Wednesday, July 19, 1972.

Czechoslovakia had become . . .

—Matt Fratus, Russia's Invasion to Crush 'Prague Spring' Mirrors
Ukraine Buildup.
. . . a police state. Universities were closed, books and plays censored,
the Russian troops were in insolent evidence everywhere, while, less
visibly, . . .
—Benita Eisler, Chopin's Funeral.

. . . agents of Russia’s . . .
—Pavel Khodorkovsky, The Point of No Return.

. . . secret police spied on every aspect of citizen activity, with particular

scrutiny of student radicals and other subversives.
—Benita Eisler, Chopin's Funeral.
Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine stirred thoughts of someone I
worked with at The Franklin Institute in the early 1970s. Hana
Roszypal, born in Prague in 1927, emigrated to the United States
following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, in 1968.
An outstanding student, after finishing her university degree, she
had worked at the Academy of Sciences in Prague. Hana and her
husband were activists in Prague's Club of Committed Non-Party
Members, founded by leading intellectuals in May, 1968. After
the Russian invasion to crush the Prague Spring later that year,
they had little choice but to leave their homeland. Hana had
earlier lived through the German occupation of Czechoslovakia
that began in 1938. She spoke fluent German and Russian. She
mentioned that the Germans had required Czech students to
learn German and that, after World War II, the Russians
required education in Russian. Hana had a visceral disdain for all
things Russian. The day after the Government of Egypt ejected
Russian military advisers on July 18, 1972, she was elated.