“You give us tanks, we give you goals,” chanted tens of thousands of people all over Czechoslovakia 55 years ago. Seven months after the occupation of the country by Warsaw Pact troops, the Czechoslovaks got symbolic revenge when the hockey team defeated the Soviets 2:0 and 4:3 at the World Cup. But the celebrations, which turned into demonstrations against the occupiers, became a pretext for the beginning of normalization.
Stockholm
1:34 p.m March 28, 2024
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Czech hockey players beat the Soviets twice 55 years ago Photo: Zdeněk Havelka | Source: Profimedia
“Hockey was basically just beating the Russians. That was in the nation. We were angry at them for what happened here,” hockey player Jiří Holík recalled for the Memory of the Nation project about the atmosphere surrounding the World Hockey Championship in the spring of 1969.
55 years ago, the Czechoslovak hockey players defeated the team in two games at the World Championship. For the Czechoslovaks, the victory meant not only sporting success, but also imaginary revenge for the occupation of the country in August 1968
The Czechoslovak team managed to defeat the team twice, on Friday, March 21 and a week later on March 28. “I remember we arrived at the airport, it was full of people: ‘It doesn’t matter that it’s not gold, the two Fridays were worth it!’ There was huge euphoria,” he added.
“At that time, any clash with the Soviet Union, even on the sports field, was perceived as political. It simply could not be prevented,” pointed out historian Prokop Tomek from the Institute of Military History.
“The feeling of betrayal and humiliation was so great that in the atmosphere of helplessness, even such substitute moments certainly played a role. The reaction to the victory shows that there was huge frustration in the population,” he added.
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Tens of thousands of people across the country took to the streets to celebrate the success of Czechoslovak hockey players. At that time, the Soviet airline Aeroflot had offices with large glass windows on Wenceslas Square.
“I know that Aeroflot was still there when I went there. When I went back he was gone. It was beaten,” Jan Jakub Outrata told Pamě národa. The communist regime was looking for the culprits of the riots. Vladimír Vácha, who commented on the World Cup in March 1969 for Czechoslovak Television, lost his job as a reporter on television and radio for twenty years.
“This was not about sticking stars on, although the fact that we did not condemn the actions of our representatives when modifying the jerseys on the broadcast, I have never forgotten. They were looking for a sentence that I was supposed to say at the end of the commentary: ‘Well, celebrate it well at home, but you know how’,” Vácha recalled years ago in a Czech Radio broadcast during an investigation.
‘Grečko threatened’
Even the Soviet side watched the events in Czechoslovakia with displeasure. Already on April 1, 1969, the Minister of National Defense of the Soviet Union, Andrej Grečko, flew to the country and met with his Czechoslovak counterpart, Martin Dzúr.
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“Grečko explicitly threatened. In essence, he announced that tolerance was over, that if any more attacks appeared, they would go to the streets, that they would defend themselves, that they would shoot. If the Czechoslovak side does not provide its own security measures, that they will simply provide it themselves. And in that rage he shouted that the Soviets would never leave Czechoslovakia,” describes historian Prokop Tomek.
“This response led to various security measures being taken, such as joint Public Security and Army patrols. The process of creating emergency units of the National Security Corps was started, which then intervened in other demonstrations in the next twenty years and then became famous in the late 1980s,” he explains.
The last point was the change in the position of the highest representative of the state. Gustáv Husák replaced Alexander Dubček as the first secretary of the Communist Party. This began the so-called normalization, a process of violent and harsh change of conditions in the country.
Lucie Korcová
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