Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

Some months later I went on my second trip. Under the tracks of
Soviet tanks, the hopes of the Prague Spring, as well as our own
expectations of change, were crushed. Heavily disappointed, it
went against my conscience to use official terminology and describe
the events in Prague as the suppression of counterrevolutionary
forces.
I have often wondered what might have happened if the aspirations
of the Prague Spring had not been destroyed by the Soviet army.
History cannot answer this question but as soon as I had returned
to Moscow, I was convinced that the Kremlin did not care about
preserving the foundations of socialism. The only thing our rulers
cared about was maintaining their own power.
Forty years ago, wandering along the streets of Prague, I was overtaken
by mixed feelings. I felt ashamed for the acts of my compatriots
who had arrived in tanks to visit friends. I felt bitter about the
communist doctrine that promised an earthly paradise. I had disturbing
thoughts about the situation my country was in and about
my own destiny. Those events in Prague symbolized the destruction
of hope and ideals, and the world appeared to be as black as night.
It was hard for me to imagine that forty years later I would return to
Prague in such totally different circumstances. The communist system
has collapsed. Instead of Czechoslovakia, there are now two
countries, each of them following its own democratic way and Europe
is undergoing a unifying process.
My country, the former USSR, took a different path. Almost twenty
difficult years have passed since the beginning of perestroika. In
those years, people placed their hopes and expectations in the ability
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to reform and follow
its democratic platform. Many hoped that in the autumn of 1991 a
split would take place leaving the conservatives in one party and the
reformers in another. The August putsch eliminated these hopes.
The CPSU was banned and several months later, the Soviet Union
collapsed. The country entered into a period of difficult psychological
perestroika, characterised by my Izvestia colleague Otto Lacis
as lomka – a period of cold turkey.
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