I’VE BEEN HIT by an onslaught of “The Eights”. My local public radio station, WNYC has been reflecting on our so-called ‘culture wars’, tracing them decade by decade, through the prism specifically of events that occurred in years ending in 8.
I’m a bit of a sucker when the media set about marking anniversaries, as I share many journalists’ easy attraction to significant dates and the blindingly obvious fact that they’ll repeat. WNYC’s thorough review runs from 1948 up to this current year, highlighting everything from the rise of globalization, in 1948’s post-war entrenchment of international financial institutions like the World Bank and IMF … through, inevitably, America’s polarization in 2018 over issues like … oh let’s say, as WNYC neatly does … ‘TRUSSIA’.
But many factors, not least that it’s an exact half-century ago, make just one year – 1968 – stand out especially. After all, WNYC and anyone else looking for striking anniversaries can pick from an embarrassment of richly resonant happenings in that year. The Guardian is calling it “1968: The Year of Revolt”. And the Detroit Free Press has created an evocatively transformative banner (right) for 1968 as ‘the year that transformed the the nation‘. Its signal events just here in the US, after all, included terrible political assassinations (MLK and RFK), riots in the streets, occupations on campuses, a viciously turbulent Democratic Convention, and LBJ’s withdrawal from seeking re-election as President.
And overseas, there was the Vietnam War’s Tet offensive, with its ever-increasing effects back in the US … student protests breaking out all across the world (in France dramatically amplified with workers’ protests too, and graphically enacted with Paris’s historic cobblestones being torn up and thrown at riot police) … and, not least, the ruthless suppression of liberalization in Czechoslovakia by a massive Soviet invasion.
For myself, young and still living then in the UK, there was a welcome spillover from these momentous events. Britain had its own share of student rebellions and public disturbances – including a huge anti-war protest outside America’s London embassy, with police on horseback infamously charging the demonstrators. As editor of the undergraduate newspaper at my university, I had a busy time making and remaking our ever-louder front pages to match the noisy turmoil of student outrage.
But my biggest – and most lasting – memory of that extraordinary year came with my story on the Russians’ brutal take-over in Prague.
I did indeed cover that event – in a way. But not from Prague. Instead, from Carlisle … the last English city as you take the western route up to Scotland.
This is a somewhat involved and rather tall tale, but I promise you it’s true.
I HAD GOTTEN an internship – during academia’s long summer vacation – with the commercial TV station that served the largely rural area stretching across both sides of the border between England and Scotland – called, unexcitingly enough, Border Television. And excitement was not a hallmark of our coverage – our main characteristic as station was that our territory boasted more sheep than human viewers. Once, unkind local wits redesigned our logo to read ‘Boredom Television‘.
My main tasks were making tea for the newsroom plus some desultory copy-editing. But things changed considerably when the mighty public broadcaster, the BBC, poached one of our senior correspondents – who left promptly without notice. To counter our sudden talent-deficiency, the news editor – for reasons I’ll never understand but am forever grateful – put me on-air as a roving reporter and occasional in-studio interviewer. I was nineteen – but no-one seemed to remark on that.
I took enthusiastically to my new daily round of agricultural shows, local politics, and visits from touring pop-stars. Then, 50 years ago this week, on August 20th, Soviet Russian tanks rolled into Prague, crushing what had become called the ‘Prague Spring’ of liberal reforms initiated by Czech leader Alexander Dubcek (pictured, top).
Now, it so happened that two weeks previously I had reported a short film about a work-camp of international volunteers and its sterling efforts to dig new ditches for the somewhat underdeveloped western region of Cumberland county. (Carlisle, Border TV’s home-base, is the county seat of Cumberland.) Among my interviewees had been a blonde Slovak teenager called Nadezda Bilakova.
In our offices on the early evening of August 20th – as 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops crossed Czechoslovakia’s borders in the middle of the night, local time – I read a Reuters wire story describing the cover-story that Moscow had concocted with leading Czechoslovak Communist Party hardliners.
A letter from those hardliners, in Russian (above), purported to “invite” Soviet forces in … because of the “danger to the very existence of socialism in our country” that Dubcek’s reforms represented. I caught an echo, from my local reporting, in the name of one signatory (arrowed above, the last name signed).
The name was that of Vasil Bilak (left), a deeply conservative member of the Czechoslovak party’s Politburo … and the father of the ditch-digging girl in West Cumberland.
I made two calls – one to my news editor, and one to the work camp organizers. Could I speak again to Nadezda? No, I could not. She had been ‘taken away’.
TWO MEN IN OVERCOATS who spoke Russian, and some imperfect English (I’m still embarrassed by the slim descriptions I got), had arrived at the camp the previous evening. Our further inquiries revealed that they had taken Nadezda by car to Carlisle train station, where they all boarded an overnight train to London’s Heathrow Airport. An Aeroflot flight took her on to Moscow. Some eyewitnesses along the course of her journey, though not all of them, said that she seemed to be an unwilling traveler.
The speculation was that Bilak, during an August 18th discussion with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev (right, pictured in earlier, “friendlier” times with Dubcek) had insisted that his daughter be extracted from the West before the invasion was launched two nights later.
Such high-level analysis wasn’t my concern – I had just my own little corner of this international subterfuge to cover.
That night, as a regional correspondent reporting into Britain’s national network news – I got to recount the reconstructed cloak-and-dagger tale – which ended with the unforgettable (to me) sign-off: “David Tereshchuk, ‘News At Ten’, Carlisle Station”.
I’d become so besotted – as you might imagine – by my heady launch into television journalism that two months later I very nearly did not return to college. But wiser counsels prevailed, and I did continue my studies. I eventually returned to TV as a graduate a year or so later, and in London, not in UK’s regions. And it’s fair to say that while I’ve known some tremendously fulfilling professional moments in national and international reporting since then – none has been quite so enthralling as my addressing the camera at Carlisle Station’s ticket-barrier.
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ENDNOTE: In the 50 years since 1968, my job has inevitably changed many times … reporter, producer, writer, network company executive, non–profit CEO, minor diplomat, advisor and consultant. But I can’t help marveling that today, as I clock up – most recently – six years of reporting for PBS tv (first with Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly and now The PBS NewsHour Weekend), I am essentially doing once again just what I did when I was nineteen. Finding things out, making the best sense of them that I can, and telling the public what I’ve learned. But now – much, much more than back then, in fact – I get the greatest kick imaginable out of doing it.
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THE STORY’S SEQUELS: The original of the notorious ‘letter of invitation’ was made publicly available in 1992 by the new liberal President Vaclav Havel, in many ways the spiritual descendant of Alexander Dubcek. First Secretary Dubcek himself had been expelled from the Communist Party after the invasion, and became a forestry worker living in obscurity; he died in 1992.
Vasil Bilak lived on until 2014, initially in extraordinary luxury (prompting weird tales of his hunting deer with a rifle from helicopters and limousines near his country retreat) and eventually in disgrace after the fall of Communism.
Bilak’s daughter, whom I filmed all those years ago in both our teens, became known later by the name Naděžda Ševcová (right), and now lives in retirement from her position as a university teacher – of Russian, interestingly – in Bratislava, Slovakia.
