In Their Own Words Radio Prague International

The Czech Republic has links with India going back to long before both countries won independence. In this programme, in our occasional series In Their Own Words, we draw from our archives to look at Czech-Indian connections – through music, literature, geopolitics and even yoga.  

This is the second of two special programmes in our series In Their Own Words, bringing the dramatic events of 1968 and 1969 in Czechoslovakia to life through the radio archives. Last week we ended a few days just after the Soviet-led invasion on 21 August 1968 that brought the reforms of the Prague Spring to a violent end. This week we pick up the story, as the process that came to be known as “normalization” began, and we tell the moving story of Jan Palach, who gave his life in the hope of persuading people not to come to terms with the gradual drift back to hardline rule.

The Czech Radio sound archives are among the richest in the world and through them we can travel in time to many moments in Czech and Czechoslovak history. This is the first of two special programmes in our series In Their Own Words that take us back to the dramatic year of 1968. The year began with hope, with the reforms of the Prague Spring, but these were brought to a bitter end by the Soviet-led invasion in August of the same year. Hundreds of archive recording bring the drama of that year to life.    

In this programme, the last in the current series looking at Czech history through the archives, we get a flavour of the Cold War. The archives throw up some curious stories: a man in love with a drill, a Czechoslovak cosmonaut celebrated in song, a campaign against noisy rockers with long hair, and some Cold War dramas – tales of defectors and spies. And we end with the strange, sad story of the Red Elvis. But first to the glowing dawn of the new regime in 1948.

Czech interest in African American culture goes back to the 19th century. When Antonín Dvořák spent three years in the United States in the 1890s he explored African American and Native American musical traditions, seeing parallels with the Czech experience of living under Austrian domination. In the Czechoslovakia of the 1920s and 30s, interest in American jazz spread rapidly and Native American culture was romanticised in the so-called “tramping” movement. After the war communist Czechoslovakia was quick to point to discrimination and segregation in the United States and encouraged civil rights activists to visit the country. The voices of some of these visitors are preserved in the Czech Radio archives. And two decades after the fall of communism the first African American US President visited Prague. This long and fascinating connection is the subject of the ninth programme in our series looking at aspects of Czech and Czechoslovak history through the sound archives.

In this programme, the eighth in our series mapping this country’s history through the radio archives, we start with the dramatic events of the last days of the war in Prague. The radio played a major role in the Prague Uprising, and through the archives we can map how the city liberated itself from the German occupiers. In the two years that follow, the radio archives give us a picture of a Czechoslovakia returning to some kind of normality, but in February 1948 everything changes. We tell the story as it was heard on the airwaves.