ABSTRACT: In August of 1968 the Soviet Army invaded Czechoslovakia. Their tanks overthrew the Dubcek government guilty of having followed a policy of cautious reforms and of claiming a

minimum of independence from the Communist fatherland. While repressions were tormenting Prague, the Radicals organised a series of protests (sit-ins and fasts). Within the framework of an international action organised by the W.R.I(War Resisters International, three Radicals, including Pannella himself, were arrested in Sofia, Bulgaria, for having distributed anti-militarist leaflets.

(Notizie Radicali of August 1968, from "Marco Pannella, Writings and Discourses", Gammalibri, January 1982)

The solution to the Czechoslovakian crisis, from what we have learned at this moment in the late afternoon of August 28, has a name - conjectural but precise: a protectorate.

The state hierarchy remains in office, but its power depends upon the will and consent of the occupying power. The civilian society remains autonomous, on the level of customs and usages, on the condition that it does not cross the line and enter the territory of political action. The press is free on condition that it does not speak ill of its masters. Debate is allowed as long as it does not become effective - that is, does not affect the structures rather than the superstructures. The army is controlled by the government and its own generals as long as it continues to be repressive and collaborates with the occupying forces. The frontiers are protected by the invaders themselves. "Socialism" and the Communist Party are permitted on the condition that they are those that the system itself secretes for its own use and consumption.

The calculations of the Russians seem evidently to include other prospects that are classic in the history of aggression and wars against populaces. It won't be difficult, one thinks, "being right on the spot", to excite and support exceptions to a "normalcy" that is imposed as a condition for the maintenance of agreements and of the autonomy of the Czechoslovakian state.

With more time, it will not be difficult to assure the rise of those alternative political candidates to the present leaders that one had hoped (and here lies the fundamental error of the operation) to impose with the trauma and menace of a few days of occupation.

The Kremlin has become Kafka's castle; the Communist leaders, who up until two years ago had prohibited any publication of the great Prague writer's works, must certainly have felt or thought this.

Several aspects and several phrases from the agreement could bring to mind other analogies from literature. Let it go. That a part of the agreement should state that the secret police and the Soviet army will not impose pressing and confessional cures on the Czechs is, furthermore, like a gag from a fourth class vaudeville show. It is illuminating in regard to the personality of whoever dictated this clause. It is a "diktat". A certain form of bad conscience, wide-spread in leftist circles, is the only kind that fears being confused with the howling of right-wing fascist dogs and of the center or half leftist clergy, if one may use precise definitions that are sufficient to cover the facts.

Just a few years ago at the Brandenburg Gate we officially expressed to our East German hosts our fears as comrades, as anti-fascists of certain authoritarian and militarist symptoms that were only too evident. Why then should we fear today to observe that, finally, after more than twenty years of abstention, German troops will again tread the goose step on foreign soil, the step that - almost incredulous - we rediscovered at the changing of the guard in front of the memorial monuments of the Republic of Ulbrich? And why fear to say that the words of the head of the German Communists are of a disconsolately arrogant and tragic imbecility? And - more - to note that after 150 years Hapsburg policies seem to have been brought back to life - Hungarians used to oppress the Czechs, seeing that circumstances have for now allowed the sending of Czechs and Bulgarians against the Romanians?

This reality, which I do not believe has been falsified by emotion, by passion, by the bitterness of a moment, has working against it just that obtuse lack of imagination that does not entrust itself to anything other than violence, weapons, oppression.

Was there any other solution possible? Was it to be hoped for? No, not as far as our Czech comrades are concerned, at least. They have done well, very well, to reject the individual heroism of capture or the continuing imprisonment in Moscow and to choose a solution that offers the choice of how to continue the fight to the people, the working class, the reformed Communist Party, the government, the parliament. They have done very well to accept an agreement that can be noted by the whole Socialist world for what it is: an irreplaceable accusation against the Soviet leadership which by now has become counter-revolutionary and oppressive. Now the fight can be resumed with greater clarity. International Socialism demands that in Italy one now concretely take

note of it.

Faced with the Prague tragedy, Elsa Morante asked herself when the young Soviets would be able and want to liberate themselves from such ignoble leaders. She has hit the heart of the problem, even if her phrase is not the dogmatically correct one for those many of our comrades who confuse ideology with theory.

Because the roots of the aggression against Czechoslovakia are in the authoritarian structures that germinate, crystallise and develop in the USSR. An authoritarian organisation of production and labour relations not dissimilar to the capitalist ones; the family, the schools, the party, the "governmental bodies" (army, administration, judiciary) still authoritarian and repressive - these are the structures that are in danger of making vain the immense conquests of the October Revolution, of suffocating for good any lay and libertarian socialist hopes, of producing the Brezhnevs...

There has been an attempt, in short, to exorcise the spectre of a continuation of the revolution, of the freeing of man from slavery as declared by socialism, striking at him in Prague because of the fear that it could happen all the sooner in the USSR and other Warsaw Pact countries. The coup almost succeeded. It had an indispensable ally: the army, which, with or without the red star, is destined in the last analysis to fight not "external" enemies, against whom the reasons for opposition and struggle are gradually disappearing, but to fight against the people and socialism.