Czechoslovakia Of Laughter and Not Forgetting

Sometimes the history of a place is best told through the history of a remarkable man. Jiri Ruml is such a man. Twenty years ago this month, Moscow dispatched Warsaw Pact troops to Czechoslovakia to crush a budding reform movement, a brutal act that plunged the country into a dark winter of repression from which it is only now emerging. Ruml, a journalist in Prague, was fired, but that was merely the beginning of his troubles. Senior Correspondent Frederick Ungeheuer, who covered the invasion for TIME, knew Ruml well. This month he returned to Prague to find out how his friend has fared over the past two decades. His report:

Aug. 30, 1968. Soviet tanks are parked near Prague's Old Town Square, ready to disperse the young people gathered around the mournful statue of Jan Hus, the 15th century religious reformer who was burned at the stake as a heretic. Looking down on the tanks from his third-floor office on Parizska (Paris Street), Jiri Ruml tells me, "We failed. The next attempt at reform will have to come from the center, from Moscow."

As deputy editor of an irreverent weekly called the Reporter, Ruml, then 44, had chronicled the student protests that set the stage for the extraordinary reform movement known as the Prague Spring. He reported on the enthusiasm that Party Leader Alexander Dubcek's vision of "socialism with a human face" had aroused among factory workers, and wrote scathing pieces about the ominous Warsaw Pact army maneuvers taking place in Czechoslovakia that summer. On Aug. 21, those exercises had turned into a full-scale invasion.

When I saw Ruml again, two years later, the "Brezhnev winter" had descended on Prague. Ruml, along with 3,000 other journalists, had lost his job and been expelled from the Communist Party. His new career: working as a crane operator with a road gang. Ruml's wife Jirina Hrabkova had been removed as the moderator of a popular radio program, and was selling sausages at the Prague Zoo. Worst of all, their two sons Jan, 17, and Jakob, 15, were hounded out of high school and denied a university education.

This time, after not having seen my friend for 18 years, I barely recognized him. He stood in the doorway of his two-room apartment in a sooty housing project. He looked frail, his thin face tanned but deeply furrowed. But his blue-gray eyes still sparkled. On a small table in the corner stood a typewriter. "It is the fifth in 20 years," he said. The police had confiscated the others in attempts to trace samizdat (underground press) articles critical of the regime. The harassment had brought on an ulcer complicated by other stomach ailments. After multiple surgery in 1980, Ruml was declared an invalid and retired with a monthly pension of $200.

"Only then, the real dance began," he recalls. In 1977 his family had signed Charter 77, a petition that called on the Prague government to observe the 1975 Helsinki accords on human rights. Within a month, all four were arrested and held briefly for questioning. Ruml was frequently picked up by the police in the years that followed, and in April 1981 he and his son Jan were accused of organizing subversive activities, an offense that carries a ten-year jail term. They were kept in different parts of a Prague prison, seeing each other only once in 13 months. In 1982 Ruml and his son were released, but the charges are still pending.

Is it dangerous for him to talk so openly to a Western journalist? "I can only tell you what I tell the police," he says. He has lost count of how many ^ times he has been arrested and held for 48 hours of questioning. Last July 4 he told his interrogator to hurry up, because he did not want to miss the reception at the U.S. Ambassador's residence. To his surprise, he was let go. But Ruml does not consider himself a dissident. "I only want to be able to criticize existing structures. I know I can't change them."

To test the new atmosphere in his country, last November Ruml and a few other journalists active during the Prague Spring launched a monthly newspaper called Lidove Noviny (People's News). Arrested twice while preparing a prototype issue, Ruml applied for a permit in January. Though he never received one, the newspaper has not been banned either, so its legal status remains in a Kafkaesque limbo. As its editor, Ruml is fined $55 after every issue appears. He appeals every fine. Each issue, typed by hand, is photocopied on many machines, making it difficult for the authorities to track down the printers. The paper has published exclusive interviews with such prominent dissidents as Andrei Sakharov of the Soviet Union and Milovan Djilas of Yugoslavia. Ruml has also submitted questions on U.S. policy in Eastern Europe to Michael Dukakis, and intends to do the same with George Bush. If they respond, he will print their answers side by side in the next issue of Lidove Noviny.

For the anniversary of the invasion last Sunday, supporters of Charter 77 planned to issue a reminder that 20 years ago, the Soviets crushed the same sort of reforms that Gorbachev is now attempting. The secret police usually step up their surveillance of the regime's critics on such occasions. Riot police were also put on alert. To avoid trouble and the summer heat, most people planned to be out of town, but not Jiri Ruml. "I wouldn't miss it for my life," he said. It is his country, and with every interrogation or arrest the authorities frighten him a little less.