and side streets with volleys of machine-gun fire. One tank retaliated by blasting away at the facade of the National Museum in Prague.

Soaked in Blood. Though the Russians had obviously been ordered to shoot only if seriously provoked, they had also been told not to brook any serious challenge to their authority in the streets. In Brno, an industrial city in Moravia, Soviet troops opened fire on a jeering worker and killed him. In Prague, a Soviet tank blasted a truckload of workers with machine-gun fire, blowing off the head of one and killing three others. A middle-aged man and his wife carrying a Czechoslovak flag jumped a Soviet paratrooper near the Central Committee building in Prague. Another paratrooper quickly turned and shot the man to death; his blood soaked the flag, which was later passed among crowds of street protesters as a symbol of Russian brutality and Czechoslovak heroism.

The only pitched battle in the first hours of occupation occurred when Russian troops tried to invest the offices of Radio Prague. About 40 staff members were barricaded inside, and snipers fired from the perches in and around the building. Three municipal bus drivers placed their vehicles at the corner of Italian and Vinohradska streets, near the Radio Prague building, as barriers to keep Soviet tanks from getting near the building. Street crowds watching the "battle managed to drag two giant steel derricks in the path of the tanks as well. Youths lobbed Molotov cocktails at the armor stalled along the street.

Finally, the tanks clanked over the obstacles, crunching them out of the way and moving within short range of the building. Paratroops darted inside and the battle was over. The station, which had been calling for support of the legal government, signed off by playing the national anthem, but came back on the air a short while later, transmitting from a secret studio. Flames poured not only from the Radio Prague office but also from other buildings along Vinohradska. In a scene recalling fiercer battles in the streets of Buda pest in 1956, a Russian tank and two armored ammunition carriers burned in the streets.

Throughout the country, black flags of mourning appeared on buildings, statues and monuments. On walls, barn doors, highway signs, car and store windows, the Czechoslovaks tacked up posters and chalked messages demanding in all the languages of the Warsaw Pact that the invaders go home. One message scrawled on a wall in Prague read: "Lenin, wake up. Brezhnev has gone mad!" Said another: "Hungarians, go home. Have you not had enough of these things?" Wenceslas Square turned into a fleet of Czechoslovak flags bobbing on a sea of demonstrators, who shouted in the direction of the 20 tanks parked among them: "Russian murderers, go home!"

Thousands of foreign tourists were caught in Czechoslovakia when the Russians came. Among them were 4,000 geologists attending the International Geological Congress. The Russian delegates were so embarrassed by the invasion that they removed their name tags. The U.S. embassy hired 20 buses to help transport some 1,500 stranded Americans, including onetime Film Star Shirley Temple Black and TV Actor Robert (U.N.C.L.E.) Vaughn, to West Germany and Austria. Tourists streamed out of the country in their cars, often driving past menacing Soviet tanks parked at lonely countryside junctions with their guns pointed at the road. The Czechoslovaks at first begged the tourists to stay and aid them in their struggle, then put them to work carrying out mail for relatives abroad and film to show the world what was happening. As the tourists left the country, Czechoslovak frontier guards urged them to mobilize opinion against the Russians when they got home. Meanwhile, many Czechoslovaks on vacation hurried home to join the struggle.

Stronger than Tanks. That struggle grew more and more coordinated--and cunning--as the Czechoslovaks mobilized all their resources to baffle, stymie and frustrate their occupiers. The campaign was directed and inspired by radio stations that continued to operate secretly throughout the country--reportedly with transmitters provided by the Czechoslovak army--after the Russians had shut down the regular government transmitters. "We have no weapons, but our contempt is stronger than tanks," proclaimed one such station near Bratislava. The station suggested that its listeners "switch around street signs, take house numbers from the doors, remove nameplates from public buildings and, when a Soviet soldier asks you something, say that you don't understand Russian."

The people did just that. They moved so many road signs and town markers in order to misdirect Soviet troops that it was impossible for a stranger to find his way without constantly consulting a map. They also switched number and name signs on houses and apartments so that Soviet security police could not find Czechoslovaks whom they sought to arrest. (The Czechoslovak Interior Ministry had already refused to make any arrests.) "You know where you live," said a free radio. "There's no need for the rascals to know." When Soviet officers asked residents of Bratislava where the clandestine radio station was, they were sent in every direction but the right one. Railway workers and local militiamen in eastern Slovakia reportedly tried every method to prevent the arrival of a train with electronic equipment that would enable the Russians to locate and jam the secret radio transmitters.

