In Prague the dear beloved Soviets
FIFTH COLUMN
Of Marcello Veneziani
Like today, in the night between 20 and the 21 August fifty years ago, Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the Prague Spring dream of freedom. They will talk about it adequately on TV and in the newspapers? They will also remember this shadowy side of '68? They will remember the infamy of those who defended them and took their side, as the Italian communists did? Or they'll say it's been too long now, and therefore we can talk about fascism and Nazism every day, dead 73 years ago, but we can no longer talk about communism, which is much more recent and present?
It should also be remembered that a part of the Italian communists dissociated themselves from the PCI and condemned the Russian invasion, as the Manifesto group did. But with a small detail: they did not dissent to embrace socialism with a human face but to pursue a much more inhuman socialism, the Chinese one, with Mao who with his cultural revolution was much bloodier than Stalin and Brezhnev. In a debate in a hall of the Chamber opened by Napolitano, a few years ago I remembered the silence of the PCI regarding the revolt, the contempt towards the insurgents and the silence of the party and L'Unità towards dissidents, come Jiri Pelikan, which was then "adopted" by Craxi's PSI. Fassino pointed out to me that, on the contrary, the PCI had supported Prime Minister Dubcek and socialism with a human face. Right, until Dubcek was in power, tolerated by the Soviet Union… But later, when the tanks arrived, and there was the revolt, an embarrassed silence fell and the orthodox thesis prevailed, supported precisely by the communist right of Amendola and Napolitano, that those who show solidarity with the insurgents are playing the usual lurking reaction game. The Italian communists aligned themselves with the Soviets, like in Budapest before, in '56, and to Gdańsk and Szczecin afterwards, in the '70s. Furthermore, we must not forget that until 1978 the funding for the PCI and L'Unità continued to come from the USSR, and the contributions from the Italian-Czechoslovak Association continued to arrive. That's how it was in '68, the Soviet tanks lost a few r and for the local communists they remained the dear beloved Soviets... Read More
