Irina Brezna on 1968 in Bratislava

Writer Irina Brezna witnessed the Prague Spring as an eighteen-year-old school girl in Bratislava. She recalls how President Antonín Novotný's rigid regime lost its influence: "Novotny's criminal conservativeness, which was a trade mark feature of KP central committee functionaries, stood for the repressive lies and deadly monotony which were forced onto my generation for as long as we can remember. ... If the president, whose picture hung in every office and classroom, had been young and attractive like Che Guevara on the famous posters I later saw hanging on the walls of western leftists, the history of the Czech Republic would have been different. However the beauty of the bearded revolutionary wearing a smart beret fit in with the West's romantic illusions about socialism - not with our ugly reality. ... Spring 1968 was a shining moment not because it created a shining future but because it showed the darkness for what it was."

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