Bulgarian memories of 1968 Prague Spring: ‘We were not aggressors’
SOFIA: Bulgarian soldiers who took part in crushing the 1968 Prague Spring democracy movement under orders from Moscow bristle at being considered aggressors.
“If we were aggressors in Czechoslovakia, having been sent there by the Warsaw Pact, what are our soldiers today who’ve been sent to Iraq and Afghanistan for NATO?” asks reserve colonel Lyubcho Banov.
His irritation is visible as he recalls commanding a company tasked with protecting Prague’s Ruzyne airport as the Czech Republic marks the 50th anniversary of the Soviet crackdown.
“It was a political decision: it was inconceivable that Czechoslovakia would be allowed to escape. As soldiers we carried out our duty, without firing on civilians,” Banov says. “We weren’t aggressors.”
Pencho Valkov, a businessman from the central town of Drianovo, bears a small scar on his chest from where he was scraped by a rebel bullet, fired from a house close to the airport. “I took cover, we weren’t allowed to respond to the shot,” he recalls.
Valkov was just 18 at the time and says he did not know why his unit was being deployed when the soldiers were flown from their base near the Turkish border to the then Soviet republic of Ukraine on July 28, 1968.
Chonkov says the men were “surprised” to arrive in western Ukraine. There they were awakened at dawn on August 21 and told of their mission just before re-boarding their plane.
“A commander explained that our ‘Czechoslovak brothers’ had asked for help, that it was ‘worse than a war’,” Valkov recalls.
Czechoslovakia did not finally shed totalitarian rule until 1989, four years before splitting into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. — AFP