Russia, which had composed the enormous fugue for the entire terrestrial globe, could not tolerate the scattering of the notes. On August 21, 1968, she sent an army of half a million men to Bohemia. Soon about one hundred twenty thousand Czechs had left the country, and of those who remained, about five hundred thousand had been forced to leave their jobs, for isolated workshops in the depths of the country, for distant factories, for the steering wheels of trucks - that is to say, for places where no one would hear their voices.
And because not even the shadow of a bad memory should distract the country from its restored idyll, both the Prague Spring and the arrival of the Russian tanks, that stain on a beautiful history, had to be reduced to nothing. That is why today in Bohemia the August 21 anniversary goes by silently and the names of those who rose up against their own youth are carefully erased from the country's memory, like mistakes in a schoolchild's homework.
[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera, M.]
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