Hidden in Ambulances. Indeed, it began to look as though the whole resistance effort had been well plotted by the government before the invasion. Clearly, people were not operating solely on their own initiative. The studios and equipment for the secret stations must have been set up in advance, and scores of journalists and technicians had been briefed on what to do and where to go. The clandestine printing presses had also been primed. Taxi drivers were soon distributing a ten-point leaflet of instructions that said:

"1) Until our leaders are released, go into passive resistance and go on strike if necessary. 2) Do not collaborate with the forces of occupation. 3) Talk to the soldiers in Russian [to persuade them of the Czech point of view], explain, paint slogans, print leaflets. 4) If threatened, claim that you do not understand Russian or any other language. 5) If pressed, play the fool. 6) Support free TV and radio stations. 7) Try to prevent Russian propaganda and jam their stations. 8) Support all pur progressive leaders. 9) Expose collaborators and those that are weak in character. 10) Prepare yourself to take further steps should the occupation not come to an end."

So resourceful were the Czechoslo vaks that they held a conference that was one of the irritants leading to the invasion right under the Russians' nose. With Russian troops everywhere in and around Prague, the special party congress that had been set for Sept. 9 convened in the CKD machine-tool factory in a Prague suburb. More than 1,200 out of the 1,500 delegates elected last July to attend the congress managed to reach the secret meeting place. Many were smuggled inside dressed in blue overalls and carrying fake identity cards; a few with familiar faces were brought to the plant hidden in factory ambulances. They promptly elected not only a liberalized Central Committee but a new party Presidium--minus such hard-liners as Kolder and Indra. Dubcek, who was in Russian custody, was again named party chief by the delegates, who also issued a declaration demanding that the Soviet armies leave the country and threatening a general strike on Friday if they did not.

After the clandestine radio network broadcast the declaration, virtually the entire nation stopped work for one hour at noon the next day. Many joined in solemn demonstrations. About 60 youths linked arms and walked through Wenceslas Square in Prague, asking the crowds to leave the square to the tanks. A deadly hush fell over the square as the people drifted away, clearly unnerving the Russians. Then the city suddenly exploded in noise as drivers in cars leaned on their horns, factory whistles sounded and church bells rang.

Soviet Viceroy. Meanwhile the Soviet ambassador to Prague, Stepan Chervonenko, acting like a Soviet viceroy, feverishly tried to put together a workable government. The Russians imposed a 10 p.m.-to-5 a.m. curfew in the streets, tore down inflammatory posters, and issued stern warnings against provocations. They also set up their own newspaper and a radio station called Radio Vltava, which could hardly compete with the free stations. Russian security men began arresting liberal intellectuals who had caused chagrin in the Kremlin. Among those held under house arrest was Ladislav Mnac-ko, author of the novel The Taste of Power, who was locked up, along with the editors of Svobodne Slovo in the newspaper's office in Prague.

Back in Moscow, the Soviet propaganda machine, slow in starting, had finally begun cranking out excuses for the military action. In a 13,000-word editorial, Pravda offered detailed criticism of the behavior of the leading Prague progressives, describing Dubcek as a "betrayer of Communist ideals." Pravda was particularly severe in condemning the plans for a party purge; it spoke of "an atmosphere of real pogrom and moral execution." After the takeover, Tass even claimed that the secret party congress in Prague was a reactionary attempt to take over the government--a feat that was hardly possible while So. viet tanks were in the streets. To prevent the real story from reaching their own people, the Russians began to jam the Voice of America broadcasts for the first time in five years.

Reassuring Words. While the Soviets were trying to create at least a modicum of government over the recalcitrant Czechoslovaks, the destiny of the nation's reformist vision of Communism was being debated behind closed doors in both Prague and Moscow. Dubcek and Cernik were flown off to Moscow in a Soviet military jet. The Czechoslovaks at first broadcast reports that Dubcek had been killed, but that was cleared up in one of the many weird, almost unreal vignettes of the week. Dubcek's mother marched in to see the local Soviet commander in Bratislava, demanding to know what the Russians had done with her son. Slightly dumfounded, the Russian officer told her: "We are negotiating with him."

The Russians were also negotiating in Prague with President Ludvik Svoboda, who as head of state could provide a stamp of legitimacy for a puppet government--and who commands immense popular prestige in both Czechoslovakia and Russia as a World War II leader of the Czechoslovak army that fought with the Soviets against Hitler. Though troops ringed his residence in Hradcany Castle, Svoboda was able to broadcast over the free radio in

Prague, and from the first his words attempted to reassure. "There is no way back from freedom and democracy. The situation must be solved rapidly and the troops must leave."

Afternoon Off. Svoboda soon decided that he wanted to talk directly with the Kremlin leaders; Moscow agreed that he could come, but insisted that representatives of the conservatives on the Presidium must also be represented. Bilak and Indra joined the delegation, as did another conservative, Jan Filler, the party boss of Middle Bohemia. To balance the lineup, Svoboda was also permitted to bring along three Dubcek loyalists: Defense Minister Dzur, Minister of Justice Bohuslav Kucera and Central Committeeman Gustav Husak. It began to look like Cierna all over again--but on the Kremlin's terms. Before leaving, Svoboda asked the nation via clandestine radio to "have trust in me."

