Czechoslovakia 1968: The Impressions of a Geographer

Abstract

Of the impressions which remain from my first visit to Czechoslovakia forty years ago in 1928 two have political overtones. One was the presence of a free Ukrainian university group whose members were preparing for the approaching return to their homeland, and the other was the strong United States influence among students and professional people. Together these illustrate the dilemma of Bohemia through the centuries, compelled to face both ways and inhibited from developing a strong national identity independent of the one or the other. In 1928 the attraction was westward. Cultural ties were being strengthened with the United States to which not so very long before many Czechs, Slovaks, and Ruthenians had migrated. There was the added attraction that there Thomas Masaryk had found a base from which to mount his independence movement. This was the period when the main railway station in Prague was named after President Wilson and a nearby street after Washington. I did not return to Prague until January 1957, a few months after the Hungarian rebellion. Washington Street had survived, but little more remained of the pre-war ties with western Europe and America. The local museum of Marxism and Leninism was featuring a display about Munich, with photographs of Runciman and Chamberlain in tailcoats and top hats, a smiling Hitler putting his name to the agreement, and maps showing the transfer of Sudeten territory to Germany. In hotel lobbies were small, rather silent, knots of people who seemed to be either trying to overhear what their neighbours were saying or to be keeping a weather eye open for the secret police, Soviet or native. That was a very lonely time indeed to be a westerner in Prague. No one wanted to be seen with one and such talks as were possible with professional colleagues took place behind locked doors. A lecture on Canada that I had been invited to offer at Charles University, was held in a professor's office, with an audience of seven. The lecture hall turned out to be unavailable, but the invitation, having been issued, was not to be