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| Czechoslovakia, 1968 |
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| Ukraine, 2022 |
Here is a quote from the interview with Pavel Litvinov who was one of the 8 demonstrators in Red Square on August 25, 1968, opposing the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. He is the grandson of Maxim Litvinov, Soviet foreign minister from 1930-1939.
Alexander Genis: And now let's fast forward to today from yesterday. What are the similarities and differences between the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Ukraine in 2022?
Pavel Litvinov: In the most important points and the essence the similarity is complete. Because neither Brezhnev, nor Putin, nor all their comrades could imagine that next to the Soviet Union there is a free country that will develop as it wants: "They, therefore, are allowed into paradise, but we live in Soviet shit." They didn't say that, but they obviously hated it all. They didn't live in this shit. That is, those ideas that inspired us made them hate us and hate Czechoslovakia. It was necessary to remove Czechoslovakia so that it would not serve as an example.
And about the same thing happened with Putin. He hated the Ukrainians, he thought that they were some kind of un-Russian, they couldn’t speak Russian correctly, and so on, but they would live in Europe, and we would sit here in the corner, watching them. We need to stop so that there are no such people nearby. Moreover, Ukrainians are almost like Russians, and at the same time they will live better than Russians? This is approximately what was the same in the mind of Brezhnev and in the mind of Putin. Only Brezhnev still had some human qualities, he still knew a little about what human relationships are.
Putin has nothing, he is a beast, he has no human qualities, he cannot worry about how anyone feels, he has no feelings, at least not human ones. So there was a similarity, but there was no moral similarity, because Brezhnev still believed in some kind of communism, believed that we were doing something good, great, and Putin did not believe in anything except cash and physical strength, and therefore there was a difference. But psychologically it is the solution of the same question in the same ways.