Unreality ruled once more when Svoboda arrived in Moscow. The whitehaired general was given a 21-gun salute, presented with flowers and bussed on both cheeks by Brezhnev, Kosygin and President Nikolai Podgorny, who had come to the airport to greet him. Together the four rode in an open car, waving to thousands of Russians who had been given the afternoon off, oddly enough, to hail the conquered hero.

When Svoboda sat down with Brezh nev in the Kremlin, he discovered that the Russians wanted to talk only with him and the six men that had come with him from Prague. Svoboda demanded that Dubcek and Cernik be in cluded. When Brezhnev demurred, Svoboda threatened to break off all negotiations, and Brezhnev gave in. Svoboda then informed the Czechoslovaks in a message broadcast over Prague's free radio station that Dubcek "was at his side" in the Kremlin confrontation.

License Numbers. Back home, the Czechoslovak people continued to show the same sort of solidarity with Dubcek as Svoboda had shown. Many of them wore red, white and blue corsages and carried IVAN GO HOME! placards. Thev burned propaganda leaflets dropped from Soviet helicopters. Hundreds of thousands of citizens in fac tories, sports clubs and professional associations signed petitions calling upon Svoboda to declare Czechoslovakia neu tral and withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. Radio Prague began broadcasting the license-plate numbers of secret police cars so that people could slash their tires.

In this frustrating atmosphere, some Russian soldiers were getting trigger-happy and tough. Retaliating against lone snipers who took potshots at them during the night, they sent up flares and raked whole neighborhoods with small-arms fire. After they spotted some armed men on the roof of the Rude Pravo newspaper office. Soviet machine gunners opened fire, riddling the building's facade and shattering windows; their targets turned out to be Russian troops. The soldiers began firing without warning at anyone seen in the streets after the 10 p.m. curfew. In Prague, they killed at least three people and wounded two in one night, bringing the total number of those killed in the capital during the occupation to 20 and the wounded to 300. As many as 30 more may have been killed in the rest of the country.

In the streets, conversation between the people and the troops suddenly ceased. Free radio broadcasts and leaf lets advised that the Soviet press was printing photos of Czechoslovaks and Russians talking in Prague as proof that a warm reception was being given the troops. Any Czech caught speaking to the soldiers, these messages said, would be branded a traitor. Though the people had little notion of the progress of the Moscow negotiations, they knew that their fate hung on them. Nearly 15,000 of them lined the route from Ruzyne airport to the city, waiting in vain some four hours to welcome back their leaders and get some clue to the outcome of the talks.

For a time last week, rumors raced through Europe that the Soviets might straighten out a few more ideological frontiers while they were at it in Czechoslovakia. Pravda ominously charged that both Rumania's Ceausescu and Yugoslavia's Tito were siding with the "reactionaries" in the Prague regime. But both Communist leaders made it clear that if their countries were at tacked, the invaders would have a shooting resistance on their hands, unlike the situation in Czechoslovakia. The ar mies of both countries were put on alert. Tito and Ceausescu were concerned enough over Czechoslovakia, in fact, to get together for talks in the Yugoslav village of Ursac. The two considered calling for a European Communist Party summit to deal with the crisis. That might prove to be a highly uncomfortable gathering for Moscow (see following story).

What sort of bargain Svoboda and Dubcek might be able to strike in Moscow remained problematical. Pravda's massive editorial sounding the warning on the invasion made it clear that the Kremlin wants to be assured of several things before it withdraws its army. The Russians insist that the old-line cad res be kept in their jobs in the party and government. They want press freedoms curtailed. They want guarantees that Czechoslovakia's economy will remain oriented toward the Soviet bloc.

Many Czechoslovaks were encouraged by the length of Svoboda's stay in Moscow. "If the Soviets had been convinced that they were right," said Agriculture Minister Josef Boruvka, "the negotiations would not have lasted more than an hour." One report said that Svoboda was promising to reimpose a degree of censorship and brake the democratization a bit as part of a political compromise. The Russians, in return, would permit not only Dubcek but also Cernik and Smrkovsky to continue in office. This would leave mat ters pretty much where they stood after Cierna--except that Soviet tanks would still be in Czechoslovakia as enforcers of the agreement. There were even reports that the party bosses from Hungary, Poland, East Germany and Bulgaria might come to Moscow to give their endorsement to such an accord.

Whether the Czechoslovak people would accept it remained to be seen. Having tasted the heady air of freedom the past eight months and in their own way tested their mettle against Soviet tanks last week, they might well insist on a greater say in their own destiny in the future. Passive resistance is an art that, once mastered, can be applied in more than one situation.

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