Twenty-five years ago, on August 20, the houses in Slovak and Czech villages began to shake in the early morning hours as columns of Russian tanks rolled through. The Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to provide fraternal socialist assistance in putting down a bourgeois counterrevolution. The "socialism with a human face" that Alexander Dubcek had tried to install some two decades ahead of his time was about to be crushed. In keeping with their legendary reputation for pragmatism, the Czechs and Slovaks did not resist the invaders. This disinclination to fight, either outsiders or each other, would mean years of submission to tyranny. It also enabled them to consummate a Velvet Divorce on January 1 of this year, separating into two independent states with a stroke of the pen instead of the sea of blood that has engulfed Yugoslavia, Armenia, Georgia, and a dozen other ethnically divided former Soviet-bloc states.
Today Czechs, Slovaks, and the rest of the world are still trying to figure out what it all means. Some are waiting for the other shoe to drop--for some dispute over cash or an unmarked bend in the river to shatter the Velvet Divorce. Others have begun to invest in the two new states. But clouds already have appeared, especially in Slovak skies, where unemployment, economic problems, and an unsolved Hungarian minority issue have rubbed some of the sheen off the velvet.
Polls already show many Slovaks regret the split. But Czechs and Slovaks alike are intensely aware that whatever problems they have now are welcome ones compared with what afflicts many of their neighbors. They are proud of their peaceful transition.
ONE NATION, TWO PEOPLES
The 5 million Slovaks and 10 million Czechs share nearly identical languages. But for many years they were under separate domination by the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Under the Austrians, the Czechs developed crafts, industries, and education; under the Hungarians, the Slovaks were left rural and undeveloped. In 1918, they joined to form an independent, democratic Czechoslovakia following the Allied defeat and dismemberment of Austro-Hungary.
Thousands of Czechs were sent to Slovakia as teachers and technicians, but Slovakia remained backward and resentful of Czech privilege, advancement, and arrogance. One Slovak journalist told me in Bratislava last summer, "I am the only one of my family to go to university, and I know that the Czechs are smarter and better than we are. I never had the books and the culture in my home as they did."
This feeling--call it resentment, jealousy, or inferiority--was perhaps the biggest cause of the split
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