FOURTH WORLD
37
But I would like to hope that the world will also take stock of what
began to happen that same day away from the chess game of cabinet
politics. On the initiative of the strike committee of Charles University's
Philosophical faculty, thousands of Prague students staged a sit-in pro–
test, the first to occur in this generation. Strike committees were quickly
set up in all Prague faculties and a strike committee of the Union of
University Students in Bohemia and Moravia appealed to all the Czech
universities to follow their example. Sixty thousand students in Bohemia
and Moravia went on strike and the Slovak universities were expected
to join them very soon. The students were in close contact with all the
factories in Prague as well as with several big factories in the country
at large: all the workers endorsed their demands and a few hundred
young workers went out on sympathy strikes. And more than 1,000
Prague journalists and Czech writers openly supported the students.
The demonstrators were protesting against attempts by pro-Soviet
politicians to restore the pre-January conditions, and against the present
Government's policy of compromise; they were also expressing their full
support for that policy which since January has been associated with
the name of Alexander Dubcek - the policy of "socialism with a human
face," that is, of a democratic and humane socialism.
The strike changed the atmosphere in Prague. Despite the imposi–
tion of more and more restrictions, people were much more optimistic
and cheerful than some weeks before. Their only hope, their faith in
the youth, was confirmed.
But before dealing further with the present situation I must tell you
more about the young people of Czechoslovakia, so you can really
understand what is going on here. This generation, the first generation
born in socialist Czechoslovakia, differs from its father's - young peo–
ple often are different, and this is probably true all over the world. In
Czechoslovakia, though, I feel there is something special about the
youth.
The postwar generation has been given various labels in the past
ten years: they've been called cosmopolitan, unpatriotic, cynical and so
on. Toward the end of 1967, during the students' mass political actions,
the campaign of abuse began to wane, primarily because the critics ran
out of arguments; and after January, 1968, it was silenced altogether.
Moreover, during the first week of the invasion the majority of journal–
ists devoted a good deal of valuable space in the free newspapers (pub–
lished clandestinely) to apologies to Czechoslovak youth for the sus–
picions voiced about them earlier, and to expressions of respect for their
courage. Some newspapers, notably
Mlada Fronta,
went so far as to
